New Avenues for the Virtual

Sometimes, the most appropriate notions among those identified only partially fitted certain aspects of the felt sense arising from the practice, which was honored above all else. Such was the case with the notion of the virtual already mentioned, treated in varied ways by philosophical thought, but always within a unified logic. The choice was made to split this notion so as to form an analog virtual and an algorithmic virtual, in order to take into account the two main levels identified as part of the anatomy of creative processes that use the digital, levels that appeared to involve different types of uncertainty.

In general, very little literature can be found that grants appropriate depth to apparatus-based creative processes, most analyses focusing, in the context of the digital, on the reception of the work by the public in a context of interactivity. The “embodied” or affective actualization of the virtual, as described by Mark B. N. Hansen¹, is itself thought in connection with the reception of the work; yet it has remarkable explanatory power when it addresses not the dynamic experienced by the public, but the one experienced by the artist during the creative process of the work, whether interactive or not.

With regard to the algorithmic virtual, and despite the interest granted to the work of Yuk Hui², this research cannot conceive how a fixed algorithm, associated with defined data, and leaving aside error or bugs, could produce a new formal configuration that would not be contemplated within the initial logical framework³. This impression echoes the following remarks by Simondon:

[…] the operation of machines does not give rise to information, but is only an assembling and a modification of forms […] a living being is needed as mediator to interpret a functioning in terms of information […]⁴

If novelty can emerge from an algorithm within this rigid framework, it would correspond to the effect that one of the “calculated” forms can produce in the perceiving consciousness, which would constitute an embodied actualization of the algorithmic virtual, to which we will return when addressing the structurations, after having considered, in the following paragraphs, what appeared as an “over-artificialization” of technics.

1. Mark B. N. Hansen, New philosophy for new media, op. cit.↩︎

2. In particular Yuk Hui, Recursivity and contingency. London Lanham, [Maryland] : Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd, 2019.↩︎

3. This can be illustrated by saying that generative neural networks, despite what one may hear, are determined systems. A certain variability in the results is obtained by varying the initial seeds (starting points of the computation), but when the same seed is reused, with the same request (prompt) and the same settings, exactly the same result is obtained, whether it is an image or a text.↩︎

4. Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, op. cit., p. 190.↩︎