Digital Alchemies

It is natural to observe that, affected by practices involving new conceptions of the manual, the materiality of the manipulated support begins to throb. In France, the work of Jacques Perconte is symptomatic of this process. Although it would be inappropriate to assimilate the artist to the “glitch art¹” movement, one cannot but note that the panoply of artisanal algorithmic tools developed by the artist, with which he builds his films, works by diverting the systems of compression and decompression of video streams². Compression, an operation that drastically reduces the volume of matter needed to store images and the bandwidth required for their transmission, produces “hollowed-out,” empty images, which retain only the information strictly necessary for the image to be reconstituted algorithmically in time and space, at the moment the video is played back. Like other international artists³, Jacques Perconte has explored the aesthetic potentialities of the malfunctions of compression codecs, raising them to a higher level of expression. In his work, technics is reduced to its plastic potential: color, form, texture, movement and matter. An intuitive knowledge arises from trial, and not from a conceptual framework that precedes contact with matter through algorithmic tools. If there is a symbolic framework within the artist’s creative process, it is less scientific than mythological, even esoteric: “there is something that struck me a lot, something an alchemist said: he said that alchemy is making light enter into matter⁴.”

In Perconte we find, in a register underlying the breathing of his images, a form of sensibility that unveils the fragility of the digital image, a fragility that echoes the real limitations of the material infrastructure through which images circulate. From the artist’s work, produced through détournements carried out on compression codecs, a critique emerges of the conditionings inherent in digital images. These stem from technical and economic choices that value images as rapidly circulating commodities⁵. These commodity-images have been conditioned according to the “worst acceptable⁶” standards, in conformity with a psychological norm of perception based on the predominance of the “message⁷” over “noise.” From this follows the utilitarian nature of the digital image as it was conceived, as if it had been forged in spite of the sensible qualities that operate outside language, even outside the symbolic, qualities nonetheless capable of “coloring our sense of community otherwise⁸.”

It is the material mode of existence of digital images that manifests itself in Perconte’s films. This is achieved through an approach that asserts the sensible aspect, in which human touch seeks the body of digital images through countless technological layers. It is an approach that flourishes outside any scientific framework, which seeks to act on the basis of a making rather than by mobilizing prior knowledge. All things considered, this is an artistic intentionality that seeks to exhaust the possibilities of the means as well as those of the support, and which makes it possible, as we saw with Adorno, to think of algorithmic coding in terms of craft, plasticity and matter. With their attitudes and their ways of doing, these artists show us that digital technology can perfectly well be mobilized outside any Cartesianism. When they anchor their practices in an experimental framework, deeply bound to matter and attentive to its expressions, they suggest, on the basis of the sensible, a more general framework in which non-instrumentalized uses of technics are articulated with new territories of freedom for the human.

1. ”Glitch art” brings together artistic practices based on images (still and moving) that deliberately exploit digital malfunctions.↩︎

2. Systems we know as codecs.↩︎

3. Such as Rosa Menkman, a Dutch artist who theorizes, within the framework of her practice, the symbolic, medial and political scope of the glitch.↩︎

4. Remarks made by the artist in the interview Les peintures numériques de Jacques Perconte, for TRACKS – ARTE, URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_Xhu9Vx5XM, accessed December 1, 2024.↩︎

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

6. Sean Cubitt, The practice of light, op. cit., p. 11.↩︎

7. Ibid.↩︎

8. Sean Cubitt, The practice of light, op. cit., p. 11.↩︎