Concrete materialities

Intuitively and concretely, when it comes to thinking about the different barriers that the artistic intention crosses as it seeks to model the digital image, the screen proves to be the paradigmatic interface. However, the screen, even more than the pictorial surface of the painting, claims absolute transparency: it presents itself first and foremost as a window-screen. Only the artistic gesture can reveal the heaviness of its presence, determined and determining. The touchscreen is (along with the keyboard) the site of junction par excellence, the site of affect, the first and last surface of physical contact between machine and human.

This technical element, whose transparency responds to a technical but also a strategic necessity, is highlighted and sublimated by the radical gesture of Rafael Serrano in his 2020 series Toucher/Glisser. These images, fundamentally photographic, show the screen as a support for images. They are digital images pushed to the extreme of their identity: they do not result from the execution of a code, or else the program must be described as actions of the body on matter. Hito Steyerl had already sculpted a screen in a classical way, that is, with a hammer and chisel, in her 2010 piece Strike. In Serrano’s work, however, the image remains stable on the switched-off device. The light that makes the screen transparent, when it ceases, reveals the trace of human gestures on its surface. This screen, far from any condition of immateriality or transcendence, shows a fragility that is that of matter, in constant transformation.

Mena El Shazly, in her video-performance A scroll, scrolling (2022), stages precisely this gesture of touching and swiping, which strives to scroll mechanically through an abstract news feed made up of images that, although they evolve slightly, never manage to truly differentiate themselves and remain within the same register. This gesture is set side by side with another, that of telling a rosary, which refers to mystical ritual but also, very aptly, to the gestures of calculation, the principle of every algorithmic operation. This approach describes the algorithm¹ in an original link with the mystical but also, without paradox, with the materiality of the elements. The hand of old that counted pebbles to count livestock, the hand that used an abacus, operates today on the surface of the screen, thereby setting off a series of highly complex operations that should be approached without skipping over their genealogy.

Behind the screen lies the electronics, blurred by commercial and political strategy, which resists revealing its material condition. Concealed behind the limits of the black box, electronics nonetheless does not escape the artistic gesture. Indeed, through his dissections, Nicolas Jenot brings to light the internal organs of the body of the device, allowing us to imagine very concretely the play of electrical flows that constitute the digital image. This approach strongly resonates both with media archaeology² and with the “forensic” conception of the digital as described by Matthew Kirschenbaum. Kirschenbaum could not be more right when he reminds us that in the physical world, no two objects are exactly alike. With Cybercorps II (2023), Jenot invites us to consider the standardized technical element in a form of singularity, echoed, very aptly, by the materiality of “denormalized” male bodies, pushed out of the visible by a power that demands the standardization of bodies and beings in order to program their instrumentalization.

The standardization of bodies particularly affects the female body, in an unbridled fashion industry that seeks to impose an unnatural silhouette, sending back to most women a devaluing image of their own bodies, in a context that is already oppressive for women within our patriarchal societies. In this stifling context, the need for an escape, for a “decompression” beyond all control, is understandable. In her series Glitch please (2016), Axelle Manfrini presents the instrumentalized body of woman letting itself be carried by a form of liberating electronic instability, which nonetheless translates into a highly stylized “glitched” texture. This attempt at artistic control starting from a failure of the machine is symptomatic of several works in the exhibition, in which we find the visual rendering resulting from malfunctions of both software and hardware, partially mastered by the artists, who modulate the unpredictable forms emerging from the machine’s abnormal behavior.

1. “With that first calculating organ, the hand, man notched sticks, then piled up pebbles (calculi), then built abaci and counting frames. Does the functioning of an abacus not already help us understand that a calculating operation can be translated into sequential gestures operating according to binary instructions (moving the bead towards the central bar or leaving it untouched)?” Excerpt from the definition of algorithme in the vocabulary of Ars industrialis.↩︎

2. PARIKKA J., 2012, Qu’est-ce que l’archéologie des médias ?↩︎