Strategies of Malfunction in the Face of Networked Digital Technology

The destructuring practices considered in the central chapter allowed us to discern a power of revelation to which they are indebted, and which makes them capable of unveiling the body of the digital image by freeing it, while making manifest its intrinsically operational nature, the digital image being a central actor within a system of domination through technics, a system backed by the mobilization of the discursive and the mythical. To this disquieting diagnosis that emerges from the works, the user can respond, for the user too is revealed in their passivity, from which they emerge when transformed into an aesthetic spectator, capable of a gaze that brings them closer to the political.

This chapter¹ seeks to further exploit this capacity for unveiling² associated with destructuring artistic practices, in order to confront networked digital technology – the Internet – more head-on, by trying to apprehend its current mode of existence. To do so, it was necessary to compose a dedicated artistic corpus, bringing together works that address more directly the extratechnical mechanisms that have been put in place, mechanisms that undermine a project which naturally should have tended toward emancipation, and from which the worst scenarios for the future of humanity and of the planet are deduced today.

1. A preliminary version of this reflection was published as an article in issue 22 of the journal Proteus, Cahiers des théories de l’art, in February 2025.↩︎

2. This is not, as in Heidegger, a capacity to unveil the real that the philosopher attributes to technics. On the contrary, the aim is to grasp the share of the artificial that has been introduced into technics itself, to pin down its “over-artificialization,” carried out by very human intentionalities, which divert the natural evolution of technics in order to transform it into a means of domination.↩︎