Hypermaterial Agency in Experimental Cinema

The central chapter provided an opportunity to grasp the way in which the works belonging to each of the strategies considered – destructurations, structurations and assemblages – traced a movement which, from outside the digital image, passed through its body to reach its inner core, grasped through its physicality. In the extension of this movement toward the interior of the image, and as the conclusion of the central chapter, the reflection gave rise to speculations with metaphysical overtones, proposing a description of the immanent nature of this fundamental bedrock, which appeared presymbolic – we can now say preindividual – inhabited by gesture, perception and matter.

In the course of this path toward the interior of the image, the works considered in the central chapter helped to delimit its place, pointing to the consistency of the digital image as an entity – raising the question of its nature, of its mode of existence. This fourth chapter is established in response to this design, and raises the question on the ontological plane, but it will be an ontology of becoming, non-essentialist, which will seek not only to grasp the becoming of the image within the digital – we could now speak of the individuation of the technical image in connection with the digital – but also to grasp its specificities with respect to the digital as it has been implemented, articulated with an increasingly unbridled capitalism.

The reflection will begin with two works we already know: The Pirate Cinema by the collective Disnovation.org and Impressions by Jacques Perconte, to which a third will be added, produced by the latter artist in 2007, entitled Le Soleil de Patiras. From the confrontation of the sensible thus invoked with theoretical notions – such as the movement-image dear to Deleuze and the notion of trace developed by Derrida – the analysis will lead us to the notion of the hypermaterial evoked by Bernard Stiegler, all of which contributes to structuring a framework in which the digital image engages in a play of mirrors with our disruptive era, which, like the image, is indebted at once to signal and support, to flows and traces, to machinic light-times but also to differing times, in which the expression of the human can still throb.