Destructurations, Perspectives

It is by dismantling, even if only partially, pre-existing structures that the gestures we have studied succeed in making a work. The structural features thus undermined may concern the data reading protocols (Rosa Menkman), the topological structure of the digital image (Samuel Bianchini), its inner texture of pixels (Takeshi Murata), the code that underlies the sensible level (the duo Jodi), the hidden flows of commodity-images and their link with the digital support (Disnovation.org), or again the physical connections of the digital and the electrical currents that traverse them, which are the true substratum of the functioning of computers (5VOLTCORE). A “destructuring” path thus takes shape, one that begins at the periphery of the digital image and manages to reach its fundamental base – which is physical, electrical, material – after having passed through the different layers – visual macro- and microstructures, symbolic code and material support – of its body. This movement, from the outside toward the inside of the digital image, traces its contours, questions its place of inscription, and calls for a consideration of its concrete conditioning, which will be addressed in chapter 4. We will, moreover, let this movement extend its deepening beyond the physical, in order to try to grasp – as will appear in the conclusion of this central chapter, Immanences – what vision of the “metaphysical” domain emerges from these artistic approaches.

By deranging the technological element, the works considered not only produce a sensible effect, but also inform us about the functioning of the digital as it is currently set up. Thus, with A Vernacular of File Formats, Rosa Menkman lights up the path, strewn with ruins born of obsolescence, of an unbridled technological headlong rush, in which the real, including the human, is progressively standardized, normalized. For his part, with Sniper, Samuel Bianchini stages the digital image on the basis of its military genealogy and reveals its present relevance as an operational element. Freed by Takeshi Murata in his Monster Movie, the digital image enters into unexpected resonance with natural forces, revealing a form of “over-artificialization” that affects it, thus bearing witness to a mode of existence of the digital system that may come closer to the living. By acting below the threshold of visibility of the digital image, Jodi.org brings back to the surface the graphic value of code, in an approach that collides with the passivity of the user, while Disnovation.org exposes the specificities of a fragmented and disruptive digital support, conceived as an imagoduct for ultra-fast compressed images, poor images, turned into consumer commodities and objects of contraband. Finally, from the intimacy of the material base of the stratified image, 5VOLTCORE alters the analog functioning that underlies the sensible levels and the symbolic layers of the digital.

The reading proposed of these works, attentive to their sensible effects and from which their revelatory capacity emerges, rests on an apprehension of the digital on the basis of its concrete materiality. Such an interpretation proves absolutely inconceivable if one dispenses with the materiality of the medium, if one seeks to inscribe it within an “immaterial” framework, and/or if one establishes abusive relations of proximity between the digital and human language. This type of comparison, stemming from Lyotard’s Immatériaux¹ and extended by Jean-Louis Déotte – a tendency that persists today when attempts are made to assimilate the “prompts” of generative AI to human language – does not do justice to the richness of human language, to its specific variability and flexibility. The abusive comparison between computer code and human language, moreover, renders opaque the internal dynamics that drive the digital.

Taking into account the concrete materiality of the medium in the study of these works leads us to consider directly certain fundamental aspects of the role of the technology thus put to work, acting at different levels of social functioning: economic (commodity-image), operational (operational image) and symbolic (discourse of immateriality). This last level refers to the mythical, within an ultimately ideological framework in which it is no longer the destiny of the human that matters, but rather its exploitation. A modality of the exercise of power is thus revealed, fundamentally dependent on the specific material action of technological means, as well as on the strategic discourses put in place to conceal it².

It is precisely, in the last instance, this material structure of technological means that the works studied destructure³, provoking or exploiting the manifestations of error, taking advantage of the malfunction and/or breakdown of the system.

Aesthetics of Breakdown

Formal production that exploits the manifestations of noise, errors and/or technological breakdowns has been described, in the field of the digital, from different approaches, such as – among many others – Rosa Menkman’s theoretical-practical reflection on the glitch, the work of Michael Betancourt in the United States, and, in France, that of Jean-Paul Fourmentraux. These lines of thought reactivate more general considerations – aesthetic, technical, sociological, anthropological – that are not necessarily recent, but whose relevance and timeliness are far from having been fully exploited. Such is the case of Adorno’s aesthetics⁴, and of Paul Virilio’s thought⁵. These authors offer fruitful conceptual structures for thinking the generation of artistic forms on the basis of the errors of the technological system.

From Adorno, we will retain his advocacy of the experimental approach in art, and his valorization of the manifestation of the unforeseen and the involuntary – which the artist must rechannel – as well as, for the apparatus-based arts, a heightened awareness of the mode of existence of the means of producing images, torn between the sphere of art and that of a culture industry that the author succeeded in grasping and characterizing together with Max Horkheimer⁶. In Virilio, what is of interest in this context is less his reflection on the increasing speed of social dynamics traversed by technics than his problematization of the cognitive role of the accident, an aspect that directly echoes the arts of error and breakdown.

Flusser can also be mobilized in this context – as we have done – not so much for the value he grants to the omnipresent codes that link up with one another⁷ as for the dialectic he described between the dispositif for creating images – in a reflection focused mainly on photography – and the user, the latter seeking to divert the functioning of their apparatus in a quest for artistic forms⁸.

Artistic approaches based on technological malfunctions – including noise – have also been brought into the orbit of media archaeology, as Emmanuel Guez indicates in the preface to Jussi Parikka’s Qu’est-ce que l’archéologie des média ?⁹, whose essay devotes an entire chapter to sketching a cartography of practices based on technological accidents:

Failure, miss, error – in short, the misunderstanding between media and humans – is constitutive of the richness and the inventions that arise from their very dialogue. In other words, humans create less than they co-create with media-technical machines. A media-technical artist, whoever they may be, cannot master everything, and when they attune themselves to what escapes them – to bruit, to noise, to ghosts, to zombies, to the bug – we obtain what I call a media-archaeological artist¹⁰.

The present research subscribes to the vision of media-archaeological practices proposed by Emmanuel Guez, provided that the symmetry he seems to establish within the bond of co-creation between the human and the machine is qualified. Admittedly, in the course of the apparatus-based creative process, the machine plays an essential role as regards the prefiguration not only of the extent of the domain of possibilities but also of the characteristics of its internal structure. It is also true that forms can emerge from the more or less autonomous functioning of the machine, forms that the artist may integrate into their creative dynamic if they so wish. However, this research – outside of any anthropocentrism – conceives of artistic creation as associated with an intentionality located exclusively in the human sphere.

For his part, and in a more concrete and systematic way, the French socio-anthropologist Jean-Paul Fourmentraux has studied practices comparable to those considered here. Taking the work of Benjamin Gaulon and Julien Prévieux as his basis, Fourmentraux proposes bricolage, poaching and sabotage – processes studied by anthropology – to describe these practices which, while generating forms, manage to thwart the effects of instrumental technics¹¹. In a more recent reflection, based on the work of the artists mentioned, but also on that of Samuel Bianchini, Paolo Cirio, Disnovation.org, Trevor Paglen and, among many others, Christophe Bruno, Fourmentraux proposes categories such as sousveillance, tactical media, speculative design, statactivism and media archaeology. These notions make it possible to structure an overall conception of digital art practices based on error and breakdown, which should also be considered from the angle of “hacktivism¹².”

The works on which the present reflection is built lead us to explore aspects that find no direct correlate in the literature studied. What emerges, indeed, is a current mode of existence of technics, wrapped in physical and discursive stratagems that contribute to its over-artificialization, thus blurring the understanding of its real functioning and denaturing its relation to the world. This is a technics whose material conditioning is occulted, concealed, without this invisibilization reducing its efficacy as a means of domination. Moreover, the gestures considered contribute to suspending the instrumental functioning of technics, a sudden process that reveals to the user their passive condition, provoking in them an awakening of consciousness which, by way of contemplation, opens onto political reflection.

The De-Talibanized Image

In the introduction to this part devoted to destructurations, historical antecedents were sketched – some very ancient – of countertendencies that generated forms by acting against what is established.

The Amarna period of Egyptian Antiquity was mentioned, a period that saw the representation of bodies become naturalistic: draperies hug the bodies more closely – or else disappear – while a gap widens with the stereotyped and rigid figuration of the Old Kingdom¹³. It is perhaps also within the framework of a loosening of the control of bodies by the divine that Praxiteles proposed, against tradition, his nude version of the goddess Aphrodite. Emerging from her bath, she drew closer to mortals, displaying a body in the image of that of the courtesan Phryne, whom the sculptor is said to have taken as a model¹⁴. We have much more information on the “fundamentally ambiguous and ungovernable nature of the human body¹⁵,” as displayed in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, a work symptomatic of the freedom of representation proper to Mannerism, a style that was to displease the Catholic Counter-Reformation¹⁶.

Showing, revealing, unveiling: gestures very frequently invoked to explain the effect of this type of destructuring works. What, then, is the specificity of the creative processes studied? Do they not extend a tendency that has long been part of the making of art, indeed one that defines an aspect of the human mode of being in the world?

When Menkman and Murata display a digital image that is too normalized, over-artificialized; when Samuel Bianchini, with his installation Sniper, reveals it as an instrument of social manipulation inscribed in a military genealogy; when the duo Jodi brings to light the hidden symbolic layer of the computer system while unmasking a passive user; when Disnovation.org unveils the image reduced to its condition as a commodity, circulating on a disruptive material support; and finally, when 5VOLTCORE dismembers the machine before our eyes, breaking the black box: can we discern a difference between these approaches that “reveal by deconstructing” and their artisanal predecessors?

Would we be entitled to imagine that, as technics increases in complexity, narrowing the gap with that of the human, it matters more and more to the instances of power to conceal, in addition to the occultation of the materiality of the human body, the very materiality of the machine?

Probably, with the apparatus-based arts – but particularly with the digital – what has evolved is not so much the attitude behind these creative deconstructions as the profound nature of their object. In other words, systems of social control (religion, States) – whatever the period, culture or place – often dependent on strategies of occulting the affective aspect linked to human bodies, now find themselves compelled, in the age of technocapitalism, to also occult the materiality of the body of technics, as that body grows more complex, while reinforcing its presence, its hold and its power.

Can we think that, through these stratagems, the instances of power suggest the idea that not only the distribution of power, but also its exercise, respond to phenomena located in a transcendental “elsewhere,” beyond human reach? Even though these are processes that are actualized here and now, very much among us.

The German media theorist Friedrich Kittler, who defends the most radical position, asserts that software does not exist. His proposition certainly needs to be qualified, but it rightly reminds us that all the work is carried out – concretely – by the hardware, which has been the object of a strategy of concealment:

The higher and more effortless the programming languages, the more insurmountable the gap between those languages and a hardware that still continues to do all of the work. This is a trend that probably cannot be adequately explained […] through technical advances […] but rather, like all cryptology, has strategic functions¹⁷.

Thus, for Kittler, the occultation of the materiality of the computer begins with the distancing of the hardware, placed out of the user’s reach. A decision that responds to the strategic choices of industry, but also to the needs of a war machine. Indeed, according to Kittler, during the war waged by the United States against Iraq in 1991, the hardware aspect of the computers mobilized in combat was revealed. As a result, says Kittler, a discursive effort then became necessary in order to restore to the digital its “spiritual” allure, which was under threat. Kittler inscribes this process within what he calls postmodern strategies of appearance¹⁸.

A New Heaven

The confluence of the strategic interests of the military sector, governmental bodies and economic actors – in particular computer and software manufacturers – inscribed the digital, in popular discourse, as a new horizon of emancipation for humanity. With an extreme optimism, perfectly inaccurate but widely disseminated, the myth of the digital as an immaterial place where humanity could be free was constructed. The hopes – which today prove to be grossly naive – of John Perry Barlow, author of the “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace¹⁹,” as well as the vision of Nicholas Negroponte – founder of the MIT Media Lab – of a world that was going to “leave the atom” behind and move on to bytes, pertain to what some have called a digital mysticism²⁰. As if, faced with the decline of religious feeling affecting the West, the opportunity had arisen to propose a new paradise, a technological one this time.

These popular imaginaries, which saw in the Internet a liberating future for humanity, have always been challenged by discourses more firmly anchored in reality and in history. These discourses tried to underline the negative effects that this new technology would bring about, notably its role in the passage from disciplinary societies to a new modality, societies of control. These alternative visions, which of course never belonged to the mainstream²¹, prove rather pertinent today²². The concealment of the materiality of the digital would thus, if we are to believe Gilles Deleuze, have to be inscribed within the framework of the evolutions of a capitalism that had to cross national borders, to “fluidify” itself in order to exploit the globality of a world henceforth ideologically conquered – after the fall of the Berlin Wall – and this thanks to new technological means:

[…] the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers […]. This technological evolution must be, even more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism²³.

From then on, the occultation of the materiality of the digital is to be apprehended as the condition of possibility for the expansion of a capitalism that is henceforth global and hegemonic. This occultation also manifests itself on a less global scale, notably in the passage from the factory to the corporation. Whereas the factory “constituted individuals as a single body²⁴,” it was replaced by the corporation, which would be “a spirit, a gas²⁵,” a disappearance of materiality that also takes place in the evolution of money, with the “floating rates of exchange, modulated²⁶” of societies of control replacing the minted money of disciplinary societies²⁷. Finally, the apprehension of the human, perceived within disciplinary society as a “discontinuous producer of energy²⁸,” evolved toward the idea of an individual who is “undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network²⁹,” better suited to the new prerogatives of the society of control³⁰.

The undertaking of concealing digital materialities has nevertheless come up against a growing tension. Indeed, critical voices have been raised against the deployment of the digital infrastructure – data centers, transmission cables, satellites, etc. – because of the very material problems it generates: excessive use of natural resources, contamination of soils and the atmosphere, offshored exploitation of precarious workers, among other consequences. This tension is becoming unsustainable today in the face of the energy and material needs – computation and data storage – associated with the massification of artificial intelligence. In an extreme case that threatens to become the norm, some managers of the digital infrastructure have begun to consider radical and unprecedented solutions. Such is the case of Microsoft’s data centers, which the company seeks to connect – directly and exclusively – to the nuclear reactor of the Three Mile Island power plant, in Pennsylvania, which is expected to be reactivated for this purpose³¹.

Thus, in light of current events, the myth of the cloud, which made the tentacular deployment of the digital possible, appears today hackneyed, fallacious, deceptive – even as it continues to be used insistently, and with a certain inertia.

A Technology That Materializes

On a more general level, it is becoming increasingly difficult to conceal the materiality of the digital, as it is traversed by the real expression of the technical tendency, a movement toward an increasing materialization of entities, processes, ways of doing and links of all kinds. Bernard Stiegler designated this process as the “materialization or objectivation of the weft³²,” while Bruno Latour maintained that the “digital materializes intellectual activities³³,” but also social links – as witnessed by Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), etc. – as well as the organization of work (now “uberized”). From then on, according to Latour, digital techniques “are easier to spot as being politically charged³⁴.”

Neural networks, colossal systems of equations capable of identifying trends within vast and complex datasets, are today the object of particularly aggressive processes of mythification³⁵. Yet, when one looks closely, one notes that these neural networks materialize – at least partially – pre-existing modes of functioning that already influenced the work of creators of images, sounds and texts: cultural influences, inspiration drawn from the work of other artists, clients’ demands, stylistic recycling… Mechanisms by which new forms adapted to existing landscapes, and whose structures had not, until then, been machinically materialized³⁶.

The stakes linked to the visibility of the digital infrastructure – no longer only cloud hosting (data hosting) but also, more and more, cloud computing (remote computation) – are highly topical today. They highlight the geostrategic importance of attempts to occult digital infrastructures, which bear on the sovereignty of states, on commercial interests and those of industrial development, among other dimensions³⁷.

The radicality of the artistic gestures considered reveals these artists as individuals who seem – in one way or another – sensitive to the doubly artificial aspect of the conditioning of technics as it presents itself to their eyes, as well as to the major stakes associated with it. The broken black box offers a glimpse of what it contains: the flesh of the digital – including that of the digital image – is laid bare. The aim, while producing forms, is to restore the visibility of the means of domination put in place.

The digital creative processes addressed in this section, as already mentioned, belong to an artistic tradition that – for a long time – has proven capable of showing hidden aspects of the real through the destructuration of pre-existing systems. However, digital creative approaches face structures of increased legibility, because they are more concretized, in a context of increasing materialization of the methods and processes mobilized by technics.

In this context, when artists seek to mobilize the digital in a project of formal creation, they take part – whether they like it or not – in a negotiation between divergent intentionalities: the ever-emancipatory movement of art collides with strategies of domination, materialized in the medium itself by the actors who designed and built it.

Deoperationalizing the Image

To varying degrees, the works considered attack the operative capacity of the digital image, creatively suspending it. These gestures do not only unveil the concealed materiality of the digital dispositif and the strategic intentionality acting behind the scenes: they also manage to reveal how the digital image acts – sometimes very concretely – while interrupting the functioning of the system of domination to which it contributes, be it ephemerally and/or symbolically.

A striking illustration of this can be found on the website Jodi.org, where the offbeat navigation experience results from the breaking of logical connections in the code underlying the interface-images so familiar to us on the Internet – blogs, maps, social networks – which diverts their functional components: links, buttons, input fields, fonts, blocks of text… Samuel Bianchini’s installation Sniper, for its part, rests on the staging of the digital image as a remote gunsight, a functionality symbolically defused by the artist by altering the spatiotemporal structure of the image. More indirectly, the undermining of compression codecs at work in Rosa Menkman’s A Vernacular of File Formats, in Takeshi Murata’s Monster Movie, and also – in a more machinic way – in Disnovation.org’s The Pirate Cinema, tears apart an impoverished and commodified digital image, which has become an operational element of a more general techno-economic system in which the image is inscribed.

These gestures interrupt the effect of an image prepared for speed of transmission, one that privileges the “message” to the detriment of the affective aspect³⁸. This is an image that operates in the direction of the acceleration of exchanges and the generation of surplus value, within the system that Deleuze designates, as we have seen, as the society of control³⁹, and that, in a more recent reflection, Shoshana Zuboff characterizes more precisely as surveillance capitalism⁴⁰. This forced “lightening” of digital images is to be linked with what has been interpreted as the semiotic turn of capitalism, as described by Félix Guattari⁴¹. A link thus takes shape between the digital image as it presents itself today – highly compressed, rigidly structured, occulting its materiality and its operational capacity – and globalized capitalism, whose fluidity ultimately rests on the properties of matter⁴², and in no way on anything immaterial⁴³.

The artistic approaches considered halt the alienating functioning of digital images as instrumentalized by the instances of power, offering a glimpse, for these images, of a destiny of freedom without a pre-established aim, a de-instrumentalized mode of existence, more directly in resonance with human sensibility.

User, Spectator… Actor?

When staged by these creative destructurations, the digital image – whose material body is the object of a strategic occultation – reveals itself as a multiple operator: active on several levels, the digital image appears as an essential articulation within the dynamics of domination. These dynamics, with their material and discursive components, are put in place, in the end and beyond technophobias and technophilias, between human actors. This is an observation that runs counter to lines of thought tending to essentialize technics, to attribute specific effects to it, in a fatalistic vision that dilutes the share of human responsibility. In light of the artistic approaches considered in the preceding paragraphs, technics appears rather as a means instrumentalized by flesh-and-blood actors⁴⁴.

The art gesture that destructures, that organizes the failure of the system, forces a stopping point, a suspension of the functionality of the technological element, at the very moment when forms are produced by drawing on the conditionings inherent in the digital image as thus implemented.

Within a process that can be described as operational, the level of passivity of users is correlated with the prominence and scope of the dominant actors. The latter can be apprehended as a hazy nebula of sectors of power, present and historical, manufacturers, sellers, military actors, governments… all, in one way or another, responsible for an industry that tends to annihilate the competence of users, limiting their role to that of mere users, and discouraging any reflexive gaze on the technological means used. This observation has not escaped critical thought:

Following McLuhan and Michel Foucault, each in their own way, Kittler maintains that all systems of inscription since 1800 have produced users […] and subjects of writing, rather than masters⁴⁵.

With an ever-extreme radicality, Friedrich Kittler asserts that humans no longer create (no longer write), the last to have truly “written” being, according to him, the engineers who, in the 1970s, spread out 12 square meters of paper to draw by hand the layout of the first integrated microprocessor, the Intel 4004⁴⁶. Subsequent processors were designed with the assistance of their predecessors, the machine becoming, for Kittler, its own agent. This is, however, a reading that will need to be qualified if we wish to think the conditions of a possible creation in digital art.

For his part, Vilém Flusser also emphasizes – as mentioned previously – the passive role of the user, induced by the default functioning of dispositifs. As long as the user does not manage to outwit the logic of the dispositif, for Flusser, they merely extend the effects of a program that eludes them, in a predetermined direction. Brilliantly reversing the classic schema, Flusser suggests that it is the camera itself that waits for a user to come and press the button. From then on, for Flusser, no creation is possible within the apparatus-based arts outside an approach that experiments by diverting the means of creation⁴⁷.

These reflections are useful in order to contextualize the transformation of the user’s role as evoked by the works studied. Admittedly – and this is seen very clearly in jodi.org – the user first becomes a spectator: confronted with the failure of the technical gesture, the Internet user mobilizes their gaze, for they suddenly recognize that they are facing an image that solicits their sensible attention. Likewise, in front of Sniper, the failed attempt to render the temporal structure of the image forces the participant in this interactive installation to abandon the role of user – useless in front of an image whose operational capacity has been suspended – and to activate a disinterested gaze, the only one capable of allowing them to grasp the stakes – aesthetic, then political – of the complex image they are looking at. In Disnovation.org’s The Pirate Cinema, we imagine the spectator – a bit like all of us, Internet pirates – observing the tampered flows – which collapse into one another, emitting grating glitches – with a new eye. Whereas, in the works of Menkman and Murata, we picture the spectator of the work – whose consumption of digital video streams has been naturalized – compelled to watch how the object so familiar to them is unexpectedly deformed by databending or datamoshing.

Faced with the failure of technics, the user is led to activate their gaze, their capacity for contemplation: they find themselves compelled to re-examine the representation they have of the technical system. Having become a spectator, they gain access to an aesthetic experience that opens the way to an awakening of consciousness. This awakening, by way of the digital medium, connects them to the complexity of the ecosystem in which this medium is inscribed.

Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s reflection, one could say that, following the failure of the technological means, the user is compelled to abandon the functional dynamic that linked them to technics – they must renounce labor – in order to adopt a mode of attention that brings them closer to what Simondon conceives of as “technical activity”⁴⁸:

the gesture of labor is directed by its immediate utility. But technical activity only reaches the real at the end of a long elaboration; it rests on laws, it is not improvised; for technical recipes to be effective, they must reach the real according to the laws of the real itself⁴⁹

In this new dynamic, the user-spectator benefits from a broadening of their coefficient of attention, within a framework that henceforth breaks down compartments. As soon as they grasp the functioning – and no longer only the function – of the system, the (human) intentionality that seeks to manipulate the user through technics becomes evident: they see the (invisible…) hand that tries to seize them. The experience of the failure of the technical gesture, as mobilized by the digital works studied, then suggests to the spectator the possibility, as never before, of action, or at least of political reflection.

Synthesizing the effect of the works considered, let us say that they have a multiple unveiling potential, making sensible several aspects of a digital technology implemented on the basis of economic and social strategies of domination. Technics thus proves to be over-artificialized, conditioned by economic logics to the detriment of the sensible. Its genealogy – a military one – is unveiled, as is its physical conditioning, long occulted by deceptive discourses appealing to the mystical. In the same movement, these works provoke a reaction in a spectator who finds their functional passivity upended. Admittedly, the works considered pertain above all to the digital medium, and result from creative processes that exploit it essentially as a support. Thus, once the at once cognitive and revelatory effects of these destructuring approaches had been grasped, it seemed pertinent to extend them by orienting them more squarely toward the networked digital, toward the Internet, on the basis of a more specifically suited artistic corpus. Such will be the subject of chapter 5.

Beyond the destructuring digital strategies that produce forms from the malfunctions of the technological system – whether orchestrated or not – there also arises, from personal experience in practice, the need to conceive of another type of gesture: a structuring gesture, which, without taking advantage of the system’s error, seems to respond to the increased possibilities of manipulation offered by algorithms. The following paragraphs will be devoted to this type of approach.

1. There has been, up to a point, a misinterpretation of Lyotard’s remarks. Indeed, for Lyotard the immatériaux are not devoid of matter; they are rather materials whose nature would be linguistic.↩︎

2. These aspects will be explored in greater depth in chapter 5.↩︎

3. The symbolic functioning of code, within the framework of this research, is to be apprehended on the basis of the action of human gestures schematized and materialized within the computing machine, an aspect that will be developed in chapter 3.↩︎

4. Expressed above all in his Théorie esthétique, on which the author was working at the time of his death in 1969, and which was published posthumously in 1970 (Ästhetische Theorie, published by Suhrkamp Verlag), based on fragments gathered and organized by his widow Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann.↩︎

5. Crystallized in Paul Virilio, The original accident. Cambridge ; Malden, Mass : Polity, 2007.↩︎

6. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, La dialectique de la raison: Fragments philosophiquies. s.l. : Gallimard, 1974.↩︎

7. Although a certain fascination with this conception helped trigger the making of l’Inter-code, as we will see further on.↩︎

8. See on this subject Vilém Flusser, Pour une philosophie de la photographie, op. cit., and also, developing the link between Flusser’s reflection and experimental photography, Marc Lenot, Jouer contre les appareils: de la photographie expérimentale. Arles : Éditions Photosynthèses, 2017.↩︎

9. Jussi Parikka, Qu’est-ce que l’archéologie des média ?, op. cit.↩︎

10. Ibid., p.25.↩︎

11. Jean-Paul Fourmentraux, «« Corrupt Machine »: Esthétique et politique de la panne numérique ». Techniques & culture [en ligne]. November 2019, n° 72, p. 204–223.↩︎

12. Jean-Paul Fourmentraux, AntiDATA: la désobéissance numérique art et hacktivisme technocritique. Dijon : les Presses du réel, 2020.↩︎

13. Adding a layer of complexity that this research could not absorb, some have seen feminized features in the colossal representations of Akhenaten, reflecting ideological and theological choices linked to the principle of male/female duality associated with the god Aten. See in this sense Cathie Spieser and Pierre Sprumont, «La construction de l’image du corps de l’élite égyptienne à l’époque amarnienne ». Bulletins et mémoires de la société d’anthropologie de Paris [en ligne]. December 2004, vol. 16, n° 3–4.↩︎

14. Jean-Françis Géraud, Aphrodite dé-voilée [en ligne]. Université de La Réunion, Saint-Denis, La Réunion, April 2009, p. pp.67–95. disponible à l'adresse : https://hal.univ-reunion.fr/hal-01243828/file/G%C3%A9raud-TD36.pdf.↩︎

15. Stephen J. Campbell, «Polémique de Contre-Réforme et Contre-Esthétique Maniériste: Le Martyre de Saint Laurent de Bronzino à San Lorenzo (traduction) ». Images re-vues [en ligne]. November 2013, n° 11.↩︎

16. The Counter-Reformation’s regulatory reaction to the arts was to find an echo in the struggle the Enlightenment waged against the Rococo, a style judged too subjective and sensual, ill-suited to the challenges ahead: moving from a subject controlled by force to a citizen governed according to intelligible values and principles. For this undertaking, the Neoclassical style was far better suited.↩︎

17. Friedrich A. Kittler, Mode protégé, op. cit., p. 55.↩︎

18. Ibid. p. 53.↩︎

19. Originally published online in 1996. Web link: https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence accessed 21 October 2024.↩︎

20. Marianne Van den Boomen, Digital material: Tracing new media in everyday life and technology. Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press, 2009, p. 8.↩︎

21. A discourse of this kind is expressed in the Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle written by Gilles Deleuze in 1990. Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers 1972-1990, op. cit., p. 240.↩︎

22. This seamless fluidification of the world as announced by Deleuze will be qualified in chapters 3 and 5. Indeed, a certain persistence of the trace is necessary in order to grasp the concrete mode of existence of contemporary digital images, while at the same time the fluidification that seems to be invading our world still retains aspects of Foucault’s disciplinary societies.↩︎

23. Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers 1972-1990, op. cit., p. 244.↩︎

24. Ibid. p. 242.↩︎

25. Ibid. ↩︎

26. Ibid. p. 244.↩︎

27. Ibid.↩︎

28. ibid. ↩︎

29. Ibid. ↩︎

30. It emerges from the present reflection that – as will be discussed in chapter 5 – certain characteristics associable with the Foucauldian dispositif retain their relevance when it comes to describing mechanisms of control based on technics. This, while recognizing the relevance of the model of societies of control, based on a form of algorithmically readable fluidification of social behavior. This fluidification does not seem absolute, however: there always remain stable traces that refer to the solid state of matter, as we will see elsewhere in chapter 4.↩︎

31. See on this subject the article by the U.S. Energy Information Administration “Data center owners turn to nuclear as potential electricity source,” web link: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=63304, accessed 25 October 2024.↩︎

32. Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps, op. cit., p. 469.↩︎

33. See Bruno Latour’s lecture at the BnF Ce que le numérique fait aux humanités in 2015. Web link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3lsSJp8dbI, accessed 21 October 2024.↩︎

34. Bruno Latour Olivier De France and François-Bernard Huyghe, «« La technique, c’est la civilisation elle-même »: ». Revue internationale et stratégique [en ligne]. June 2018, vol. N° 110, n° 2, p. 163–171.↩︎

35. On this subject, the association La quadrature du net has launched an information campaign aimed at denouncing the conditions of production of artificial intelligence, its dangers, and the fantasies that are being spread. Website: https://www.laquadrature.net/2024/11/29/cest-pas-de-lia-cest-de-lexploitation-dernier-cri/, accessed 4 December 2024.↩︎

36. Maisie Cousins’s project In defence of AI is very pertinent in this respect. In her reflection, the artist problematizes the work of creators of images and sounds, who draw inspiration – spontaneously or at the request of clients – from pre-existing works, iconographic references, etc. Project link: https://darklight-digital.com/thought/maisie-cousins-in-defence-of-ai/ accessed 21 October 2024.↩︎

37. See in this sense Clotilde Bômont and Amaël Cattaruzza, «Le cloud computing : De l’objet technique à l’enjeu géopolitique. Le cas de la France: ». Hérodote [en ligne]. June 2020, vol. N° 177-178, n° 2, p. 149–163.↩︎

38. A reflection that seems particularly pertinent, as formulated, with a nuance, by Sean Cubitt. Indeed, the latter refers to the definition of images and not to compression processes. His remarks nonetheless remain valid if one thinks in terms of compression, a process whose ultimate aim – as in the case of a reduction in definition – is to reduce the “weight” of images, that is, the quantity of data concerned, in order to make them lighter and therefore more easily transmissible. We will return to this idea in chapter 5, for it clarifies Jacques Perconte’s gesture. Regarding Sean Cubitt’s remarks, see Sean Cubitt, The practice of light: A genealogy of visual technologies from prints to pixels. Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT press, 2014, p. 11.↩︎

39. Gilles Deleuze, Pourparles 1972-1990. Paris : Éd. de Minuit, 2003, op. cit., p. 241.↩︎

40. Shoshana Zuboff, L’âge du capitalisme de surveillance, op. cit.↩︎

41. Hito Steyerl, “In defense of the poor image,” in http://www.e-flux.com/, op. cit.↩︎

42. Or, to use Stiegler’s terms, of hyper-matter, a notion that will be mobilized in the following chapter.↩︎

43. This link between the digital image as implemented and capitalism must be qualified, insofar as China, a power claiming to be communist, has managed to make the capitalist version of the digital image its own, instrumentalizing it to excess for the purpose of controlling the Chinese population.↩︎

44. These works also inscribe the digital image at the epicenter of the human-technical dialogue, to be grasped as a transductive link that connects the human to technics, on a broader temporal scale certainly, but one which, as will be discussed in chapter 3, expresses its domain of possibilities in the micro-universe of each apparatus-based creative process.↩︎

45. Friedrich A. Kittler, Mode protégé, op. cit., p. 20.↩︎

46. Ibid. p.30.↩︎

47. This research conceives of another possible modality of creation based on the digital dispositif, still experimental, certainly, but not necessarily based on malfunctions or errors of the system. This “structuring” modality, which we will address next, takes shape in the digital environment thanks to the modulating power introduced by algorithmic programming.↩︎

48. Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques. Nouvelle éd. revue et corrigée. Paris : Aubier, 2012, p. 339.↩︎

49. Ibid., p. 345.↩︎