Foreword

This research-creation thesis belongs to a movement that began some ten years ago, when an artistic practice sought to evolve through contact with the academic world in order to enrich its dynamics and deepen its social inscription, while diversifying the ways in which it could take part in collective dialogue and reflection.

This practice had been nurtured long before, in the teeming underground of a Paris that no longer exists, where extremely diverse individuals and social groups shared time, projects and dreams, in an open environment that revealed the impoverishment of life as it is “offered” by our contemporary society, while giving a glimpse of emancipatory possibilities.

As it evolved, particularly when it took up digital means, my artistic approach found no well-established, systematic and suitable theoretical correlate capable of making intelligible the whole range of issues and feelings that were emerging. It is from this observation that the decision to undertake the present thesis was born.

To simplify, one could say that, while the theory that sought to think digital practices tended to reason in terms of “language,” practice kept referring to “matter,” in a culture such as ours, which has imposed a fairly watertight barrier between these two instances. The aesthetics of the apparatus-based arts has certainly benefited from a material turn that appeared in the 2010s, but many aspects still remain little explored.

This state of affairs can be interpreted as the expression of a more fundamental problem, rooted in the very mode of existence of our Western culture, where the original, sacred Word establishes a structure of control – but also of redemption – of the human by a divine that is also a beyond, whereas matter is what corrupts and soils us “here,” in this transitory station that the world is supposed to be.

This scheme, which stems from the divine and is formidably effective, has been taken over by enterprises of domination that are far more human, but which cannot do without the discursive and mythical dimensions. In this scheme, technics has become central as the medium through which control circulates and through which the action of power is very concretely carried out.

Artistic practice, especially when it mobilizes high-technology means, quickly finds itself – whether we like it or not – confronted with various expressions of these technically structured schemes of domination. Understanding creative processes in this context stands out as a privileged vantage point from which to weigh more global features of our time, all the more so since, in order to be properly grasped, these creative processes call for an understanding of both the human and the machine over the long time of their evolution.

The present research considers that it has achieved its primary aim, that of proposing a conceptual framework capable of making certain aspects of a personal artistic practice intelligible, while suggesting new directions for a practice to come. It would be most gratifying to learn that elements of the proposed conceptual structure can help other artists better grasp, within their own specificity, certain aspects of their worlds. The reflection could not be carried out without at the same time problematizing aspects related to the ontology of the digital image and of the networked image, within a non-essentialist framework of reflection in which becoming has its place. In a conception where not only art, but more fundamentally the human itself, is constitutively articulated with technics, the current mode of existence of technics is also questioned from the standpoint of art, which makes it possible to pose certain questions in a singular way and, probably, to offer a few elements of an answer.