Natural Language, Gesture and Algorithmic Gesture

Within the creative processes that interest us, the artist and the computer interact on a plane that presents itself in symbolic guise: the algorithm. However, as mentioned in the preceding paragraphs, both the human and the machine reach the symbolic from experiential and material relations with the world, in a process that takes place over several temporalities for the human, and over several (convergent) technical tendencies for the computer: multiple and diverse relations, but always inhabited by technical gesture¹. These two instances, human and machine, are thus wrapped in a symbolic finery — yet behind the symbol, there is matter and gesture.

It must never be forgotten, however, that the symbolic functioning of the human is entirely different from that of the machine: whereas the latter mobilizes formal logic concretely hardwired on the operational level, the human reflects and communicates by means of natural language. Indeed, the human can flourish within his language, with words that activate the sensible in unpredictable and subjective ways, according to subtle dynamics that keep their irreducible dose of mystery. Within human language, signifiers radiate a living, evolving, plastic semantic spectrum, stirring the senses and memory in a process anchored in the affectivity of the body. A tale or a poem can, by the sole way in which natural human language is handled in it, send shivers down the spine.

The same is not true of the computing machine. Indeed, the computer has been “pushed” by the human to express itself in a register that tends to resemble natural language, without ever succeeding — as we have seen. Indeed, the language of the machine can in fact belong only to formal logic, where signifiers follow one another governed by a fixed and rigid syntax, face to face with schematized and machinized operative gesture.

It would be unfortunate to see, in this particular type of human-machine interaction, a moment when natural human language would become operative. For in reality, during algorithmic coding, human language is never really mobilized. To suppose so would not do justice to the richness, the flexibility, in short, the life of natural human language.

Very recent empirical data help to shed light on the nature of this specific exchange established between the human and the machine, dominated more by gesture than by speech.

1. Graphical interfaces restore a gestural regime, from a spatial arrangement of algorithmic functions.↩︎