The digital Stack

Laid bare by the artistic gesture, the surface of the painting expresses itself in an evident way: it settles and merges with the surface of the earth in Pollock’s dripping/pouring, it adorns itself with a black struck by the tool in Soulages, it withdraws into itself and becomes an asemic object in BMPT… But what becomes of this surface when the artist weaves the image through the computer?

Whether it is understood as a medium of art or apprehended as a communicational medium, many conceive of the computer as the result of the superposition of several layers. Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack describes the global deployment of computing capacities as a system of layers ultimately resting on the terrestrial substrate (where else?); Friedrich Kittler, the leading figure of German media theory, denounces the inflation of the layers of computer language that pile up on top of one another, moving the user ever further away from the concrete functioning of the machine. From then on, in the digital, there would not be one surface but several surfaces. Several works in the exhibition Alchimies numériques make digital surfaces vibrate in different registers.