Assemblages (Personal Work)

The third part of the central corpus considers works that come from my personal practice. It was while these works were being created that the need for a deeper theoretical-practical research made itself felt, at the same time as the questions this thesis attempts to answer were emerging. Put forward as assemblages, these personal works seek, together with destructurations and structurations, to delimit a field of practices that mobilize digital images on the basis of their physicality, which calls for a closer specification of their material conditioning and makes it possible to raise the question of gesture afresh.

These three categories mainly indicate an emphasis, a predominance within the creative processes belonging to each group, and in this sense they should be taken as relative. Indeed, there can be destructuring moments within practices considered structuring, and vice versa, with a porosity that may arise between these two categories and the one proposed here for my personal work.

By assemblage we seek to describe a system, set up during the creative process, that results from the articulation – physical or symbolic – of at least two different elements, and that aims to foster the emergence of the unforeseen. Just as with destructurations, one can say that an assemblage may give rise to an “off-program” behavior of the system. In the same way as structurations, the assemblage does not call upon the expression of the system’s errors, and what emerges – if anything emerges at all – can be understood as a surplus of structure.

The use of the term – assemblage – comes above all from a feeling experienced during the practice, and does not seek to overlap with the notion as mobilized by Deleuze and Guattari, although bringing the two into tension will be necessary in order to clarify these intuitions.

Since the author of these lines is the same person who created these works, they will be approached from a different angle from that adopted for destructurations and structurations. Indeed, for these personal works, the attempts at theorization are reduced, the efforts being directed above all toward trying to give an account of the sensations, intentions, feelings and discoveries related to each work, as well as of elements of context, in a more personal register, with the aim of enriching the understanding of these productions.