A "Methodological" Note

It is not easy to refer to a methodology of research-creation, so wide is the spectrum of solutions proposed by artists seeking to articulate a theoretical reflection with their works¹, in a dynamic that can potentially be extended to researchers wishing to articulate their theoretical quests with creative experiences². Failing that, formulas setting out what research-creation should not be are legion, such as the artist indulging in “self-exegesis” by taking a problematic distance from their own production, or so-called self-referential approaches, in which the artist sets up their work as a closed microcosm with its own rules, minimizing the various porosities and the effects of context³.

Sensing that one does not conduct a research-creation as one wishes, but rather as one can, and holding dear the hope that the only formula that emerged naturally for this one does not cross into forbidden territory, the choice was made to preserve the pre-existing artistic practice. This was done in an attempt – not entirely successful – to keep its temporality, and above all its freedom, during a period known in advance to be a special one, insofar as this practice would have to be harmonized with intensive reading and theoretical reflection.

Since my practice unfolds in projects of varying duration, generally counted in months, the – fairly widespread – format that involves developing a single work over three years – or even longer – while the associated theoretical reflection takes shape did not seem relevant. It was also deemed appropriate to include the works already completed at the beginning of this doctoral work, to which new productions would gradually be added.

It was not possible, however, to keep the temporality of artistic production intact, because periods of intensive writing, spread out in various ways over recent years, and themselves secondary to bread-and-butter work and family needs, took precedence at its expense. During 2025 in particular, all the time left over once obligations had been met was devoted to writing, an activity that turned out to be the sustained extension of the theoretical elaboration.

On the other hand, whenever the practice could be pursued, it was with a relative freedom, in the sense that every creative impulse that arose⁴ with a certain intensity was honored, without knowing whether it would contribute “coherently” to the theoretical-practical structure that was taking shape, nor whether the resulting works would do violence to the theoretical reflection in some irresolvable way.

If we observe today, among other things, that Paysage d’hiver (2019) manifests the digital image as both flow and trace; that Postdigital flipbook (2019) bears witness to an algorithmic assemblage and to the capture of images from the iconosphere; that Substance (2021) stages a narration that emerges from working with the materiality of images; and finally, if we can say that Sky Semantics (2023) problematizes a perception that proves fundamental as an embodied means of actualizing a virtual, it is less because we managed to produce these works in keeping with a theoretical reflection still in the making than because these works, through their inscription in the research, steered the reflection toward the notions and processes born of the practice: flow/trace, assemblage, narration arising from matter, perception… In other words, the model of the transductive relation⁵, which seemed to clarify the human-machine dynamic within digital creative processes, can probably contribute to a better understanding of research-creation processes themselves…

In any case, there was an affinity between the feeling that guided the research and the words with which Patrice Maniglier introduces his essay La Perspective du Diable : Figurations de l’espace et philosophie de la Renaissance à Rosemary’s Baby:

What can we ask of art? To decorate our apartments, as Picasso was indignant that people wanted to do with his paintings? To allow us to escape? To recover a native perception of things? To experience a disinterested pleasure? Perhaps… But it can also serve, quite simply, to make us think⁶.

Maniglier puts into words what happens in any case. Indeed, at the moment of reception, the work of art necessarily acts as a prism through which reality can be contemplated, while making it possible to ask questions that would not otherwise have been asked. This is certainly a process that amounts, more globally, to a mobilization of the sensible articulated with an intellectual activity, that is, an exercise of thought associated with forms of activation of affectivity and therefore, ultimately, of the body, in a process that could hardly be exclusive to art⁷. One can moreover hope for an effect of reciprocal stimulation between art and theoretical thought when what is at stake is not only the reception of the work but an artistic practice – which is also a permanent reception of the transitory plastic manifestations, bound to evolve, during the creative process. This is perhaps what one tries to put to use when questioning (or encouraging) research-creation, provided – in the artist’s interest – that theorization can productively lead to a new practice, as the experimental filmmaker Malcolm Le Grice points out:

Theory is not only a matter of analysis or criticism; it has to do with establishing conditions favorable to the development of a future practice⁸.

The process can therefore take the form of a back-and-forth between theoretical reflection and artistic practice, in which the movement from theory to practice – at least the one that was put in place during this research-creation – can be summed up as follows: after working on theory, one abandons oneself to practice, above all without making it conditional on the elements that emerge from this theory, knowing that their influence on the new practice is perhaps inevitable, but also – and above all – leaving room for the latter to call into question the conceptual framework built up until then, if need be.

The passage from practice to theory proved far less obvious. How can one put into words something that one sees inwardly, sometimes very precisely? Should one invent notions out of whole cloth, which will be part of a “personal,” self-enclosed system that will try to present itself as “original,” turning its back on efforts of thought⁹ that have followed one another for millennia, convergently or contradictorily, and whose more or less faithful traces have reached us?

Thus, in a manner less humble than realistic, the choice was made to look for conceptual structures where we know they are to be found: within the perimeter of reflection on the arts, certainly, but also beyond it, within other disciplines. Fortunately or not, what was taken up were often theoretical elements stemming from the great schemes of thought. On a personal level, this can be interpreted as a ricochet effect, the extension of an impulse – precisely – that goes back a long way, to a reading – intense, naive, overwhelming, foundational… – of Henri Bergson’s L’Évolution créatrice (1907), an experience¹⁰ that certainly played its part in fostering a certain affinity with the thought of Gaston Bachelard, Gilbert Simondon, Deleuze-Guattari and Bernard Stiegler.

In this context, an extra-disciplinary use of theory – anthropology, philosophy, neuroscience, software studies… – was inevitably involved, which cannot guarantee at every moment, for the borrowed notions, concepts and/or processes, absolute coherence with the theoretical scaffolding and the tradition from which they stem and to which they belong. That said, the research was also driven by the will to minimize the possibilities of distorting these theoretical tools, together with a constant concern to respect them. This translated into efforts to deepen the readings until reaching a level of understanding deemed acceptable, within a research whose object concerns above all artistic practices, and which never aspired to problematize or produce theoretical objects that could be inscribed within any discipline other than reflection on the arts.

Many theoretical proposals did not resonate in any way, or did so only in a limited way, with the feeling arising from the artistic practice that drives the theoretical research developed in this work. The thought of Friedrich Kittler, for example, was not mobilized to the extent expected, so strongly does it convey a form of overly pervasive determination of the human by technological “media,” leaving very little room for the possibility of the apparatus-based arts. The reflection of Vilém Flusser, mobilized up to a certain point, is for its part structured too insistently around the symbolic, disregarding the material aspect, and did not resonate further with the research. Adorno’s aesthetics, for its part, appeared too unstructured and very difficult to follow, and could be drawn upon only to a limited extent. Moreover, the lines of thought that seek to approach art from an absolutely disembodied conception of the notion of information, such as the one expressed in Umberto Eco’s L’œuvre ouverte (1962) – which relies on an understanding of the work of art as a “message” – or Max Bense’s aesthetics, which directly seeks to quantify the aesthetic value of the sensible through information theory, proved frankly at odds with the intuitions that guided the work of this thesis. The integration of the thought of Michel Guérin, philosopher of gesture, would deserve long paragraphs, so much have certain intuitions at the heart of this research been made explicit and encouraged by what this philosopher – whom one guesses to be a practitioner of art – says about the notion of medium and about the plastic aspect of artistic intentionality. This rapprochement unfortunately reached its limits with La troisième main (2021) (despite great expectations!), where the philosopher seems to subscribe to the validity of a disembodied form of information, when he continues to speak of a difference in nature between what is called technics and what is designated as technology.

With regard to the lines of thought with which this research developed a stronger affinity, sometimes considerable efforts of deepening were necessary, either in order to better grasp the structure of certain theoretical elements, or to understand the contextual elements in which these notions and concepts are inscribed. This approach was encouraged by the fact that each theoretical deepening that proved necessary often shed light on new aspects that made it possible to enrich the reflection while respecting the basic feeling arising from the practice. Generally speaking, the relationship that this research was able to establish with theory finds support in a dialogue between Foucault and Deleuze, in which the latter asserts:

Practice is a set of relays from one theoretical point to another, and theory is a relay from one practice to another¹¹.

and also:

A theory is exactly like a box of tools. It has nothing to do with the signifier. It must be useful. It must function. And not for itself. If no one uses it, beginning with the theoretician himself (who then ceases to be a theoretician), then the theory is worthless or the moment is inappropriate¹².

At times, however, it was also necessary to take some distance from certain of the theses mobilized, particularly those from which totalizing ambitions seem to emerge. Indeed, the Bergsonian élan vital, Simondonian individuation, Deleuzian assemblages, as well as certain parts of Stiegler’s reflection, propose schemes that can be applied in very different contexts and, each with its own emphases and specificities, would be able to explain the whole of reality, or almost. A need for relativization thus arose with regard to Stiegler’s radicality and urgency, to the proximity that seems to be established between the Bergsonian élan vital and the divine, but also and above all with regard to Simondonian individuation, which imposed itself in a paradigmatic way. Indeed, individuation as conceived by Simondon makes it possible to render intelligible the multiple transformations at work in apparatus-based creative processes; it makes it possible to characterize artistic intentionality in terms of the plasticity of an image – which, moreover, is not without a certain beauty –; it offers a framework for thinking about the human-machine link; and finally, it stands out as an extremely interesting scheme from which to think evolutionary processes at all spatiotemporal scales. Yet, at this stage, in order to truly face the feeling arising from the practice considered in this work, conditions of immanence that are even more concrete would have to be specified for Simondonian individuation. Questions therefore remain open for the time being, awaiting new leads, which this time will have to come from artistic practice and, more generally, from a more experiential contact with the world.

1. See for example: Izabella Pluta and Mireille Losco-Lena, «Pour une topographie de la recherche-création: ». Ligeia [en ligne]. January 2015, vol. 137–140, n° 1, p. 39–46.↩︎

2. Diego Jarak defends a vision of research-creation as a “multidirectional” movement, which would not be the preserve of artists wishing to try their hand at research. In Diego Jarak, «De quoi la Recherche Création n’est-elle pas le nom ? ». Marges [en ligne]. Saint-Denis : Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 2024, vol. n° 39, n° 2, p. 136–149. disponible à l'adresse : https://shs.cairn.info/revue-marges-2024-2-page-136?lang=fr.↩︎

3. An approach described, at its most extreme, in these words: “Artist-researchers position themselves at once as the producers of their works, their own critics, curators and collectors. Not to mention that they are also their only audience.” In Jérôme Glicenstein, «Introduction. Qu’est-ce que la recherche-création ? ». Marges [en ligne]. Saint-Denis : Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 2024, vol. 39, n° 2, p. 10–20. disponible à l'adresse : https://shs.cairn.info/revue-marges-2024-2-page-10?lang=fr.↩︎

4. One could now say, with Gilbert Simondon, every “intention-image” that manifested itself.↩︎

5. This is the model that takes shape between Simondon and Stiegler and that envisages an evolution in which two entities co-structure each other.↩︎

6. Patrice Maniglier, La perspective du diable: figurations de l’espace et philosophie de la Renaissance à "Rosemary’s baby" sur une oeuvre de Laetitia Delafontaine et Grégory Niel. Arles [Nice] : Actes Sud Villa Arson, 2010.↩︎

7. Thus, true to his polemical style, Nietzsche asserts: “Only the thoughts one has while walking are worth anything,” in Friedrich Nietzsche, Le Crépuscule des idoles, ou comment philosopher à coups de marteau. [s. l.] : Gallimard, 1991, maxim 34. Why not, then, emphasize the specificity of the thoughts that run through us while jogging, or those that reach us in the boarding area of an airport — that suspended moment when we find ourselves “captured” in a vast, surprisingly soothing hangar, the antithesis of anxiety.↩︎

8. Malcolm Le Grice, Experimental cinema in the digital age. London : British film institute, 2001, p. 142. Our translation.↩︎

9. Which it would be naive to consider as owing anything to “pure” thought.↩︎

10. We all remember – at least those of us of a certain age – where we were at the time of the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. Several French friends have also told me that they remember where they were when France won the World Cup in 1998. As for me, I remember where I was on the day when, with a worldview slumped by both science (“nothing is created, everything is transformed”) and religion (everything is the expression of a prior divine), I intimately grasped, while reading Bergson, the possibility of the emergence of the new: the world before my eyes, on every level, was no longer the same.↩︎

11. Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits. Tome II : 1970–1975. vol. 2. Paris : Gallimard, 1994, p. 307.↩︎

12. Ibid., p. 309.↩︎