From Analog to Digital: A Transductive Evolution

At the beginning of this chapter, an analysis of the paper notations associated with analog experimental films attempted to grasp the issues they involve, to understand how they function, and to determine how these notations can be considered as instances that prefigure and clarify the mode of existence of algorithms when they are used in the generation and modulation of digital moving images.

We first saw that, through these paper notations, experimental cinema materializes its filiations with music as an art of time, and with avant-garde painting and its multiple regimes of figuration. By way of notations, this complicity with the artistic tradition is extended to algorithms — in less obvious configurations, admittedly — and to the forms that emerge from them¹. This should be grasped as an element that favors thinking of the digital arts in terms of continuity with the artistic tradition, and not of a complete break with it².

Although paper notations always maintain singular relationships with their films, two main functions appeared fairly quickly. On the one hand, paper notations serve to keep track of and organize the operations to be carried out on the celluloid support (operative function); on the other hand, these notations are built and used by artists in order to better understand the spatiotemporal structure of their films — finished or in progress — and the aesthetic issues that emerge from them, in a form of graphic analysis from which the viewer can in turn benefit.

We then observed how, in several respects, paper notations prefigure or anticipate elements of the mode of existence of algorithms: digital generative art, operational images, the principle of the loop, the discretization of space within the digital (the pixel), the morphology of graphical editing interfaces, and, finally, transcoding.

However, when it came to characterizing the passage from paper notations associated with celluloid films to the use of algorithms in the generation and processing of digital images, the model of a simple and linear exteriorization of human capacities into the machine — such as the one that emerges from transhumanist ideologies — proved insufficient and inappropriate. In other words, as far as the technological and methodological means employed in making experimental films are concerned, the passage from analog to digital cannot be conceived as a simple transformation of the type:

On the contrary, a survival of notations has been observed in connection with digital creative processes: these are either notations still made on paper, or notations inscribed on a digital support but which neither result from nor trigger a computation. This research proposes to call these notations human inscriptions. The passage from analog to digital, in the context that concerns us, then takes the following form:

Moreover, whereas the paper notations of the analog avant-garde were almost exclusively made on graph paper, with the digital we observe the appearance of notations made on plain paper³, without a pre-established structure. One may suppose that this is a consequence of the change of medium: control over temporality, previously exercised by the artist through paper notations (which therefore had to be very precise), has moved into the orbit of the machine, freeing the human from this task⁴. Furthermore, since the algorithmic processing of images allows retakes in case of error, it makes the back-and-forth between different trials and their results at the level of the image more fluid, which also makes errors less costly.

All of this contributes to a form of liberation of notations, which become “more human,” without paradox, within the digital: since the rigid management of time is taken over by the algorithm, the forms in the notations evolve toward a renewed freedom.

In the new digital context, the human is not demobilized; quite the contrary, the human remains intimately involved: the artist can now organize and manipulate vast sets of images, or choose to work on the image in its microstructure, while new, more global levels of analysis become more easily accessible. The direct involvement of the artist’s body and the use of the hand are reduced in the digital, admittedly, and there is no longer any question, as with celluloid, of a direct intervention on the body of the image. The making of art becomes more of a “cosa mentale,” as Leonardo might have suggested for painting, but one should not conclude — sinking into a crude hylomorphism with regard to the human, that is, a dualism — that art becomes an “act of the mind.” On the contrary, digital art remains an immanent affair that plays out at the level of the agency of matter: the digital image takes a stratified form, with specific agencies deployed at each level⁵, and in which gesture remains relevant. Seen through the prism of these approaches, intellectual activity turns out to be associated with a symbolic functioning that emerges from gesture and matter⁶.

Consequently, the passage from analog to digital, in the light of experimental cinema, turns out to be a transformation that involves a surplus of structuration, for the human as well as for the machine. It is a displacement — indeed an evolution — of the human-technical link during which these two entities co-structure each other; the model of the transductive relation that emerges from the thought of Gilbert Simondon thus appears relevant for thinking the complexity of this passage. While Simondon defines transduction as the propagation of an activity “step by step within a domain, basing this propagation on a structuration of the domain carried out from place to place⁷,” Bernard Stiegler derives from it the notion of transductive relation as follows⁸:

[…] these are thus two dynamics that negotiate: the one bio-anthropological, the other techno-logical. The dynamic of the who itself redoubles that of the what: conditioned by it, it is also conditioning for it […]⁹

Thus, from the situation in which the human operates directly on the image support, assisted by paper notations and analog tools, we move to a new “state”: it is the computing machine, through the hypercontrolled manipulation of electricity, that acts on an image support taking on a new nature¹⁰. This surplus of structuration in the domain of the machine implies a “liberation” of part of the human’s participation, but this participation does not vanish, quite the contrary. The human remains fully engaged in the project (that of making an experimental film), and this new availability makes it possible to envisage, as we have seen, new levels of operability with regard to images — the macro and micro levels — as well as broadened analytical possibilities.

This study of the paper notations associated with analog experimental films, set in tension with the working of images by means of algorithms, had a decisive influence on the rest of the research, by suggesting a horizon of thought touching on the philosophy of technics and anthropology, from which interesting articulations with apparatus-based image practices emerge. This prompted further reading that would guide the research, making it possible to raise new questions, to which elements of an answer will be offered later on. At this stage, it was decided to leave the conceptual research in abeyance, in order to pursue and deepen, in the following chapter, the immersion in the sensible, letting the reflection be enriched through contact with a dedicated corpus of works. The works in this corpus, by established or emerging artists, were chosen because of their various resonances with pieces from my personal production, to which a place will also be given.

1. We will see how the work of Jodi.org and that of Simon Le Boggit, among others, reveal the survival of painting and music respectively within algorithms.↩︎

2. Favoring continuities over ruptures, and refusing any radical rupture, is one of the aspects through which this research resonates with media archaeology.↩︎

3. Such as the compression notation we considered in Perconte’s work, or Biermann’s, whose paper bears a structure that the notation does not respect.↩︎

4. While impoverishing, admittedly, the experience on the affective plane, since the direct involvement of the artist’s body is lessened.↩︎

5. We will grasp this through specific works in the following chapter.↩︎

6. We will develop this aspect in chapter 3.↩︎

7. Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. Nouvelle éd. Grenoble : Millon, 2017, p. 32.↩︎

8. The who being, for Stiegler, the human – in this case the artist – and the what signifying technics, the machine; in our context: analog means and their evolution toward the digital.↩︎

9. Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps: suivi de Le nouveau conflit des facultés et des fonctions dans l’Anthropocène. Réédition. Paris : Fayard, 2018, p. 321.↩︎

10. In chapter 4, in the light of the works, we will specify this new nature of the image support, drawing on the notion of the hypermaterial dear to Bernard Stiegler.↩︎