Artistic Creative Process, Individuating Process

Let us first say that individuation in Simondon is to be apprehended as a permanent, endless process, during which individuals emerge while being “never complete, never fixed, never stable¹,” retaining a preindividual aspect that binds them to the original horizon from which they detach themselves through differentiation and structuration. Besides being “preindividual” and homogeneous (though traversed by tendencies and tensions), this original horizon is supersaturated with potentials that can be activated. Individuation, that is, the genesis of any individual – human, technical, aesthetic, social… – as apprehended by Simondon, means the realization of part of this preindividual potential, when the individual is structured through the “appearance of phases in being².”

This process takes place not through continuous change (fluidic, one might say), nor through violent ruptures, but through a succession of metastable states. The notion of metastability, which Simondon borrows from thermodynamics, refers to states that are stable, yet contain (latently) potentialities that can be triggered, activated. This new paradigm moves Simondon’s thought away from the “clear-cut alternatives, established between being and becoming, movement and rest, substantial stability and chaotic instability³,” extreme and inadequate alternatives which, according to Simondon, blocked the thought of the Ancients⁴.

The notion of metastability, thus mobilized by Simondon, leads us to envisage all matter as active matter. In other words, metastability contributes to the critique of a hylomorphism in which form prevails over a matter considered as a passive entity:

The hylomorphic schema inevitably lets slip the energetic conditions of taking-form, which reside in the energetic potentials already deposited in the structure of matter, which natural conditions due to chance or human labor can release, orient, channel into the formation of an individual⁵.

When it comes to artistic creation, we must think of “the formation of material individualities which, through the arrangement of their structure, arouse thought⁶,” within a conceptual framework that applies equally to the technical means of production – technical individuals having been the privileged object of Simondon’s attention –, to the artist as an individual, without forgetting their social inscription and collective processes of individuation⁷.

Through the prism of Simondonian individuation, the artistic creative process takes as its basis a “field of preindividual tensions, which constitutes the metastable horizon of the World of the work⁸,” in a dynamic in the course of which, as already suggested, the individual (artist, machine, work) individuates itself while retaining within itself a preindividual dimension, which “never ceases to shape its subsequent individualizations⁹,” and which reminds the individual of the “original stock” (in our own words) from which it stems. This original stock, this fundamental horizon, appears in the light of this research as already inhabited by gesture and matter.

During the digital creative process – as already indicated – when it succeeds, the code (and with it the machine) individuates itself, as do the plastic component of the work and the artist, who will no longer be exactly the same before and after the process: they have undergone a surplus of individuation. At the same time, meaning is produced, a meaning that is structured in terms of natural human language. This dynamic extends to the viewer at the moment of the work’s reception: the work continues its individuation beyond the artist.

Simondonian individuation, in which “phases of being” emerge from a preindividual and homogeneous level – yet one charged with potentials and marked by a latent internal instability – helps us better understand the strategies attributed to the works in the artistic corpus of this research, particularly in the central corpus Strategic Mysteries, Immanent Miracles: Destructuring and Structuring Digital Matter.

Indeed, structurations appear as a natural, organic extension of the process of individuation of being, which is by essence a structuring process. In structurations, new forms are produced through the actualization of the analog virtual and/or the algorithmic virtual. These forms of actualization of the virtual, which may constitute phenomena of algorithmic emergence¹⁰, respond, at least in part, to our human and machinic finitudes: impossible to foresee, they occur only at the moment of sensible reception, with the participation of the artist’s perception.

Destructurations, by contrast, act otherwise. In these practices, the creation of forms depends on the dismantling – partial or complete, sudden or progressive, on the technical, plastic or symbolic plane – of structures that do not seem to stem from natural and organic processes of individuation, but appear to be imposed in an artificial¹¹, parasitic, alienating¹² and profoundly entropic manner. The stranglehold of capitalism on the digital and the Internet, which has recently become very explicit, sadly bears witness to this.

As for assemblages – the strategies associated with the personal work – they too seem to be encompassed by Simondonian individuation, to be grasped as a mediation¹³, a bringing into contact of aspects initially uncorrelated within the preindividual. Simondon refers to these aspects as “extreme values¹⁴” and also as “orders of magnitude¹⁵”: their disconnection testifies to a certain incompatibility within the preindividual, to a form of tension, released when a communication is created between these aspects during individuation, which leads to a new stabilization, always metastable.

The strategies proposed for the works in the artistic corpus of this research – structurations, destructurations, assemblages – understood as processes of individuation, thus draw on what subsists of the preindividual in the real at a given moment, provoking actualizations of the virtual, through the extension of organic structures, the dismantling of artificial structures or the creation of unexpected links between independent elements.

However, for the work to flourish – as we have seen – putting a strategy in place is not enough: at one moment or another a gesture must manifest itself, must take its place within a dynamic in which matter is modulated by establishing a reflexive link with the artist’s consciousness.

1. Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, op. cit., p. 13.↩︎

2. Ibid., p. 25.↩︎

3. Ibid., p. 14.↩︎

4. Ibid., p. 26.↩︎

5. Ibid., p. 12.↩︎

6. Ibid., p. 13. Let us stress that we cannot reduce art to a process of triggering thought, without considering the central place of the sensible, of sensation.↩︎

7. Simondon introduces individuation as a process that, in various forms, places “the individual back in being, according to the three levels physical, vital, psycho-social.” In Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, op. cit., p. 32.↩︎

8. Ibid. p. 13.↩︎

9. Ibid., p. 11.↩︎

10. Very legible in the work by Toni Mitjanit that we considered, An Autonomous Agent Choreo (2016).↩︎

11. As if it were a matter, as already mentioned, of an over-artificialization of technics. We first detected this aspect in connection with Takeshi Murata’s work Monster Movie (2005).↩︎

12. Simondon himself considers the possibility of a form of alienation capable of affecting the technical object when it is subjected to a market logic. Indeed, for Simondon, when the technical object is produced as a consumer commodity – which must arouse the interest of consumers – it can sink into an extratechnical logic that denatures it, that introduces what the philosopher conceives as a form of “superhistoricity” that collides with its openness, generating artificial barriers between the technical object and the user, in a strategy that the philosopher conceives as cryptotechnical. See in this regard Gilbert Simondon, Sur la technique (1953-1983). 1re édition. Paris : Presses universitaires de France, 2014, p. 60 ff.↩︎

13. Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, op. cit., p. 26-27.↩︎

14. Ibid.↩︎

15. Ibid.↩︎