Human Inscriptions

We will next turn our attention to digital approaches, seeking to understand how the dynamic established between notations, artists and works of analog experimental cinema persists — while transforming itself — within digital creative processes, from which emerge works that still belong to experimental cinema.

We will see that the passage from paper notations — associated with manual operations on the celluloid support — to the use of algorithms in the conception and making of experimental films cannot be explained as the continuation of a process of exteriorization of human faculties, for it is a phenomenon that requires a more complex conceptual framework. To better characterize this passage between analog and digital, it will be necessary to call upon the notion of transductive relation as it emerges from the thought of Gilbert Simondon.

Indeed, the details provided by artists about their digital creative processes, combined with an introspective look at my own work with algorithms, bring out a clear observation: in the digital context, artists continue to use paper notations, or notations on a digital support that do not answer to algorithmic logics. These are personal and subjective notations, which do not result from a computation and do not aim to trigger one. The following paragraphs will refer to these notations as human inscriptions. In the digital context, they are sometimes mobilized according to logics close to those we have seen associated with analog approaches — paper notations supporting an operative or analytical function — but often within the framework of new dynamics and functions. This happens at a time when the scale and intensity of operations on images reach levels unimaginable before the digital.