Artisanal Algorithmics

When art invests technology, the latter is set in resonance with its past modes of existence, opening the way to the manifestation of artisanal dynamics, including when the most advanced technologies are involved. This idea appears in Adorno¹, for whom the threshold traditionally established between industry and craft is suspended by artistic activity, in which the relevance of an artisanal approach depends not on the presence or absence of machines, but on “the preponderance of a free disposition of the means by consciousness².” In this respect, Adorno sets himself against Heidegger, for the latter already saw a loss in the use of the typewriter compared with handwriting³. It should be considered, however, that in 1953, in The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger seems to qualify his position when he suggests that “the saving power⁴” of technics, that is, artistic activity, is what will introduce into technics something of the order of the poiesis proper to the Greek tekhnè, in which art, craft and technics were intertwined. Close to craft, bricolage⁵ also appears as the means of reconquering a hyper-industrialized technics, which escapes the hand of man, both literally and figuratively. Unlike craft, bricolage, sublimated by Lévi-Strauss as a “science of the concrete⁶,” systematically operates by détournement, with the means at hand. The artist-bricoleur, during their experimentation, develops an acute sense of the process as it unfolds. This approach is not to be placed within the framework of “labor,” but rather, in Simondon’s terms, in the orbit of “technical activity⁷,” more attentive to the functioning than to the function of the technical elements mobilized. It is an attention paid not only to form and matter, but also to taking-form as a fundamental operation⁸.

Craft and bricolage, ways of making fundamentally anchored in matter and in the present instant, claim their experimental nature, outside any deterministic planning. Within certain high-tech artistic approaches, these practices are sensitive to every manifestation of the machine’s error; indeed, they provoke it. This is a formal quest that favors the unforeseen and that manages to remain within an operational framework in which the human gesture predominates, despite the degree of sophistication of the tools employed. Benjamin Gaulon and Jacques Perconte, French artists, deploy artistic processes that mobilize algorithms within an artisanal dynamic, in which bricolage and alchemy find their place.

1. When it comes to asserting the survival of artisanal dynamics within the digital, we could not mobilize the thought of Jean-Louis Déotte or that of Vilém Flusser. Indeed, we find in Déotte too close a rapprochement between the digital and the notion of “language” and that of immateriality, while in Flusser even analog photography is already a recoding of scientific language. On the other hand, we find the gestural filiation of the digital implicitly suggested in the thought of Bernard Stiegler. See in this regard the definition of algorithm proposed within the framework of Ars Industrialis, a research group founded by the philosopher, which he directed until his death in 2020. URL: https://arsindustrialis.org/algorithme, accessed December 1, 2024.↩︎

2. Theodor W. Adorno, Théorie esthétique, op. cit., p. 295.↩︎

3. If we are to believe what Derrida said in his 1985 lecture in Chicago, translated into French under the title Geschlecht II : La main de Heidegger, in Jacques Derrida, Psyché. Inventions de l’autre. vol. 2. Paris : Éditions Galilée, 2003.↩︎

4. Heidegger, in his famous text on technology, refers to poetry, notably to Hölderlin’s verses, as what could save technics. See in this regard Martin Heidegger, Essais et conférences, op. cit., p. 47.↩︎

5. Jean-Paul Fourmentraux makes bricolage, together with poaching and sabotage, one of the three axes of an aesthetic and political critique of the digital breakdown. See in this regard Jean-Paul Fourmentraux, “« Corrupt Machine »,” in Techniques & culture, op. cit.↩︎

6. Ibid.↩︎

7. Technical activity remains, in Simondon’s thought, in a relation of proximity with ”aesthetic thought.”↩︎

8. See Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, op. cit., p. 329.↩︎