The Artistic Gesture within the Digital, an Anti-Glitch

The glitch occurs unexpectedly, without assignable cause; it introduces a rupture, an organic expression within the inorganic, just like the artistic gesture as envisaged above. However, a fundamental difference separates the glitch from the artistic gesture we are trying to grasp.

Indeed, the appearance of a glitch — which tears the digital image — results from the sudden exhaustion of what we guess to be a gradient of electrical voltage, no doubt caused by the overtaxing of the material capacities of one of the computer’s components. The glitch thus consumes a potential for action — like the one associated with any gradient — and marks an increase in entropy within the technological base.

The artistic gesture, for its part, even if it can arise — like the glitch — suddenly¹, bears witness to a structuring effect (including when it is part of a strategy of destructuring the technological base, as in some of our Destructurations): it establishes the conditions that will allow the advent of meaning, increasing both the plastic and the symbolic reach of the work in progress. In so doing, the artistic gesture reduces entropy and increases the capacity for action of the work-system, whereas the glitch, on the contrary, increases entropy at the level of the technological base.

If the glitch can be associated with a “discharge” on the technical level, the artistic gesture “recharges” the more general – plastic and symbolic – level of the work.

In this form, the artistic gesture we are seeking echoes the description Bergson offers of a singular moment in our existences, which can come about suddenly, without our knowing why:

Let us seek, in the deepest depths of ourselves, the point where we feel ourselves most intimately within our own life. It is into pure duration that we then plunge back, a duration in which the past, always moving on, is swelling unceasingly with a present that is absolutely new. […] Rare indeed are the moments when we grasp ourselves again to this degree: they are one with our truly free actions².

The process described by Bergson recalls the one that accompanies a “revelation”, or else the one that marks the sudden emergence of an idea, or the abrupt irruption of a certainty in our lives. It is not deduced from our analyses, but carries the weight of the self-evident. In what way, then, could this process be specific to the creative gesture, and more precisely to the artistic gesture that can be expressed within the digital medium? How does it differ from the moments when we are led, forcefully, simply to follow an intuition that presents itself? The answer seems obvious: the artistic gesture, arising from a form of contraction of consciousness like the one described by Bergson, is articulated with the modulation of a matter that is the object of the artist’s attention, and it is as if, for an instant – that of the gesture –, the artist and the work under construction were a single entity, which evolves by expanding its plastic and symbolic richness.

Another Bergsonian vision helps us pin down what is at work within creative processes. This is the joint functioning of intelligence and intuition:

There are things that intelligence alone is able to seek, but which, by itself, it will never find. These things instinct alone could find; but it will never seek them³.

Indeed, the digital creative process can be described, in general terms, as structured by two absolutely complementary movements. On the one hand, starting from the intelligible, protocols are designed and set in motion, “workflows” are defined and followed, necessary but intermediate tasks are accomplished, directions to follow are assessed. On the other hand, intuition must also manifest itself — for otherwise there would be no work — within a scheme that implies a complementarity between intelligence and intuition, a complementarity that Bergson describes brilliantly.

1. We will distinguish below, associated with the “algorithmic gesture”, a less sudden, intermittent, discontinuous temporality, which is nonetheless always capable of harboring the expression of an artistic gesture. That gesture manifests itself by way of the execution of the algorithm.↩︎

2. Henri Bergson, L’évolution créatrice, op. cit., p. 201.↩︎

3. Henri Bergson, L’évolution créatrice, op. cit., p. 152.↩︎