The Experience of the Avant-Gardes

The relationship each artist maintains with their paper notations, as well as the nomenclature used to refer to them, varies. For Peter Kubelka, these inscriptions are called “scores” or “pages of notes” – for the film Unsere Afrikareise (1966) – or “preliminary studies” for Adebar (1957), or again “articulation scheme” for Arnulf Rainer (1960). In his 2008 article, Yann Beauvais refers to “diagrams,” “notation systems,” and even “instructions for use,” while Rose Lowder called her notations “analytical drawings¹.” In English, they are often referred to as “scores” or “score key” (for example in Bill Brand’s film Zip-Tone-Cat-Tune, 1972, (Figure 8)). In these pages, we will simply call them notations or paper notations, a term that, in the digital landscape, we will broaden to human inscriptions.

The notations accompanying avant-garde films were not a novelty of the 1950s and 1960s; on the contrary, they go back to the beginnings of cinema, as the Russian school of montage, with Eisenstein and Vertov, attests². However, while these notations can be considered the first milestone on the road to editing images through interfaces and algorithms, a difference in nature regarding the artists’ attitude should be pointed out.

Indeed, the writings of the Russian school of montage convey an apology of the machine, comparable to that of the Futurists, which was no longer relevant by the time of the avant-garde experiments from the 1950s onward, when the human-machine link had become more ambiguous³. This link has continued to evolve, becoming ever more problematic up to the present day, when the question of the place of the human and that of the machine, as well as the nature of the link that binds them, is still raised with great intensity⁴.

1. Roselyne Marsaud Perrodin, Expérimentations cinématographiques: une vision de l’art élargie. Rennes : Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2003, p. 53.↩︎

2. Clint Enns, A brief history of algorithmic editing, op. cit.↩︎

3. The horror of global conflicts undoubtedly having influenced this change in the way technics was viewed.↩︎

4. This research will attempt to offer elements of an answer to these questions, through the prism of artistic practice, by drawing on the thought of Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Stiegler, among many others.↩︎