Introduction

This thesis aims to establish a framework of intelligibility in order to enrich reflection on a personal artistic practice. This practice relies on digital images – videos, but also photographs – captured in various places: outdoor spaces – urban, natural – but also indoor spaces – a bedroom, a museum. These may be direct captures, but also images “captured” from their location on the Internet, our contemporary iconosphere. These images can be used in their raw state, or they can undergo the most diverse kinds of pre-processing (image rendering, 3D construction, AI processing…). Most of the time, these captures seek to grasp the movement of the real, that of the living as much as that of the inorganic. Understood as raw material, these digital images are then manipulated in different ways using algorithms: they are transformed, superimposed, cut up, their pieces rearranged within the frame…

From this approach emerge video works in which images express themselves according to a hybrid regime, oscillating between fixity and movement; figuration, disfiguration and abstraction; matter and symbol. This is a corpus of eight video works spanning 2016 to 2023, the last four of which were produced during the research carried out within the doctoral framework. The register of these pieces resonates in several respects with certain currents of experimental cinema, sharing with them an attention to the mechanisms of perception – notably apparatus-based perception –, a clear tendency to favor the generation and manipulation of forms within the frame, and finally, a heightened consideration of the political issues that lie in the apparatuses for producing and transmitting images and in their role within schemes of domination.

One might thus speak of a “digital experimental cinema,” a category that has no consistency in a post-medium artistic landscape, but which manages to signal the renewed interest of a post-Greenbergian reflection on the medium. If this old notion remains operative, it is because it seems to meet the need to deal, from the standpoint of art, with a reality that no longer allows us to ignore the agency of matter, materials and hardware.

The first efforts of the present research were directed toward the study of the paper notations built and used by certain experimental filmmakers of the analog avant-garde – Peter Kubelka and Paul Sharits, among many others – in the conception and construction of their celluloid films, in the expectation that they would clarify how algorithms function when they are used in the production and processing of images within digital creative processes. These notations immediately appeared as instances that crystallize the filiation of analog experimental cinema with the traditional arts – painting and music –, a filiation that fades at the level of algorithms, but does not disappear for all that¹. The at once operative and analytical functioning of these paper notations was grasped, along with their “generative” capacity and their autonomy: some notations themselves become the object of an aesthetic gaze, while others assert themselves through their coherence in the films they generate.

This passage from analog to digital, however, proved complex, since the algorithm did not completely “absorb” the dynamic that had formed around paper notations. Indeed, exchanges with artists about their work, together with attention to my own practice, show that notations continue to be mobilized within digital creative processes, whether on paper or on a digital support. This new type of notation, referred to as human inscriptions, broadens in several respects the functions of paper notations in the analog context, while taking on new roles and taking advantage of the new “spaces of inscription” that emerge within the digital. A fundamental result of this first phase of the research was to identify the complexity of this passage from analog to digital, which cannot be described by a model of simple exteriorization of human skills into the machine – a model that would have suited transhumanist ideologies –, an observation in the face of which the present reflection had to broaden its scope in order to integrate theoretical elements drawn from the philosophy of technics and from anthropology. This concerns in particular the transductive relation established between the human and the machine, a model that takes shape between Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Stiegler, the latter drawing in turn on the work of the anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan.

It was then decided to intensify the contribution of the sensible, by taking a sustained look at an artistic corpus in which the 8 pieces from my personal production were joined by 14 pieces produced by other artists, the latter chosen intuitively for their resonance with my work. It proved necessary to organize these works according to three strategies: destructurations, structurations and assemblages. While destructurations seek sensible effects from malfunctions – spontaneous or induced – of the digital system, structurations produce forms without going through malfunctions of the means employed: they simply exploit the programmability that the computing machine enjoys. The personal work, with both “destructuring” and “structuring” components, is considered in the category of assemblages and treated in a more personal way, the emphasis being placed less on plastic description and the search for conceptual articulations than on the expression of the intentions at the origin of each project, the rendering of what was lived during the creative process and its experiential depth, and on the description of what was perceived as the emergence of meaning in the course of that process.

Destructurations turned out to be practices that unveil the body of the digital image, a materiality strategically hidden by actors of power who deploy schemes of domination based on the technological element, accompanied by elements of discourse that recycle mythological elements. With an undeniable “unveiling” capacity, these practices also reveal the user in their passive role, offering them the possibility of an aesthetic gaze and a political reflection.

Dealing with structurations proved more difficult, owing to the absence of a consensual, established and suitable body of theory that could be mobilized in their regard. These practices present themselves as approaches that are always experimental, which exploit the generative capacity of algorithms while revealing the functioning of the computer as an open machine, and this at several spatial and temporal levels. These practices also make it possible to consider the immeasurable extent of the domain of the computable associated with digital images – an extent that far exceeds any kind of human or machinic capacity – and to open a dialogue with the notions of the virtual and the possible, as they emerge from a tradition of thought that begins with Henri Bergson and which, passing through Gilles Deleuze, culminates – across the Atlantic – in a treatment that seemed to us particularly relevant in Mark B. N. Hansen².

The personal work was articulated around the notion of assemblage, a connection that enriched the reflection while raising new questions. The heterogeneous structure of assemblages (which, in this respect, echoes Foucauldian dispositifs), which can include elements of diverse nature – material, discursive, territorial, normative, human and non-human – made it possible to grasp, for the works and creative processes studied, domains of action beyond the concretely material plane (but always starting from it), allowing a multilevel reading. The notion of assemblage is moreover already associated with movements of territorialization and deterritorialization, which resonate with a certain feeling during practice, when “something happens” – the expression of a gesture, for example – that displaces the system toward an “elsewhere” where the emergence of meaning is reactivated. Furthermore, the notion of assemblage provides an interesting model when it comes to thinking the transformation of the symbolic on the basis of a material logic, since assemblages function “on the basis of modes of semiotization that make signs work ‘directly on’ things, bodies and flows of every kind³.”

The works belonging to each of the groups studied – structurations, destructurations, assemblages – trace a path from the outside toward the inside of a digital image that turns out to be stratified, delineating the contours of its body and calling for a better understanding of its concrete mode of existence, which will be the subject of chapter 4. This “descending” movement displayed by the works, which passes through the digital image until it reaches its fundamental foundation, was extended, allowing the reflection to address a level beneath the physical level, which had to be assumed as “metaphysical.” Thus, from the reflection arising from the sensible emerge features that make it possible to describe, in a speculative and hypothetical way, the nature of this primitive and original fundamental level, which appears to be inhabited less by immaterial linguistic structures⁴ than by the gesture of the living associated with an original form of perception⁵, the whole being anchored in the affective and immanent dynamism of matter.

The third chapter of the research extends and deepens the reflections begun in the central chapter, refocusing the analysis on the notions of intentionality, gesture and uncertainty. The artistic gesture, apprehended as that which allows the uncertainties inherent in the system – in the medium – to express themselves, raises the question of the possibility and nature of these forces in the context of the digital, within a creative process triggered by an “intention” that also needed to be specified.

A great deal of effort was then invested in articulating theoretical proposals drawn from anthropology, from the history and philosophy of technics, from neuroscience and from software studies. Some of them are empirically supported, making it possible to sketch, for the human as for the machine, a genesis based on an experiential and affective contact with the materiality of the world, the fundamental framework on which, only in a second stage, symbolic functioning is structured, for the human as for the machine. Thus, in the digital creative process, the symbolic component that dominates human-machine interaction is to be apprehended on the basis of the archaic gesture from which it emerges, as the expression of a primitive evolution that is reactivated on all temporal frames (that of phylogenesis and that of ontogenesis). During this genesis, gestural schemes are put to the test on the experiential plane and subsequently transferred to the symbolic level, giving shape to notions and concepts that are manipulated from the intelligible. The digital creative process thus apprehended remains deeply marked by its plastic origins, even at its very core: artistic intentionality is in turn indebted to a form of plasticity that brings it into dialogue with the notion of intention-image as problematized by Gilbert Simondon.

Chapter 3 also proposes a generic description of the anatomy of the creative processes studied, which are internally organized according to two fundamental levels: the algorithmic core, where machine computation takes place, and the analog periphery⁶, the latter to be understood as the “normal” real that acts as an associated milieu for the computer, including within the creative process. These two levels house uncertainties of a different nature: an analog virtual and an algorithmic virtual, potential sources of novelty that are actualized in distinct but always embodied ways, through the artist’s affective contact with the images in the making during the creative process.

The third chapter of this work concludes by proposing a schematic description of the temporal evolution of the creative processes concerned, understood as dynamics in the course of which all the instances involved – images, algorithm, artist – evolve according to a process that echoes individuation as described by Gilbert Simondon. Thus, during the creative process, the work emerges, and with it meaning, drawing on what remains preindividual in the system, and subsequently opening up – when the process reaches a safe harbor – to an existence beyond the artist and the creative process, as a possible component of collective processes of transindividuation.

The last two chapters of the thesis open up the reflection, in an attempt to confront the sensible manifestations studied more directly with aspects of the real that structure the dynamics – social, political and economic – of our time, without abandoning the “medial” vocation that has colored the present research from the outset.

Thus, chapter 4 focuses on the concrete mode of existence of the digital image – which stands as a mirror of certain aspects characterizing our time – approached through two works by Jacques Perconte and one work by the collective Disnovation.org. These pieces make it possible to grasp the full extent of the expressive latitude of the digital image, which shows itself through the fluidity of the signal, but which can also bear witness to the stability of a support. The image is then apprehended as a giving-form to the hypermaterial proposed by Bernard Stiegler, a common foundation of civilizational scope that the digital image shares with our contemporary age, in which the manifestation of algorithmic fluidities recalls the Deleuzian time-image, while pauses, slowdowns and rigid fixations indebted to the trace also assert themselves: the visual glitches that affect the digital image are answered by a glitch capitalism, which affects the overall economic, social and political functioning of the system. Thus emerges – within a framework proposed by Bernard Stiegler – the vision of a disruptive present dominated by technology, traversed by algorithmic light-times, within which it is vital to grasp, from the standpoint of art, how to inscribe differing times, capable of bringing forth and preserving forms of knowledge, bulwarks of resistance to the erosion of the human caused by machinic flows of information.

Finally, the last chapter of the thesis⁷ seeks to put to use the “unveiling capacity” identified in the central chapter and associated with destructurations. It does so on the basis of a dedicated corpus, made up of works from approaches that strategically stage malfunctions of the technological system, but which deal more directly with networked digital technology: the Internet. These works are approached in light of what we propose here to designate, schematically, as the “theories of apparatuses”: a conceptual field in which Gilbert Simondon, Vilém Flusser, Theodor W. Adorno and Jean-Louis Déotte enter into dialogue, and which will in turn be supported by more recent proposals concerning digital means more specifically, such as those of Hito Steyerl, Shoshana Zuboff and Jean-Paul Fourmentraux. These are theoretical proposals – some of them already mobilized in the analysis of destructurations – that make it possible to think artistic practices that resort to means of high technicity, which certainly carry inherent conditionings, but which are considered (when diverted from their design logic) capable of taking part in the emergence of the new. These works appear as the result of approaches that introduce a playful atmosphere into digital art, while also rehabilitating a sense of craftsmanship within an environment that is nonetheless high-tech, thereby evoking forms of liberation of both the human and technics, in an undertaking that succeeds in enriching a reality artificially impoverished by technically structured schemes of domination. The collective collision of these works with the Internet reveals the anatomy of the latter in its current state, unveiling the features of the hegemonic biopolitical dispositif of our time: just like the digital image, at once trace and flow, this biopolitical structure cannot be apprehended exclusively as a fluidified structure of control, without also considering the survival of the characteristic aspects of disciplinary societies, which act on the materiality and visibility of bodies and are indebted to the fixity of the trace.

1. Echoes between the algorithm and painting will come to light in chapter 2, on the basis of the work of Jodi.org.↩︎

2. Mark B. N. Hansen, New philosophy for new media. Cambridge, Mass : MIT Press, 2004.↩︎

3. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux. Paris : Éd. de Minuit, 2009, p. 112.↩︎

4. As shown by the famous exhibition Les Immatériaux, curated by Jean-François Lyotard, which took place in 1985 at the Centre Pompidou.↩︎

5. This form is considered on the basis of the remarks of the experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage in Metaphors on Vision, published in 1963 by Jonas Mekas. For the French version, see Stan Brakhage, Métaphores et vision. Paris : Centre Georges Pompidou, 1998.↩︎

6. These are the levels between which lies an intermediate region, named the protocol zone.↩︎

7. 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↩︎