How to Read This Thesis

The five chapters that make up this thesis lend themselves, up to a certain point, to an independent reading. Thus, chapter 1 should be understood as the analysis of a pivotal moment in the emergence of computer programs, seen through the prism of art: the paper notations used by experimental filmmakers working in analog, in tension with the algorithms mobilized by artists working with digital images.

Chapter 2 would then become a set of commentaries on works that mobilize digital images, works chosen for their proximity to a personal practice and organized into two categories, “destructurations” and “structurations,” depending on whether or not the formal production derives from the expression of errors, spontaneous or induced, in the computer system. Chapter 2 also contains a third category, “assemblages,” comprising what the artist-researcher behind these pages can say, in a more or less spontaneous way, about their own work. From each of these three strategies emerge reflections – presented as so many “perspectives” – that seek to grasp shared aspects of how the works function, the understanding they offer of the medium within which they operate, and their potential effects on the viewer. In general, each of the sets of works that make up the three proposed strategies can be apprehended as a movement that progressively deepens its action within the medium, passing through the body of the digital image, a movement that the reflection did not wish to halt and which, in its extension “beneath” the physical, offers a vision of what then appears as a form of “metaphysics¹.”

Approached independently, the third chapter would consist of an attempt to describe algorithmic creative processes involving images, on the basis of a hypothesis that envisages, for both the human and the computing machine, a genesis in which their symbolic faculties are structured on an experiential, gestural and material foundation that determines them. Within this framework, artistic intentionality is characterized in terms of a form of plasticity deduced from the notion of intention-image dear to Gilbert Simondon, while the uncertainties inherent in the digital “medium” are problematized as depending on the embodied actualization of virtual potentials. These uncertainties can be activated by the expression of an artistic gesture – which may take the form of an algorithmic gesture –, a gesture whose possibility is envisaged even though this is a medium of high technicity that seems to reduce the direct involvement of the human body². The aim would be to grasp the survival of a gestural logic within the digital, even though the medium carries many conditionings due to its industrial origin, and even though it is a system traditionally associated with symbolic functioning – an understanding that the research proposes to reassess by emphasizing the primacy of the gestural (and therefore of the material) in the intimate nature of the algorithm. The process of individuation described by Gilbert Simondon serves, in this context, to describe certain aspects of the dynamics set in motion during creative approaches of this kind.

For its part, still within the framework of an independent reading, the fourth chapter can be approached as a reflection that puts the concrete mode of existence of the digital image in tension with certain expressions of our time, which is often described in terms of an acceleration responding to a form of fluidity introduced by technics. Without entirely calling this reading into question, and through the prism of the works of Jacques Perconte and Disnovation.org, it emerges that the manifestations of traces, which still play a role, should also be considered. Reflecting on the intimate nature of the digital image, at once support and signal, amounts to better understanding certain aspects of how our time functions, in which flow-type behavior is clarified when it is combined with the effects of traces. Thus, in an age that proves disruptive, as problematized by Bernard Stiegler, the hegemony of the light-times (temps-lumière) associated with flows must be rebalanced by the establishment of differing times (temps différants), indebted to the trace and capable of preserving the human and the living.

Finally, chapter 5³, when approached separately, will appear as a look at networked digital technology, at its current functioning and its effects on the human. This is made possible by the revealing action of a corpus of works that operate by orchestrating or staging malfunctions of the technological system, unveiling the Internet – as it has been implemented – as the main biopolitical dispositif of our time. We will then observe that the action of an alienating power on bodies is still very much in force, confirming the validity of certain aspects of Foucault’s reflection on disciplinary societies, to be grasped, admittedly, within the new framework of societies of control⁴.

Reading the chapters in sequence should reveal an additional, transversal dimension, for a play of correspondences arose spontaneously around the notions of fixity and movement, aspects originally associated with a dialectic affecting the images produced by the personal practice, the plastic core around which the reflection took shape.

The “results” of the preliminary study of the use of paper notations in analog avant-garde cinema, set in tension with the use of the algorithm in the generation and manipulation of digital images, affected the present reflection as a whole. Indeed, the study of this passage from analog to digital – more complex than expected – foreshadowed the need for a more complex theoretical framework, which had to call upon notions drawn from anthropology and philosophy: notably the transductive relation, which clarified the relationship between the human and technics that takes place during the apparatus-based creative process, a relation that Stiegler built on the basis of Simondon and Leroi-Gourhan.

The reflection developed in this thesis truly began to feel out what its axes would be, in contact with the works, in the central chapter (chapter 2). This sensitive reception, combined with an effort of description that never aimed at ekphrasis, brought out a myriad of aspects which, in combination, made it possible to identify a number of mechanisms specific to each strategy (structurations, destructurations and assemblages), while allowing new questions to emerge and sometimes providing the beginnings of answers. The “metaphysical” speculations mentioned above, which close this chapter, prepare the ground for the preindividual associated with Simondonian individuation, a dynamic that helped us to describe schematically the creative processes addressed in the following chapter.

Thus, as if through umbilical cords, the following chapters originate in and feed on the central chapter. Chapter 3, which problematizes within the same framework the artistic gesture, the uncertainties associated with digital creative processes, and artistic intentionality, seeks above all to respond to the “structuring” aspects of the creation and modulation of images by means of algorithms. Indeed, “destructurations⁵” by definition break with the inherent logic of the computer system; they become “analog,” so to speak, offering angles of approach that make rich interpretations possible⁶, which are naturally linked to a tradition of thought that problematizes the errors and accidents arising from technics⁷. By contrast, the mechanisms behind structuring creative approaches within the digital have been less studied and are therefore more difficult to address, to the point that some critics seem to question the very possibility of a “digital art.” This possibility nevertheless becomes conceivable once one understands (with Simondon) that information as such is secondary to the process of taking form, in which gesture and the expression of the potentials and limits of matter prevail. In this context, the process of individuation, which seemed to us to shed a great deal of light on digital creative processes, can be understood as a first translation, within the theoretical progression proposed by the thesis, of the fixity/movement dialectic that characterizes the practice at the origin of this research. Indeed, Simondonian individuation proposes a departure from the “clear-cut alternatives, established between being and becoming, movement and rest, substantial stability and chaotic instability⁸,” extreme and insufficient alternatives which, according to Simondon, blocked the thought of the Ancients⁹.

New manifestations of the fixity/movement dialectic appear in chapter 4, which envisages a certain ontology of the digital image¹⁰. Indeed, this dialectic becomes a dialogue between support and signal, thus clarifying the concrete mode of existence of the digital image; but it also makes it possible, when it takes the form of a reflection that associates effects indebted to the trace with those arising from flows, to better understand certain aspects of our age permeated by technics, an age that displays a disruptive dynamic, affected by what we will refer to as capitalist glitches. Still in chapter 4, a new transformation of the fixity/movement dialectic takes place; when articulated with Stiegler’s thought, it turns into a reflection on time, where we observe the proliferation of fluidified machinic times that must be offset by differing times, more human, indebted to the trace.

Finally, the last chapter draws on the “unveiling” capacity associated with destructurations, a capacity grasped in the central chapter. The Internet is thus approached through the prism of a suitable artistic corpus, comprising works that operate through malfunctions of the technical system, establishing the conditions for a final transformation of the fixity/movement dialectic. This will take the form of a search for a balance to be struck, when it comes to weighing the mechanisms of social domination at work today, between the importance given to Foucauldian disciplinary societies – indebted to the trace – and the attention paid to the societies of control described by Deleuze – irreducibly fluid. Together, these two models offer a better understanding of the biopolitical system, fundamentally technical, currently in place.

1. Which is approached from the standpoint of art, without calling upon the multiple and diverse anchorings of the metaphysical within Western philosophy.↩︎

2. The reflection, in a strand that could be developed further, will here seem to call for more subtle attention to the “physicality” of the human body, to its internal (energetic) functioning, and for taking into account aspects often considered trivial, associated with practices and discourses poorly inscribed in our culture but taken more seriously, for example, by Eastern cultures. The work of Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, crystallized in L’inscription corporelle de l’esprit. Sciences cognitives et expérience (1993), which we have drawn upon, reflects along these lines.↩︎

3. A preliminary version of this chapter was published as an article in issue 22 of the journal Proteus, Dispositifs, art & connaissance, edited by Sara Bédard-Goulet and Marie-Laure Delaporte. URL: http://www.revue-proteus.com/Proteus22.pdf↩︎

4. Societies of control are described by Deleuze, and then more precisely with regard to the digital by Shoshana Zuboff, who theorized what she named surveillance capitalism. See in this regard Gilles Deleuze, Pourparles 1972-1990. Paris : Éd. de Minuit, 2003, and Shoshana Zuboff, L’âge du capitalisme de surveillance: le combat pour un avenir humain face aux nouvelles frontières du pouvoir. Paris : Éditions Zulma, 2020.↩︎

5. Like the glitch staged by Murata and Menkman – which manifests itself spontaneously in Disnovation.org’s The Pirate Cinema –, the disconnections of the symbolic code introduced by Jodi.org, and, moreover, the direct intervention on the hardware ”performed” by 5VOLTCORE.↩︎

6. The work of Jean-Paul Fourmentraux is an example, in France, of the thinking that can be built around these artistic expressions associated with the breakdown of the technological system. Internationally, this research highlights the interest of Rosa Menkman’s research-creation.↩︎

7. Certain aspects of the thought of Paul Virilio and of Gilbert Simondon bear witness to this tradition.↩︎

8. Gilbert Simondon. L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. Nouvelle éd. Grenoble : Millon, 2017, p. 14.↩︎

9. Ibid., p. 26.↩︎

10. An ontology which, within this framework of thought, could hardly present itself as an ontology of being, so constantly is it affected by effects of becoming. Put differently, in the terms of media archaeology: the digital image has become what it is, but it could have been different, and it will certainly continue to evolve.↩︎