Intelligence as the Schematization of Bodily Experience

To sum up the preceding developments, we can say that human symbolic intelligence is to be apprehended as a faculty that emerges from the body’s experience of the material world, in a dynamic governed by gesture. This emergence of the symbol from gesture holds true on every temporal scale. It took place first over the long time of the evolution of the species (phylogenesis), which saw the very body of the human (including the brain) co-structure itself with the tools extending its gestures (Leroi-Gourhan), a process during which symbolic intelligence was built upon the world of objects (according to Bergson). As a result, intelligence requires the participation of intuition when it comes to apprehending the real in its totality, understood as the superposition of the inorganic and the living (Bergson). The symbol also emerges from gesture over the much shorter time of individual evolution (ontogenesis), in which symbolic intelligence is established on the basis of schemas valid on the sensorimotor plane (Piaget). In the present, the work of Varela and his associates allows us to grasp intelligence as an embodied faculty, within the body but also beyond it, in an enactive dynamic in which the subject and the world around it are constantly co-defined.

Put differently, in the long temporality as in the short temporality and in the instant, thought is gesture and it is body.

This long multidisciplinary detour has provided us with solid theoretical references, capable of supporting, on every temporal scale, the hypothesis of a fundamentally gestural and bodily origin of human symbolic intelligence, to be apprehended as a faculty that emerges from a play of mirrors between the plasticity of the body and that of a matter modulated by gesture.

Bringing this conceptual framework closer to our object of study, we understand that it will be difficult to think about the digital creative process without considering – at least in the background – the role of the body, the salience of the hand and of gesture. It is a process in which the artist works in front of the computer, coding algorithms, using interfaces, taking part in the creation of the sensible through software, a process inhabited by schemas inherited from ancestral gestures, schemas arising from concrete environments and subsequently subjected to a process of abstraction, of decontextualization.

The computer, for its part – the most complex machine ever built by humans, and the one that interacts with the artist at the heart of the digital creative process –, can be understood only by considering its material and gestural genesis, a dynamic on the basis of which humans have built up symbolic layers in order to generalize its use. These layers mask the actual functioning of the computer, in which matter is modulated on the basis of machinically schematized gestures, as we will see below.