Hypermaterial Agency, Between Light-Time and Differing Times

With Le Soleil de Patiras, we grasped both the expression of the original signal – sunlight – and the thickness of the apparatus-based process of capturing images. The dynamic of the signal, apprehended in its genealogy, is fundamental, for it clarifies the mode of existence of digital images while inscribing them in continuity with tradition. Indeed, while the technological processes at the origin of images are becoming more complex, they nonetheless remain describable as interactions between signal and support.

There is, however, an unprecedented plastic intensity, specific to the digital hypersupport, which we have chosen to think of as hypermaterial plasticity, and which allows the digital image to express itself both as flow and as trace. The industrial conditioning of the hypermaterial – and its transfer effects on the macro world – becomes visible within the installation The Pirate Cinema; whereas with Impressions, Perconte brings out the expressive potential of the hypermaterial, and its negentropic side¹.

The hypermaterial stems from a thought – that of Bernard Stiegler – that never sought to abstract from the concrete mode of existence of materialities, inseparable from human evolution, which cannot be grasped outside its link with technics, its tools, its prostheses and its exteriorized memories. It seeks to resolve the epistemological problems introduced by immaterial approaches, which tend wrongly to exclude physical agencies which, omnipresent, express themselves permanently and at all spatial and temporal levels. The hypermaterial is a particularly fruitful notion for understanding digital works, as well as the more general expressions of the digital in our societies, for it manages to associate trace and flow, two aspects hitherto treated separately on the theoretical plane.

The material anchoring of the hypermaterial is opposed to the logic stemming from theoretical computer science, which considers the signal as “independent of its support and entirely computable².” This conceptual framework makes it possible neither to think the creative potentialities of the digital nor to apprehend its undesirable effects – which we observe daily – whether they stem from glitches or from interconnected programs that, without departing from their normal functioning, generate unexpected effects. Taking hypermaterial agency into account also makes it possible to counter the terrifying reverie of a posthuman patented by Silicon Valley, which likewise proceeds from a disembodied conception of information³.

Work – necessarily collective – remains to be done to balance the description of the hypermaterial bequeathed by Stiegler. Indeed, in the philosopher’s thought, the hypermaterial appears above all associated with negative effects, as the support of temporal objects – for example, video streams – through which economic calculation and algorithmic industrialization are introduced, as never before, into the symbolic, sensible and affective layers. This process entails a manipulation of consciousnesses, compromising the production and dissemination of knowledge, and making processes of individuation, both individual and collective, difficult. Yet Stiegler forcefully suggested the possibility of a positive side to the digital, capable of opening the field of the possible toward a negentropic production, notably by way of artistic practice⁴. Indeed, in this sense, the philosopher left solid conceptual frameworks and precious intuitions.

On the one hand, we understand that while the hypermaterial can be the site of an alienating light-time and of the circulation of computable information, it can also be traversed by differing times, associated with forms of knowledge – which the philosopher opposes to information – that rest on the endurance of the trace⁵. On the other hand, Stiegler elaborated an “alter-strategy of shock⁶,” derived from an “alter-doctrine of shock,” which consists in transforming – we might say, in our own terms – the “arbitrary and violent⁷” glitches of capitalism into “new and necessary rights⁸.” What can the role of art be in this process? Finally, Stiegler belongs to a very small group of thinkers who have recognized that programs produce uncertainty, which, according to the philosopher, requires the establishment of a new aesthetics⁹. This new aesthetics, we argue here, cannot ignore the fundamental role of the trace.

The tradition of analog experimental cinema, like that of video art, constitutes an extremely rich field from which to try to approach these issues. Indeed, long before the massification of the digital, these practices already bore witness to the struggle between the emancipatory action of art and the alienating project of the cultural industries – whether Hollywood cinema or the television industry.

In the digital, the negentropic action of art will have to flourish between the dead zones, washed out by the actors of a growing alienating power: the GAFAM, the surveillance of authoritarian states and the military sector. The practices we have evoked – which mobilize both the signal and the hypermaterial support – offer glimpses of hope through artistic gestures that, while excluding the transmission of a “message,” awaken the affective dimension inherent in contemporary hypermaterial plasticity. From this kind of gesture the poetic can still arise, carried by modulations of flow that respond to human temporalities, while resistances will seek their footing on the roughness of the trace.

1. The tendency to reduce entropy, to intensify the internal organization of a system, and to postpone its collapse.↩︎

2. See on this subject Anne Alombert, Nous avons à devenir la quasi-cause du décès de Bernard Stiegler [en ligne]. 15 August 2020. disponible à l'adresse : https://blogs.mediapart.fr/anamnesis/blog/150820/nous-avons-devenir-la-quasi-cause-du-deces-de-bernard-stiegler.↩︎

3. See on this subject N. Katherine Hayles, How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. Chicago, Ill : University of Chicago Press, 1999.↩︎

4. We find this in the postface to the philosopher’s major work, Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps, op. cit., p. 843 ff.↩︎

5. Ibid., p. 473. Indeed, the attention paid to digital traces can also contribute to a negentropic mobilization of the hypermaterial support. This seems to be the direction of the work of Dominique Boullier, who proposes to broaden the description of our territories so as to integrate a topological dimension into it, capable of making possible the integration of digital data into the institutional management of territories. See on this subject Dominique Boullier, «L’écume numérique des territoires ». dans : SEVERO, Marta and ROMELE, Alberto (dir.), Traces numériques et territoires [en ligne]. [s. l.] : Les Presses des Mines, 2015, p. 113–134. disponible à l'adresse : https://shs.cairn.info/traces-numeriques-et-territoires--9782356712271-page-113?lang=fr.↩︎

6. Anne Alombert, Nous avons à devenir la quasi-cause du décès de Bernard Stiegler, op. cit.↩︎

7. Ibid.↩︎

8. Ibid.↩︎

9. Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps, op. cit., p. 389.↩︎