An Algorithmic Gesture?

The artistic gesture expressed in digital creative processes can concern the analog periphery, the protocol zone and/or the algorithmic core. In the latter case, one could refer to an “algorithmic gesture”.

What, then, can be fundamentally specific to this algorithmic gesture and distinguish it from other creative gestures? One fundamental characteristic stands out immediately: it concerns the temporality in which this algorithmic gesture is put in place. Indeed, whereas the preceding paragraphs dealt with an artistic gesture that manifests itself suddenly, in a flash, an algorithmic gesture can come about only by associating itself with a more staggered, intermittent temporality.

There is indeed a gap, a form of latency, between the formulation of the logical proposition (the modification of the algorithm) and the sensible result (supplied by the computer): a delaying effect introduced by the technical means, which requires a more or less considerable time to perform the calculation. This unfolding of gesture according to an extended and discontinuous temporality can be apprehended as one of the “states” of gesture:

[…] the first, spontaneous, “naive”, instant(aneous) gesture and the studied, practiced, learned gesture held like a role; the one is an almost imperceptible beginning, the other consolidates sequences, montages over duration¹.

In this possible double temporal nature of gesture, Michel Guérin contemplates a complex temporality that comes close to the one that might suit the algorithmic gesture. Indeed, this is a gesture that instructs sequences: successions of coding commands, sequences of flows, looped or not. It is also a gesture that envisages montages: images combined in time or in space, or else, internally to the code, logically articulated assemblages of commands. A form of intuition always accompanies gesture in this discontinuous temporal modality; it is, however, a type of intuition that invests temporality in a fragmented way, with phenomena of delay and latency. Intuition unfolds here less immediately than in the case of the more “instinctive” intuition described by Bergson.

The algorithmic gesture is by definition a delayed-action gesture, for between the action (modification of the code) and the result (the images produced) comes the time needed to perform the calculation. But another temporal complexity inhabits the algorithmic gesture: it can also harbor layers of future temporality, which may or may not be activated — layers constituted by conditional actions.

The algorithm makes possible, in its full scope, a type of gesture associated with future transformations of matter and energy². These modifications can adopt a rhythmicity reaching high frequencies, or else take place all at once. In other words, the algorithmic gesture can modulate the materiality of the world as flow or as trace. Moreover, this gesture can remain latent, awaiting a condition capable of materializing its effects.

Taken together, these characteristics point to a form of specificity to which the algorithmic gesture would be indebted.

As regards its internal structuring, the algorithmic gesture manages to coordinate and orchestrate — in a quest aimed at giving depth to the work — a multitude of gestures schematized and mechanized in the machine. These individual, machinic and determined gestures could not be creative per se. They become so, however, when they are creatively organized by the algorithmic gesture, which is, in truth, a form of metagesture.

This metagesture jostles the rigidity of the algorithm and activates a new form of uncertainty, of unpredictability, which takes part in what has been conceptualized as the “algorithmic virtual”. The uncertainty stems from the quasi-infinite possibilities of connection between these individual gestures schematized and crystallized in the machine, which act on the quasi-infinite possible images, the whole giving rise to forms likely to take part in the emergence of a new meaning, when they are offered to the perception and sensibility of the artist.

1. Michel Guérin, Le Geste ; entre émergence et apparence, op. cit., p. 8.↩︎

2. This type of transformation has been multiplied by the algorithm, and its reach broadened to the point of affecting a multitude of objects; but it is not a new possibility: a simple bird trap already constitutes a conditional and deferred transformation of matter. This type of process is also found in nature: a seed is “programmed” to germinate from a certain temperature and a certain level of humidity onward.↩︎