Structurations, Perspectives

The approaches studied in the preceding paragraphs, as already mentioned, generate forms through the production of new structures, without provoking or exploiting any malfunction of the system. These surpluses of structure are mainly plastic in nature, but also narrative, or even quite simply technological.

Indeed, it was first a matter of grasping how Rosa Menkman wraps an otherwise too abstract element of computer coding¹ in a traditional narrative structure — the hero’s journey — in an approach that runs counter to the tradition of experimental cinema — reluctant to mobilize pre-existing narrative forms — but that is justified in the digital context, insofar as it responds to the need to bring increasingly hermetic technical procedures closer to the human — to personalize them. It was then a matter of identifying how Gregg Biermann structures a new plastic plane, in which he algorithmically assembles, in time and space, sequences taken from Hollywood films whose superficial narrative is either denatured — as in Happy Again and Utopia Variations — or whose psychological depth is accentuated — as in Labyrinthine.

It is through a surplus of network — through the algorithmic creation of a new structure for relating images to one another — that Arcangel, for his part, strings together video sequences extracted from online guitar tutorials, in order to reproduce the highly complex structure of the Paganini Caprice No. 5, in a work that also bears witness to a form of algorithmic virtuosity. We then considered two works — Every Icon by John F. Simon and Every Possible Photograph by Jeffrey Thompson — that present themselves as conceptual but that, through their effects, make sensible the fundamentally material and temporal anchoring of digital images. This occurs through the progressive structuring of what is ultimately a minuscule portion of the territory of possibles for the digital image — a territory that proves too vast, practically infinite on the human scale.

Attention then turned to the way in which Jean-Michel Rolland structures, by way of a transition that defines the thickness of the work, an inverted version of an original image, thanks to an algorithmic reweaving carried out at the level of pixels. It is this same fine texture that Mitjanit activates, with pixels that simulate the living and collectively form choreographies that the artist brings forth through a work of experimentation. We then turned to Simon Le Boggit, as he produces, from a single dataset, both images and sounds, in which one can sense the internal dynamics of the digital image, whose fluidity — which is none other than that of electricity — must be apprehended in connection with the presence of traces capable of simultaneously informing a visual signal and a sound signal.

Finally, the study of Impressions provided the opportunity to discover how Jacques Perconte modulates the digital image in its most intimate aspects, orchestrating in time and space plastic transformations — which seem to emerge from a highly plastic version of a Deleuzian time-image — under whose sway the screen becomes an inexhaustible source of reveries and fictions.

Taken together, these approaches describe a structuring movement that, starting from outside the digital image, penetrates into it — just like the destructurations we considered earlier — to grasp its structural intimacy, then taking advantage of the symbolic layers of code, in resonance with the physical conditioning of the technological system. In doing so, they manage to trace the boundaries of the body of the digital image, as well as its irreducible material rootedness.

But this structuring creative action, which produces forms by acting on an environment traditionally conceived as entirely determined — the computer system — must be thought in tension with appropriate conceptual frameworks, so as to be clarified through agreement or disagreement with them.

Structuring Algorithmic Creation, a Fragmented Conceptual Landscape

Numerous theoretical echoes were identified in connection with the gestures of deconstruction studied in the previous part. These were reflections specific to the arts — such as Adorno’s aesthetics, the thought of Vilém Flusser or that of Patrick Nardin — but also proposals situated within a broader framework, concerning the link between the human and technics, such as Paul Virilio’s considerations on technical accidents, or the heuristic role that Gilbert Simondon attributes to the failure of the technical gesture. These theoretical references, as we indicated, are mobilized by a more recent literature, which is particularly interested in practices founded on digital malfunctions — such as, among many others, Rosa Menkman’s research-creation on the glitch or Jean-Paul Fourmentraux’s reflection with its anthropological accents.

Yet when it comes to detecting conceptual elements capable of clarifying the artistic gestures that structure in the digital, references are lacking. Indeed, in the field of digital aesthetics, no theoretical corpus could be identified that would, on its own, enrich the reading of these works, which do not rely on the errors of the system but stage digital images by exploiting, quite simply, the programmability proper to the computing machine. We have nevertheless found certain theoretical proposals that resonate — at least in part — with the creative processes implemented.

Moreover — and this emerges more clearly from the existing theoretical landscape — numerous objections have been formulated according to which no creative possibility could reside within an algorithmic process. These objections run up against the very existence of very diverse digital works which, without necessarily diverting the digital tools employed, have managed to acquire a certain legitimacy in the landscape of artistic practices for several decades. Disavowed by an art scene within which the presence of the digital keeps growing, these objections nonetheless remain very interesting, for by analyzing the way in which they fail, reflection comes into contact with notions that are fundamental for thinking this type of artistic functioning proper to the digital medium.

Finally, philosophical thought seems to offer promising conceptual frameworks. Pierre Lévy’s essay, Qu’est-ce que le virtuel ?, appears paradigmatic in this respect. Indeed, by mobilizing the thought of Deleuze, Bergson and Simondon, Lévy develops an understanding of the digital that departs from the notions of simulacrum and simulation, suggesting a mode of existence of the digital that is not opposed to the real, but takes the form of a real in becoming, articulated with the sensible. Furthermore, by bringing certain aspects of the thought of Deleuze and Guattari² to bear on the question of the digital, Anne Sauvagnargues’s reflection provides extremely interesting avenues. These will help us, in chapter 3, to inscribe the digital image in the temporality and spatiality of the associated creative processes, contributing to restoring their thickness. In the lineage of Deleuze and Lévy, one finds other reflections — for the most part from across the Atlantic³ and never translated into French — that seek to detect dynamics through which digital creation takes place.

In the paragraphs that follow, a reflection will be initiated that will seek less to “demonstrate” the plausibility of structuring algorithmic creation — which seems, as mentioned, already attested by the cultural presence of this type of artistic practice — than to identify elements capable of contributing to the formation of an intelligible framework from which these approaches can be addressed. This reflection will be deepened in chapter 3.

New Media Objects, Operations, Database.

Lev Manovich’s reflection, crystallized in his famous essay The Language of New Media (2001), appears as one of the most structured attempts to describe creation on the basis of the digital medium without appealing to the errors of the system. The author indeed identifies, and pertinently so, the properties of what he calls new media objects⁴, as well as the operations that can be applied to these objects⁵.

Admittedly, the use of the word language (The Language of New Media) introduces a gap with our own reflection — which aims at something of the order of gesture, of the experiential plane, a form of “presymbolic” sensible — although the author reassures us that this term does not express a desire to reinstate a structuralist dimension in the understanding of new media⁶.

Conversely, the use of the term object — new media object — which might seem to be in affinity with our intuitions, in fact responds in Manovich to the need to refer to the culture of “objects” in the field of computer science. But not only that: the author also expresses his intention to reactivate certain connotations between his “new media objects” and the objects of the Russian Constructivists, of the Productivists and of the Bauhaus, in an undertaking that aims to attenuate the differences between artistic creation and industrial mass production⁷. Yet the recognition of a fundamental difference between an industrial use of technics and an artistic use — between an instrumental, teleological mobilization of technics and an artistic, non-instrumental solicitation — constitutes a structuring axis of the present reflection.

The Language of New Media also develops the description of a database logic⁸, problematized in its aesthetic extensions by other authors following Manovich⁹. In this framework, the database is presented not only as a primary division of artistic material in a digital environment, but also — with ontological ambitions — as a structure to be privileged in the description of the real¹⁰. Although this theoretical configuration may provide us with interesting elements of interpretation for some of the works addressed, the approach favored by this research, centered on the materiality of forms, also requires attention to the levels underlying the symbolic layer in which the database is expressed. A gap thus naturally arises between our — material — apprehension of the digital and any thought that seeks to downplay or exclude from analysis the material conditioning of forms as well as the agency of matter¹¹. In the context of the present reflection, the choice is made to consider digital creation not only in connection with the recombination of pre-existing symbolic elements, but also as associated with the emergence, mutation and destruction of forms — in a dynamic permanently affected by the agency of matter, from which the symbolic plane emerges.

It is therefore natural to observe that, while Manovich’s reflection has helped us clarify certain aspects of the works, the mobilization of his thought in the framework of this research reaches its limits.

Moreover — and this deserves to be stressed — Manovich had written, as early as 1996, a text entitled What Is Digital Cinema, in which he posits that cinema, when it becomes digital, comes closer to the practices of nineteenth-century cinema, in which images were made by hand. Digital cinema would thus once again become an artisanal art of animating images. We obviously keep in mind this ultimately “media-archaeological” perspective avant la lettre, within the framework of an analysis that could not dispense with the notion of gesture, nor with that of craft.

It should also be noted, with particular attention, that Manovich takes as his matrix for reading the digital medium Dziga Vertov’s film Man with a Movie Camera (1929) — a film that, in several respects (refusal of classical narration, formal experimentation, reflexivity on the dispositif, the political project of a “cinema-eye”…), can be considered as belonging to the tradition of experimental cinema. This choice by Manovich supports the idea that the universe of practices and reflections associated with experimental cinema constitutes fertile ground for thinking the various creative expressions that take advantage of the digital medium.

The Materiality of Capture

For its part, the thought of Jean-Louis Boissier also interests us. With his installation Le Bus, ou l’exercice de la découverte (1984), Boissier took part in the exhibition Les Immatériaux — by opposing it, one might say. Indeed, while for Jean-François Lyotard — philosopher and curator of the exhibition — experience was losing its relevance with the advent of postmodernism (the real, including materials, now emanating from the intelligibility of code), Boissier, on the contrary, founds his creation on an experiential relationship with the world: the concrete exploration of a chosen place¹².

Boissier is attentive to the processes of capture associated with the digital — apparatus-based capture of images, but also capture in the broad sense — at a time when the synthetic image was problematized as an image deriving directly from simulation models, themselves perceived as disconnected from the physicality of the world. This stance is asserted through an awareness of the role of “capture” (saisie), of the gathering of samples intended to constitute a collection — a physical version of the database — and through the recognition of the pre-eminence of the observation and study of the real over statistics, which make it possible, only at a second stage, to derive mathematical models capable of “simulating” the real, including the living.

Moreover, through the notion of the relation-image, Boissier aimed to establish a theoretical framework for thinking what he conceives as an interactive cinema¹³, drawing on the typology of images proposed by Gilles Deleuze in his thinking on cinema.

For our part, we have attempted to mobilize the Deleuzian categories of images in the quest for a better understanding of the work of Jacques Perconte, in which forms of narrativity emerge from the complex modulations of digital matter. Boissier’s work and thought seem to stand in manifest proximity to the intuitions that guide this research.

The Sensible from the Intelligible

Edmond Couchot, for his part, develops a vast and nuanced reflection — sometimes embracing paradoxical considerations — in which the digital appears caught in the tensions between cultural, industrial and institutional networks in France. The author analyzes the place of the digital within artistic practices, from the production of works to their reception, without neglecting ontological and epistemological dimensions.

Couchot notably problematizes the notion of emergence, which lies at the heart of the structuring approaches addressed in the preceding paragraphs. However, unlike Boissier, he does not seem to attach importance to the processes of capturing images, nor to the traces of the real that capture processes (in the broad sense) can introduce, in one way or another, into the digital. For him, the digital image — and in particular the synthetic image — derives entirely from a calculation:

The digital image is no longer a mark or an imprint left by a material object on a support; it is the result of a calculation carried out by a computer. Its processes of fabrication are no longer physical but computational, linguistic¹⁴.

Couchot thus opposes physical processes to computational processes, moving away from the present reflection, which seeks to weigh the role of calculation on the basis of its physicality. His thought also seems to lean toward an understanding of the digital as a vector of ruptures — or at least of profound transformations — with respect to the tradition of artistic practices, whereas our intention — supported by media archaeology — is to bring out features of continuity with the past.

Interactivity, for Couchot, thus appears — alongside automatic calculation — as the element marking a specificity of the digital with respect to traditional figurative techniques, insofar as it “profoundly changes the traditional relations between the author, the work and the spectator¹⁵.” Conversely, we are not the first to recognize forms of interactivity — admittedly less obvious — but already well present in the analog arts. Couchot himself points to forms of interactivity predating the digital, scattered across numerous artistic disciplines¹⁶. The early works of Jeffrey Shaw¹⁷, to cite only one example, trace a seamless passage between the interactivity of analog expanded experimental cinema and that of digital dispositifs.

In rupture — at least partial — with tradition, and with no anchoring point in the real, the digital image, in Couchot’s universe of thought, appears as the product of pure intelligibility:

[…] on a computer screen one can figure, give a visible, sensible form, only to what is already intelligible, already a rational interpretation of the world. Artists thus find themselves in the delicate necessity of creating the sensible (artistic forms) with the intelligible (computer programs), in a sense the applied residues of science.

Within the digital, according to Couchot, the artist confronts the problem of creating the sensible from the intelligible — the sensible from programs. Programs are indeed necessarily intelligible, but not only that, we would add: in their normal functioning¹⁸, they are necessarily determined¹⁹: any unresolved ambiguity causes an error, or even the system to halt.

Couchot puts his finger on one of the most delicate questions when it comes to thinking the condition of possibility of digital art: how can a new form emerge within a system that is not only governed by the intelligible but also determined — other than by way of error and/or détournement? From Couchot’s thought there seems to follow the idea that it is through interactivity that the digital can become a truly creative medium.

However, one might ask how the situation of the digital artist truly differs from that of a painter, for example, who uses tools — brushes, paint, canvas — that are intelligible, since they are built by machines, and who relies on methods — linear perspective, atmospheric perspective… — that are likewise intelligible, insofar as they are comprehensible and transmissible in writing. It will be objected that the painter’s gesture is not intelligible a priori, even to the painter, just like that of the jazz musician improvising from the sensible, in cohesion with the musical flow. It is precisely in the face of this type of question that the present reflection does not seek to exclude from the outset the notion of gesture — which will be further problematized in chapter 3 — understood as an instance through which forms of indeterminacy can infiltrate the digital medium, thereby making its creative use possible.

Why Do We Compute? A Matter of Finitude

In evoking the situation of the digital artist, who must produce the sensible from the intelligible²⁰, Couchot undoubtedly formulates the most pressing issue that needs to be clarified when it comes to thinking digital creation.

This tension is powerfully condensed in the “trick question” formulated by Samson Abramsky²¹, who asks, in an apparently simple way: why do we call upon a computer to carry out calculations — Why do we compute?²² — when the result, one might say, is already contained in the initial premises: the algorithm and the input data.

Abramsky answers this question by invoking the principle of “logical omniscience,” which is expressed as follows:

K_aΦ ∧ (Φ→Ψ) → K_aΨ

Despite its formulation in logical language, this principle is relatively simple to understand: if agent “a” knows the proposition Φ, then they know all the logical consequences that follow from this proposition. Abramsky asserts — and we agree with him on this point — that this is manifestly false in practice. This observation can be related more specifically to the present research: even if the software and algorithms used by artists are “known” to others (for example, to the people who designed this software), as is the physical system in which these algorithms are concretely executed, this does not mean that all the possible outputs generated by these algorithms are themselves known. Indeed, even when artists design their own algorithms, they obviously do not know all the logical consequences — and a fortiori all the sensible manifestations — that may follow from this initial proposition.

To begin clarifying this problem, by relating it to the creative process of digital images, let us say that in the act of knowing, two dimensions intertwine and interact. On the one hand, there is an intelligible knowledge, which makes it possible, for example, to anticipate the structure of an image calculated by an algorithm. On the other hand, a form of sensible knowledge is also mobilized, not necessarily translatable into linguistic terms, and which cannot emerge without the participation of the senses in the face of the concrete existence of the image.

For a being endowed at once with an infinite intellectual capacity, an infinite imagination, and an infinite speed in the functioning of these faculties, the distinction between the intelligible and the sensible would tend to fade. Such an imaginary being — might this be a possible definition of God? — could, from the mere knowledge of an algorithm and its associated data, effortlessly determine the structure of any computable image, and then immediately imagine its physical manifestation, in all its complexity, within a given spatial configuration.

This framework of thought is illusory, but not sterile, for by comparing the human to this all-powerful being – who, as we shall see, could be neither human nor machine – and who refers not to God but to Laplace’s demon²³, we can understand the consequences of taking our human finitudes into account.

Indeed, the human is haunted by different forms of finitude, at every level of existence. Our memorial and intellectual capacities are not infinite — an aspect that Bernard Stiegler mobilizes in his thought under the name of retentional finitude. Our imagination, even understood in a restricted way²⁴ as the faculty of forming images in consciousness, could not be infinite either²⁵.

Finally, just like computers, the human is limited by the resistance of matter and time: even if we possessed infinite intelligence or imagination, these could not be expressed instantaneously.

In addition, psychoanalysis has taught us that we carry within us a psychic life that escapes consciousness — the unconscious — and that helps structure our relationship with the world. Moreover, we know that perception is an active and subjective process, in which our desires to come are also expressed, which mobilizes several levels of our memory, and which can even be influenced by the participation of the unconscious.

All this leads us to think that even the most brilliant human being is obliged to go through perceptual experience in order to truly know the sensible effect produced by an element of the real — such as, for example, a digital image. From then on, the latter must not be apprehended solely as a “digital image,” but in a far more realistic way: it will be a digital image in the determining context of its display — type of paper and frame (in the case of a print of a still image), type of projection dispositif, type of screen, format, size, placement of the frame, ambient lighting, level of file compression, chosen color space, configuration of the exhibition room, and a great many etceteras.

Let us say, for now, that concrete artistic practice shows that imagination and perception work together. From then on, we understand, with Bachelard, that imagination cannot be reduced to the mere capacity to form images in our consciousness, but that it is also “the faculty of deforming the images provided by perception; it is above all the faculty of freeing us from first images, of changing images²⁶.”

These considerations oblige us to take a position, on the basis of the specificity of these artistic practices, with respect to certain ideas from philosophy. On the one hand, attention will be paid to what can be called — in our own terms — dynamics of materialization, which philosophical thought describes as transformations: from the virtual to the actual, from the possible to the real, within processes in which the potential is also at stake.

Indeed, a form of equivalence, or “near equivalence,” between the possible and the real emerges from certain theoretical proposals — notably crystallized in Brian Massumi²⁷. According to this conception, in the passage from the possible to the real — a transformation comparable to what happens when a computer program is executed — nothing truly new is created. This issue will be examined in more detail in chapter 3. Let us nevertheless put forward here the fact that equating the possible with the real amounts to erasing, in reflection, the role of the artist’s perception during the creative process, which this research cannot accept.

Nothing Is Created, Nothing Is Lost…? An Objection from the Physical Sciences

The possibility of “structuring” creation with a computer, like the need to carry out a machinic calculation – Why do we compute? – must also answer another objection²⁸, arising from the field of physics, whose starting point lies in Antoine de Lavoisier’s famous assertion. This assertion²⁹ stipulates that, whatever the process, nothing is created – neither in quantitative nor in qualitative terms – including in the “operations of art”³⁰.

In the specific framework targeted by this research — that is, the creation of digital images — the answer to this objection makes it possible to clarify the relationship between the operation of calculation and the emergence of novelty. As indicated earlier, what the algorithm produces during its execution cannot be entirely known in advance, either from the intelligible point of view or on the sensible plane. But can the result of the algorithm — the output — when it materializes, constitute a genuine novelty, one that does not depend — or does not depend exclusively — on the recombination of pre-existing elements? The objection, formulated in other terms – but still in the field of physics – would consist in asserting that a calculation cannot generate a new form — that is, an informed matter — without contradicting the second law of thermodynamics. This law stipulates that, in a closed system, entropy — that is, the quantity of disorder — can only increase, and does so irreversibly. The appearance of a new form — which Abramsky calls “information” — would reduce entropy, which would seem physically impossible. This objection would only hold if one considered the site of the calculation — that is, the computer — to be a closed system. Is this really the case? Not at all, in reality. Indeed, as we know, the computer is an open system, in constant interaction with the environment that houses it, through multiple channels of exchange.

Computer, an Open System

In the framework of artistic processes, the computer receives forms, first of all, when images resulting from a capture are fed into it. Several of the works mobilized in this corpus can be recognized here. Indeed, the films by Gregg Biermann analyzed, Cory Arcangel’s work Paganini Caprice No. 5, Jean-Michel Rolland’s Upside-Down series and the work of Jacques Perconte mobilize “captured” forms, either by the artists themselves or through the appropriation of images in circulation.

As for the works mentioned that stage synthetic images³¹, we can say, with Jean-Louis Boissier, that the generation or simulation models employed are built from a work of capture (saisie) of the real world: a collection of objects, measurements, recordings, which mathematical and physical models subsequently reproduce. The openness of the computer is manifested here too — albeit more indirectly and over a longer temporality.

Interactivity constitutes another form of openness, made possible, in its most immediate form, by the keyboard and mouse, and more generally by a variety of dispositifs in the artistic field³²: virtual reality (VR) headsets, augmented reality (AR) dispositifs, touch screens, various sensors, etc. The unpredictable gesture of the spectator — a movement that is analog — is then encoded digitally by an interface, introducing an informed signal into the system.

It is thanks to its capacity for openness that the computer can connect to other computers, whether within restricted, private networks or large-scale public networks, such as the Internet. It is notably by taking advantage of this connectivity that an artist like Cory Arcangel, as we have seen, constructs his work Paganini Caprice No. 5.

The computer’s mode of existence is thus always open: it functions on the basis of very diverse inputs and outputs, more or less mediated, intervening at several levels and according to multiple temporalities. The computer can then be considered as a local subsystem within a larger system. From this perspective, we can admit — from the theoretical point of view — the creation of a new form, implying the appearance of a newly informed matter (information), linked to a local reduction of entropy, which must be offset by an increase in entropy in the surrounding systems connected to the computer.

In summary, let us stress that the study of the literature has made it possible to identify certain theoretical elements capable of describing these structuring digital approaches. To conceptions founded on the symbolic, this research will prefer those that attend to the deeper temporal and physical layers of the medium and that, in doing so, prove more attentive to the interactions — more or less indirect, unfolding over multiple temporalities — between the technological system and the world in which it is inscribed. From this perspective, the notion of capture (saisie), dear to Jean-Louis Boissier, seems highly pertinent, for it notably allows a better understanding of the nature of the synthetic image. The weaknesses of certain discourses that tend to deny algorithmic processes any creative potential were then examined. These objections, as we have seen, hold up neither on the logical plane nor from a physical (thermodynamic) point of view. They nonetheless lead us to consider the role of human finitudes in digital creation, to stress the importance of the artist’s sensible engagement throughout the creative process, while affirming the need to envisage the functioning of the computer in its openness to the system that surrounds it.

On the side of philosophy, a play of dialectics arises — which can also be thought of as passages — between the possible and the real, between the virtual and the actual. A position must be taken with respect to these dynamics: a material perspective should make it possible to shed a more accurate light on the structuring approaches considered. Taking human finitudes into account (as problematized by Bernard Stiegler), as well as recognizing the joint functioning of perception and imagination (which manifests itself on the basis of artistic practice, echoing Bachelard’s vision), will most certainly lead to calling for a more marked distinction between the possible and the real — only the latter being able to be inscribed in a fully sensible dynamic, with the decisive participation of the complexities associated with human perception.

The main conclusion of these paragraphs, which attempt to identify the set of structuring approaches considered, can be condensed as follows: these are always experimental, and therefore open, practices that cannot be grasped outside the spatiality and temporality proper to each creative process. Over the course of this process, various forms of indeterminacy are expressed, in a dynamic punctuated by human-machine exchanges, certainly, but fundamentally structured by the artist’s sensible engagement. This reflection will be extended and deepened in chapter 3.

The following paragraphs, for their part, will consider the personal work from which the questions and intuitions at the origin of this research-creation emerged.

1. This is the DCT, the “discrete cosine transform,” a decisive algorithmic procedure in the compression of digital images.↩︎

2. This concerns above all a second moment in Deleuze, starting from his work on cinema, in which the image, Anne Sauvagnargues tells us, abandons its status as a “mental projection,” its role in representation, to become a “motor process of sensible differentiation.” See in this regard Anne Sauvagnargues, «Écologie des images et machines d’art ». dans : VINCIGUERRA, Lorenzo (dir.), Pourparlers entre art et philosophie. Reims : Presses Universitaires de Reims, 2013, p. 165–182.↩︎

3. Such as the work of the Canadian philosopher Brian Massumi.↩︎

4. Namely: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability and transcoding. See in this regard Lev Manovich, The language of new media, op. cit., chapter 1.↩︎

5. These are menus, filters, plug-ins, compositing and teleaction. See in this regard Ibid., chapter 3.↩︎

6. Ibid., p. 12.↩︎

7. Ibid., p. 14.↩︎

8. Ibid., p. 218.↩︎

9. See for example the collective volume Victoria Vesna (dir.), Database aesthetics: Art in the age of information overflow. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2007.↩︎

10. Marianne Van den Boomen, Digital material, op. cit., p. 95.↩︎

11. Emmanuel Guez, in the French introduction to Jussi Parikka’s essay What is Media Archaeology (2012), establishes a distance of the same nature between media archaeology and Lev Manovich’s paradigmatic work, indicating that the latter contents itself with the surface effects of materialities. See in this regard Jussi Parikka, Qu’est-ce que l’archéologie des média ?, op. cit., p. 10.↩︎

12. This was the surroundings of the University of Vincennes, also known as Paris 8, after its “parachuting” to Saint-Denis from its original site in Vincennes. See in this regard Jean-Louis Boissier, La relation comme forme, op. cit., p. 15.↩︎

13. An artistic object explored by Gwenola Wagon in her research-creation thesis Utopies d’un cinéma interactif : accessibilité des images en mouvement, defended in 2006. Web link: https://theses.hal.science/tel-00177253/, accessed 25 November 2024.↩︎

14. Edmond Couchot, L’art numérique, op. cit., p. 23.↩︎

15. Ibid., p. 109.↩︎

16. Ibid.↩︎

17. Such as Emergences of Continuous Forms (1966) or Glove Screen (1967), visible on the artist’s website: https://www.jeffreyshawcompendium.com/.↩︎

18. And without an external connection, which would introduce forms of “analog” uncertainty.↩︎

19. This from an exclusively formal point of view. We shall see that a form arising from the intelligibility of code can produce novelty, which emerges when the materialized form offers itself to the artist’s perception and sensible reception during the creative process.↩︎

20. We will nuance this situation in chapter 3, for digital creation does not consist solely in executing an algorithm, but must be apprehended within the temporality of a creative process in which countless back-and-forth movements between the machine and the human artist take place. Moreover, in a form of “spatiality” of the creative process, as we shall see, the algorithmic core of the creative process is surrounded by an “analog” periphery, with an intermediate zone that involves protocols. These two zones that envelop the digital are subject to the same type of uncertainties that affect the non-digital real.↩︎

21. Abramsky is a researcher and emeritus professor of computer science at the University of Oxford, as well as professor of computer science at University College London. A pioneer in domain theory and in the semantics of code, he has received numerous distinctions, including the Alonzo Church Award (2017) and the BCS Lovelace Medal (2013). He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society since 2004.↩︎

22. In Samson Abramsky, «Two puzzles about computation ». dans : COOPER, S. Barry and VAN LEEUWEN, Jan (dir.), Alan turing: His work and impact [en ligne]. [s. l.] : Elsevier, 2013, p. 53–57.↩︎

23. “Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it – an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis […] for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.”, in Pierre Simon de Laplace, Essai philosophique sur les probabilités. Reprint of the Paris 1825 edition. Cambridge : Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009, p. 4.↩︎

24. With Bachelard, we will enrich this understanding of imagination as a human faculty, by recognizing that it is also — and perhaps above all — the capacity to deform the images that reach us through perception, and this sometimes after they have been, we would add, the object of a first deformation by our memory, in which the role of unconscious processes and affective dynamics is fundamental. It should be stressed that Bachelard himself, when he reflects on the element of earth in La terre et les rêveries de la volonté (1948), will have to nuance his own remarks and envisage a creative imagination that precedes perception; the final paragraphs of this research will return to this.↩︎

25. This research, echoing a critique that can be traced back to Nietzsche, does not believe in the figure of the “genius,” which refers to the transcendental.↩︎

26. Gaston Bachelard, L’air et les songes: essai sur l’imagination du mouvement. 6. éd. Paris : Corti, 2007, p. 5.↩︎

27. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham : Duke University Press, 2002.↩︎

28. Also pointed out by Abramsky in his article. op. cit., Two puzzles about computation.↩︎

29. “[…] nothing is created, either in the operations of art or in those of nature, and it may be laid down as a principle that, in every operation, there is an equal quantity of matter before and after the operation; that the quality of the principles is the same, and that there are only changes, modifications.” Antoine Lavoisier, Traité élémentaire de chimie, Paris, Cuchet, 1789, p. 140–141.↩︎

30. It is crucial — and interesting — in this respect to stress that Lavoisier refers here less to the arts understood within an aesthetic framework (at the very moment when this idea was beginning to emerge, at the end of the eighteenth century) than to the arts conceived as human procedures — artisanal ones or those belonging to experimental chemistry. It was precisely at this time, with Lavoisier, that the passage from alchemy to chemistry, understood as a science, took place.↩︎

31. Above all An Autonomous Agent Choreo (2016) by Toni Mitjanit and Entwining of Lost Souls (2022) by Simon Le Boggit.↩︎

32. See in this regard Les dispositifs ouverts, in Edmond Couchot, L’art numérique, op. cit., p. 55.↩︎