From Dream to Nightmare

When it emerged, the digital network we know as the Internet was presented as a new technological paradigm that would foster, as never before, the free sharing and production of knowledge, while establishing new forms of interconnection. The Internet project thus took root in the collective imagination as the legitimate bearer of promises of emancipation.

Today, owing to growing privatization and an unbridled takeover by the sectors of power, the Internet is structured by a market logic in which unethical commercial practices flourish, articulated with surveillance mechanisms, within a system of social manipulation that endangers the foundations of democracies worldwide.

While many books retrace the operations that were necessary to transform the Internet’s original emancipatory project into a global structure of alienation¹, an entire field of artistic activity is today devoted to making sensible the current role of the technological system, thereby establishing non-discursive critical forms, indispensable in a sphere of opinion eaten away by post-truth². These are works that produce forms by causing the technological system to fail³ and, in doing so, deploy a definite cognitive potential.

In the following paragraphs we will try to situate these creations within a framework of intelligibility built from conceptual elements borrowed, in varying doses, from the thought of Theodor W. Adorno, Gilbert Simondon, Vilém Flusser and Jean-Louis Déotte⁴: aesthetics sensitive to technics, which, for simplicity’s sake and schematically, we will call theories of the apparatus. From the confluence of these rich modes of thought with the radical artistic gestures that interest us, a conceptual mosaic takes shape that sheds light on the creative processes involved, processes that mobilize technics differently. We will first see how some of these works orchestrate malfunctions in order to integrate them into a playful dynamic, while other works generate “bugs” through artisanal algorithmic intervention. Then, from a more general perspective, we will identify how these creative processes propose strategies for the liberation of technics, in order finally to appreciate, still on the basis of the works, how the liberation of technics implies a re-enrichment of the real itself.

In a sensible counterpoint, drawing on the rich and varied content of each work, we will bear witness to the emergence of a veritable anatomy of digital technology and of the Internet as they are implemented, revealing them at the heart of the dispositif⁵ – the biopolitical⁶ dispositif – of our time.

1. See for example: Ben Tarnoff, Internet for the people: The fight for our digital future. London ; New York : Verso, 2022 ; Shoshana Zuboff, L’âge du capitalisme de surveillance, op. cit. and Martin Moore, Democracy hacked, op. cit.↩︎

2. Derived from the English term post-truth, proclaimed “word of the year” by the Oxford dictionary in 2016, the concept of post-truth designates the fact that we “have entered a period […] in which personal opinion, ideology, emotion and belief prevail over the reality of facts,” Dictionnaire Larousse online, https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/ francais/post-v%C3%A9rit%C3%A9/188379, accessed December 1, 2024. See also issue 18 of the journal Proteus on “l’art de mentir,” edited by Antoni Collot and Gary Dejean, http://www.revue-proteus.com/Proteus18.pdf, accessed December 1, 2024.↩︎

3. In this way, they extend a tradition already well established in artistic creation using analog means. See in this regard Patrick Nardin, Effacer, défaire, dérégler, op. cit.. We commented on certain aspects of this book in chapter 2, in connection with destructurations.↩︎

4. Above all, but not only: Theodor W. Adorno, Théorie esthétique, op. cit. ; Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, op. cit. ; Vilém Flusser, Pour une philosophie de la photographie, op. cit. and Jean-Louis Déotte, L’époque des appareils. Paris : Lignes & manifestes, 2004.↩︎

5. In Giorgio Agamben’s sense: “[…] anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control and secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions and discourses of living beings,” Giorgio Agamben, «Théorie des dispositifs ». Po&sie [en ligne]. 2006, vol. 115, n° 1, p. 25–36, p. 25-33.↩︎

6. Likewise inspired by G. Agamben, we understand by biopolitics a form of exercise of power, justified by a “state of exception that has become the rule,” whose object is “bare life,” that of a “‘homo sacer’ exposed without mediation to the exercise, on his biological body, of a force of correction, confinement or death,” Stany Grelet and Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, «Une biopolitique mineure ». Vacarme [en ligne]. 1999, vol. 10, n° 4, p. 4, p. 4.↩︎