The Human Body: In Retreat?

The following paragraphs will consider the role of the body in relation to the artistic gesture within the digital. How can we conceive of the place of the human body in a medium that (apparently) tends to make it disappear, through the progressive integration of human skills into what seems to be the culmination of a movement of exteriorization that began with flint and accelerated with the machine of the industrial era?

In delimiting the perimeter within which this inquiry will take place, it is worth making explicit an important difference that arises from the outset, between the expression of the digital gesture¹ targeted here and the conception of gesture that derives from the traditional arts, associated with perceptible and frank manifestations of human corporeality, such as the gestures a painter or a sculptor may make. The “praise of the hand” in the making of the artisanal arts (painting, sculpture), as pronounced by Henri Focillon in 1939², or in handwriting – as opposed to the typewriter –, as professed by Heidegger³, will certainly not be relevant here. Indeed, the digital can hardly present itself as a medium capable of welcoming a hand that concretely “thinks” – or meditates – when it modulates matter directly, or by means of artisanal tools – pencil, brush, chisel –, a hand able to exploit the immediate interaction between tool, support, pictorial medium and subjectile – each bringing its intertwined specificities into play – like the one Focillon evokes in Hokusai⁴.

It is toward a more mediated link between the artist’s body and the modulated matter that the inquiry must be directed. Within this constrained framework, elements have been identified that make it possible to grasp the salience of the body, and the expression of matter, within the digital creative process.

Indeed, on the one hand, the vast extension of the domain of the calculable, as envisaged by the digital, makes possible the expression of chance even in a technically highly conditioned environment: unpredictability would affect pixels just as it affects ink, the pictorial emulsion, or the chips of marble struck by the chisel.

On the other hand, if the direct activity of the hand disappears, it continues to manifest its “character⁵” through human faculties – such as intelligence – that are invariably structured, on every temporal scale, on the basis of the activity of the body and the hand (as we are about to see).

Thus, the paragraphs that follow will consider the ways in which the present and past activity of the hand and the body structure or affect the functioning of intelligence: intelligence always calls upon the body, the physical support of a symbolic functioning governed by schemas arising from past experience of the materiality of the world, an experience mediated by gesture(s).

Within the conceptual framework we are seeking, one that would make it possible to think afresh about the creative gesture in the digital, the direct role of the hand will indeed necessarily be reduced: its immediate manifestation disappears almost entirely, its fingers serving only to trigger the inscription of symbols on a keyboard or, at best, to command the movement of the mouse. In this framework, the artist’s hand is too far removed from the action on matter, which is carried out by the machine, through a thick layer of mediation. Within this mediation there rises a layer of codification whose sole purpose has been to make the use of the machine more accessible to most humans; yet this codification tells us nothing about the actual functioning of the computer.

The task will be to consider the emergence of gesture when the body takes part in an intellectual activity – such as the writing of an algorithm –, an activity that is also sensible, since it is intimately articulated with the perception of the forms created, within creative processes that seek to orient their evolution, and in which the participation of intuition proves crucial.

1. An artistic gesture that takes place during a digital creative process.↩︎

2. Henri Focillon, Éloge de la main. New York : Parkstone International, 2018.↩︎

3. And as recounted by Derrida in the lecture “La main de Heidegger (Geschlecht II),” delivered in Chicago in 1985. In Jacques Derrida, Heidegger et la Question. Paris : Flammarion, 1990, p. 173.↩︎

4. Ibid., p. 170.↩︎

5. The term used by Verlaine in the opening sentence chosen by Focillon for his praise of the hand.↩︎