Distribution of the Virtuals within the Creative Process

These considerations were necessary because they have allowed us to determine conceptual elements that help us think about the uncertainties that can be expressed within digital creative processes, in connection, as we have seen, with the embodied actualization of different forms of the virtual, which manifest themselves in distinct places within the creative process.

The algorithmic core, which can be understood as the place of machinic “calculation”, harbors what is generated during the execution of an algorithm associated with a given dataset. For us, this means the generation of digital images, their transformation and/or their combination via the algorithm. This core is associated with a form of “algorithmic virtual”, from which forms of novelty can emerge, not by virtue of formal originality, but through the artist’s sensible and affective contact with images actually materialized – following the calculation.

The analog periphery, to be understood as everything that surrounds digital calculation in a creative process, is associated with the expressions of uncertainty as found in the “normal” real – so to speak –, arising from the (always embodied) actualization of an “analog virtual”.

The intermediate zone, which we have called the “protocol zone”, can be affected by the two types of virtuality we have defined, for this zone can integrate an algorithmic aspect, which is at the same time inscribed on an analog, continuous base.

notion
application
appearance
in Pierre Lévy
in Pierre Lévy
Analog virtual	Analog periphery / Protocol zone	Analog virtual → Form → Meaning (embodied) (difference / divergence / creation)	Virtual (producer of novelty)	Actualization (difference / divergence / creation)
Algorithmic virtual	Algorithmic core / Protocol zone	Algorithmic virtual → Form (resemblance / limitation) → meaning (embodied) (difference / divergence / creation)	Possible (not a producer of novelty)	Realization (resemblance / limitation)

The analog virtual is always actualized in a productive and divergent way, both at the appearance of form and in the affective process of producing meaning and sensation. The algorithmic virtual, although it remains productive, is realized in a non-creative way during the production of form (for example, a digital image as calculated by the algorithm), but it becomes a source of novelty when this form, once spatialized, is received affectively by the artist.

What emerges from the preceding paragraphs is a distribution of the uncertainties likely to manifest themselves within the internal structure of digital creative processes. There follows an attempt to clarify, if only partially, the nature of the artistic gesture capable of activating these uncertainties, while specifying the nature of the bond established between the artist who codes and the computing machine — a bond structured less by the terms of language than by those of gesture.