Strategic Mysteries, Immanent Miracles: Destructuring and Structuring Digital Matter

This chapter is the epicenter of the thesis, its core. It aims to bring forth a reflection from the sensory apprehension of twenty-two works, most of them screen-based, eight of them personal productions and fourteen drawn from the work of other artists. The latter, produced by established as well as emerging artists, were chosen intuitively, because of their resonance with my own work. With their affinities and their divergences, these works join mine to form a family of practices that mobilize digital images on the basis of their materiality, within an experiential framework. The attention paid to this artistic corpus will give rise to considerations that will seek to make certain aspects of the works intelligible, and that will tend to overflow the purely artistic domain, radiating beyond technicalities toward the anthropological, the political and the metaphysical.

The work drew on a preliminary study, which was the subject of the previous chapter, chapter 1. In that study, the use of paper notations by experimental filmmakers working in analog was set in tension with the use of algorithms in the construction of digital films. The emergence, within the digital creative processes considered, of what appeared as “human notations” prevents us from seeing in this passage from analog to digital a mere exteriorization of human skills toward the machine. On the contrary, this process rather bears witness to a displacement of the human-machine relationship, which is expressed in the evolution of apparatus-based creative processes. This preliminary study calls for approaching apparatus-based creation while keeping in the background the more general bond between humans and technics, which makes it possible to take some distance from transhumanist ideologies¹.

Fairly quickly, it became necessary to group the works of this central corpus into three sets, corresponding to three distinct strategies. On the one hand, destructurations rely on the exploitation of malfunctions in the computer system, sometimes strategically provoked by the artists. On the other hand, structurations generate forms without resorting to system errors: they simply exploit the programmability that the “computing machine” enjoys like no other. Finally, the personal work proved suited to problematizing a third type of strategy, which in some respects resembles a hybridization of the first two – structurations, destructurations. We will try to think through this third category by freely mobilizing notions of philosophical inspiration: assemblages liable to trigger deterritorializations.

For each work discussed, an initial effort of description was made, seeking to favor the contribution of the sensible. In a second stage, when this helped to enrich and clarify the reflection, conceptual elements were integrated. Exchanges with the artists concerned helped to refine the understanding of the creative processes they set in motion.

Each of the first two parts, destructurations and structurations, includes an introduction that aims to situate, in a non-exhaustive way, these two attitudes within the tradition of the craft-based and analog arts. Although schematic, these introductions tinge the reflection with tonalities that proved interesting². Each part concludes with paragraphs of reflection and synthesis, perspectives, which seek to grasp shared effects, as well as conceptual structures liable to enrich the characterization of each set of practices.

Assemblages, the third strategy, grasped from the personal works, are approached differently, in a more personal register, which aims to account for elements of context as well as for the details of the creative processes involved. This is an attempt to convey the experiential aspect in its temporality, the impressions and sensations felt before images in the making, without having sought to suppress later considerations arising from the research.

We will see how destructurations can be understood as ways of doing that unveil the body of digital images, a material conditioning concealed by means of stratagems that resonate with the mystical, through a human intentionality – stemming from the instances of power – which in turn finds itself unveiled. These works call upon the spectator – or even the user – and invite them to abandon their passive role, while awakening in them a sense of the political. They produce forms by suspending the operational capacity of a digital image that actively takes part in a system of social domination. This type of work bears witness to a cognitive potential that will be put to use in chapter 5, where a suitable artistic corpus will specifically take on the network in which digital images circulate, the Internet, understood as the most important contemporary biopolitical structure.

Reflection on structurations presented more difficulties, in the face of a theoretical landscape that either directly calls into question the possibility that any form whatsoever can be created with an algorithm in its “normal” functioning, or suggests schemes for conceptualizing the digital on the basis of the symbolic, within an immaterial framework that tends to bring the medium closer to human language. Yet this research seeks to think the algorithm in terms of a gestural logic, stemming from a personal sensation felt at the moment of practice. The study of the works awakened intuitions about the nature of the dynamics at play, and articulations emerged with notions drawn from philosophy as well as from a technical strand of anthropology. What emerges is the expression of practices that are always experimental, which can only be understood on the basis of the spatiotemporal thickness of creative processes in which human and machine enter into dialogue, the latter displaying an open functioning. Elements capable of constituting a conceptual framework associable with these structuring practices have been identified: the dynamic between the virtual and the actual, the one that takes place between the possible and the real, the “analog” periphery of the digital, the expression of human but also machinic finitudes; all these elements being affected by their material and therefore temporal anchoring. The conceptual framework that emerges from these works will make it possible to establish a generic scheme within which something of the order of gesture can unfold in the digital, a scheme that will be developed in chapter 3.

We will also see how the works of the three groups – structurations, destructurations and assemblages – carry out transformations at different levels of what is taking shape as the place of the digital image. One after another, the works belonging to each of the groups trace paths that, taking the periphery of the digital image as their starting point, progressively cross its body, finally reaching the intimate technological bedrock in which the image is rooted. Taken together, these works call for attention to the concrete mode of existence of digital images, in order to better understand their internal material and energetic dynamics, which will become the concern of chapter 4.

Each in its own way, these works resonate with a fundamental level, in whose depths destructurations, structurations and assemblages merge within the same originary gesture. This central chapter will conclude with an attempt to describe, in a reflection with metaphysical accents, this originary and immanent place where forms and matters converge, proposing for this level the preponderance of the sensible and the perceptual over the disembodied symbolic.

1. These tend to regard the human as entirely exteriorizable within technics, and therefore potentially patentable.↩︎

2. For example, the reference to mannerisms – Italian Renaissance Mannerism above all, but also what has been interpreted as a form of mannerism under Akhenaten in ancient Egypt – encourages reflection on the tendency of powers, in the digital, to seek to conceal the physical body of digital images.↩︎