Lines of Horizon

This research-creation took the time to “gestate” within a sensible domain, where a felt sense arising from a personal artistic practice came into resonance with impressions and considerations born of a free contact with the works. Starting from this domain, taking as a guide new and old intuitions – sometimes fruitful ones –, and as a compass the felt sense arising from making, a series of incursions was conducted into territories belonging to the immense jungle of human thought, with the aim of finding notions and concepts capable of taking part in the construction of an intelligible framework from which to weigh the practices and the works at the origin of the research.

A great initial sorting was necessary in order to set aside the very numerous frameworks of thought, of diverse origins, that deal with the symbolic without problematizing its material inscription – approaches that all have their interest, but that run counter to the felt sense that guided this research.

In the course of the quest, a certain number of theoretical elements – notions, concepts and processes – were discovered, which could come from paleoanthropology, developmental psychology, software studies, the natural sciences, the neurosciences and philosophy. These elements were necessarily mobilized outside their disciplinary context, but transposed with a concern for respect, without hesitating to intensify their study when this proved necessary. The approach was strengthened by the fact that, often, the efforts invested in a better understanding of the theoretical elements made it possible to identify “attributes” associated with them, or else elements of context belonging to them, which in turn shed light on regions of a sensible that, in any case, escapes a complete description, qualitatively and quantitatively.

Although the undertaking did not seek to propose new concepts or principles in the form of neologisms too quickly, it was not always possible to describe all the aspects arising from the practice on the basis of pre-established theory. In such cases, derived or adapted terms, which alter the nature or the field of application of the original terms, had to be considered. Conversely, particularly with regard to the anatomy of apparatus-based creative processes, the present research sometimes required conceptually structuring aspects for which no pre-existing theory was available.