A Hypermaterial Complex

The hypermaterial, to be understood as a hypermaterial complex, constitutes a relevant conceptual tool for thinking the physicality of the support of digital images. Its material heterogeneity reflects the heterogeneity that seems conceptually necessary for understanding the mode of existence of digital images. In Impressions, when the hypermaterial evolves at high speed, we experience a sensation of streaming, of flow. Conversely, when the hypermaterial remains static, we are in the presence of a trace.

We can then, on the basis of Impressions and Le soleil de Patiras and through the prism of the hypermaterial, formulate a complete proposition aimed at identifying the concrete mode of existence of digital images: they are the result of a signal – evolving between light, electricity and codified electricity – that informs (during capture) a hypermaterial support, or that is informed by it (during rendering). This support, which subsists in the absence of the signal, can express itself as a flow, but can also constitute itself as a trace.

By mobilizing the hypersupport in the full range of its possibilities – from trace to flow – Perconte orchestrates the rhythmicity of a plastic unfolding oscillating between the organic and the inorganic, from which the symbolic can emerge. The artist’s gesture sublimates the plasticity of the hypermaterial, even though it is always designed to meet the needs and priorities of an industry within a specific techno-economic and military regime¹. Thus, outside of any instrumental purpose, Perconte brings out the positive aspect of the hypermaterial understood – still following Stiegler’s logic – as pharmakon, at once remedy² and poison. Yet it is this latter aspect, the negative side of the pharmakon, that manifests itself when the hypermaterial is invested within an instrumental framework, particularly in the circulation and consumption of commodity-images: the hypermaterial then proves troubled, disruptive, as perfectly expressed by the installation The Pirate Cinema (2012) by the collective Disnovation.org.

1. See on this subject, for example, the origin of developments related to the digital as a weapon of war, Pierre Barboza, Du photographique au numérique, op. cit., as well as the hypercompressed conditioning of digital images that have become consumer commodities, Hito Steyerl, « In defense of the poor image », in http://www.e-flux.com/, op. cit.↩︎

2. Stiegler illustrates, for his part and in his own way, the expression of the “positive reversal,” negentropic, of the digital, capable of taking part in “the expectation of the unexpected.” See in this regard Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps, op. cit., p. 866 ff.↩︎