Anticipation, Intentionality, "What If...": The Intention-Image

The preceding paragraphs have attempted to sketch, for the human as much as for the computer, the symbolic regime as a mode of functioning built upon ancestral gestures. Returning to a much shorter temporality, we find these two entities, human and machine, interacting within the digital creative process: they confront each other, collaborate, come to terms (or not), structure each other. We will now attempt to better characterize artistic intentionality, the starting point and guiding thread of the creative process, seeking a form of coherence with the felt sense that drives this research and the conceptual framework that emerges from it. How are we to grasp what motivates the artist to begin making a work that will invest the digital “medium”? How is this intentionality distributed between the human and the machine? Finally, how does the initial intention evolve during the creative process? We will see how the processes established over the long time span, in the course of which human and machine tend toward the symbolic starting from gesture, make it possible to clarify the artistic intention that sets off and energizes the digital creative process.