The digital dissected

Through the prism of the works, the digital system is dissected, the mythological “cloud” vanishes, and with it the window-screen, leaving visible a series of sensible and intelligible articulations:

Internet infrastructure / electronics / algorithm / interface / screen / human body

These articulations are established on the basis of the materiality of the entities, and probably express their physicality in Philippe Descola’s sense¹. Materiality establishes a matrix of the possible within which the dispositions and the movement of the real are actualized.

The artistic highlighting of the layers (electronics/screen/body), and their exploitation for aesthetic ends, presents the digital system to the understanding in its true face, without a mask of immateriality, without any hidden or concealed component, in its full immanent dimension. From then on, new possibilities open up for the figurative image, for the window-screen. It will, however, be a bottom-up window-screen that scrutinizes the aspects of the system, a medial window-screen, concerned with the experience of the human being evolving in an environment largely affected by the omnipresence of the computer system.

The window-screen can then turn its gaze towards the concrete conditioning of the “cloud,” that is, towards the material management of data, towards the geographical, economic and political assemblage of data centers, which store our personal information in order to turn it into commodities, in an unbridled evolution of the digital made possible by a discourse of immateriality that tends to present the digital in a harmless form. In her video essay Zuckerberg, You Owe/Own Me (2022), Pauline Blanchet raises the issue of the dispossession of our personal data and of our online activity of which we are the victims. This illegitimate appropriation, legal only within the framework of a legislation that always lags behind when it comes to regulating new technologies, is today made possible by the complicity of governments and private actors (who profit from it). Blanchet reveals with complete objectivity the real characteristics of the system, in a form of investigation that takes us into the material but also historical backstage of a communication infrastructure that has become dangerous, now capable of hindering any attempt at individual or collective emancipation.

Jungkyun Shin, for his part, unveils the backstage of a 3D modeling software, making visible the artificiality of virtual constructions that are today increasingly photorealistic. In Cache memory (2023), the images of a stroll behind a virtual set are accompanied by a parodic discourse proposing various strategies against the loss of computer data. The virtual, often associated with the immaterial, is thus set in tension by the artist with a very material issue, in this work which, through its comic bent, echoes Hito Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen : A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013), while through its introspective exploitation of interfaces, it resonates with Harun Farocki’s learned series Parallel (2016).

María Molina Peiró is not worried about the loss of data; on the contrary, it is their proliferation that concerns her. Indeed, as we have seen, a form of dispossession of our data is carried out by web actors through their abusive terms of use, but a new form of inaccessibility also results quite simply from the almost permanent generation of data made possible (and encouraged) by new technologies (networked wearable devices). The artist decides to push the experiment to the extreme by strapping on a camera that she wears permanently for an entire year, capturing images automatically and continuously. With the mass of data she obtains, and against the obsession with forgetting nothing, she attacks these images through their plasticity, arranges them in strata, in an approach inspired by media archaeology, which the artist accompanies with 12 reflections (one for each month) offering a rich reading of the human condition as affected by the digital.

Gia Abucejo, in turn, describes the effects of digital technologies on people’s concrete lives. In a comic register, which does not prevent her from tackling a complex problem still linked to the materiality of devices (and bodies), Gia Abucejo highlights the positive aspects of social networks, thanks to which young people can build their sexual identities in the serenity of a protected environment, where anonymity, the use of avatars and remote communication make possible explorations that would otherwise be impossible or dangerous because of social intolerance. Once again, in Shield ambiance (2023), we find the virtual relativized by the foregrounding of the material aspect, the devices (keyboards, cables, physical interfaces) acting as accessories, or as objects indebted to an affective touch that is impossible at a distance.

Resonating with these works, Alice Santini exhibits the visual and textual traces of a year during which the artist made intensive use of online dating platforms. From these many and varied encounters, a meager balance emerges: no memory, or almost none. An attempt to reconstitute an intense but fleeting experience, the installation We Didn’t Meet (2017) stages the “dataization” of individuals carried out by algorithms that are not, today, able to grasp the qualitative aspect of the human bond.

Gioula Papadopoulou makes perceptible the process of “dataization” of the human being in its extreme form, not at the experiential level (like Santini or Molina Peiró) but in a graphic dimension. Indeed, artificial intelligence algorithms are now capable of generating photorealistic images from databases containing real images. These images, which present the “interpolated” human figure, were arranged by the artist in the form of a jerky video, AI made me do it : Ophelia (2023), in which the images struggle between the beauty of color and the vertigo of the rapid succession symptomatic of the digital, in a form of madness that echoes that of Shakespeare’s character.

1. “the set of visible and tangible expressions taken by the dispositions specific to any given entity when these are deemed to result from the morphological and physiological characteristics intrinsic to that entity.” DESCOLA P., 2015, Par-delà nature et culture, Editions Gallimard.↩︎