The Image-World

This research originated in an algorithmic creative process from which surfaces a sensible register in which fixity and movement within the image maintain a particular bond. Fixity and movement do not present themselves as mutually exclusive regimes, and to say that they are complementary or else contiguous states would be insufficient. Nor is it simply a matter of passages between these two states.

Raymond Bellour already saw these passages in analog cinema and a fortiori in the video image, where his model of the double helix took shape – the DNA of the new images, for the author –, with, on its edges, the “photographic analogy” taking the place of fixity, intertwined with the “representation of movement¹.” The “digital image²” intensifies the dynamic of the double helix, and at this point, in open dialogue with Jean-Paul Fargier³, Bellour sets out two remarkable intuitions, from which, in his time, he cannot draw all the consequences.

The first is that of an image that tends toward the object with digitization, but this visionary observation is not properly weighed, for it follows that the digital image, through “self-implication, [would tend] to become its own and sole referent⁴,” as if all objectuality had to be denied to representation, forgetting perhaps that representation is not necessarily a symbol, and forgetting (probably also) that there is no symbol without matter.

Bellour’s second intuition, which stems from a genuine reading of digital plasticity, is even more powerful: “The image floats, destroys itself, objectifies itself and self-reproduces, like the world in which it is produced; and that is no small thing⁵.” It could not yet be seen, in 1999, how the characteristics of the “medium” would overflow to invade the world.

The synthetic image, for its part, would be “the ultimate and paradoxical expression⁶” of this double-helix model, so shaken was the passage between fixity and movement within it. This image is nevertheless apprehended, in the lineage of Couchot, as a disembodied entity, the product of an immaterial mathematical computation – a reading to which we prefer that of Jean-Louis Boissier, already mentioned, which seems to us more attentive to the materiality of the capture (saisie) on which digital modeling over the long time span is founded⁷.

The fact remains that, in evoking a passage between fixity and movement, Bellour speaks the truth, but he does not say everything: the idea of passage does not exhaust the morphogenesis at work within the digital image.

Let us try to specify this point by plunging, one last time, into the sensible. Let us think, for example, of Gare Paris-Saint-Lazare, 10 avril 2017, 12h03-12h07. There, the characteristics of the passersby’s movement – number, frequency, speed, trajectory – take part in structuring the fixed form that emerges. Let us then evoke Postdigital Flipbook and La Flamme, where it is the specificities of the fixed forms that become one with movement. The same process is at work in Jean-Michel Rolland’s Upside-Down, where the forms, colors, spatial organization and texture of a photographic image provide plastic elements that take part in defining the architecture of a subtle movement. These transformations, under a different mask (that of datamoshing) but without really changing in nature, become breathing in the work of Jacques Perconte, an artist whose work helped us grasp that, in the intimacy of the digital image, the support lets itself be informed by a signal that it informs in turn. For the technician, this is a banal fact; yet the same principle, mobilized by the artistic gesture, makes an aesthetic reflection overflow beyond its own borders.

If all the artificial images built by humans respond to the interactions between a signal and a support⁸, the digital inaugurates a regime in which the permanent co-structuring of the silicon support and the coded electrical signal takes full part in the dynamic of the image. The support ceases to be an inert substrate and becomes an active matter: the image has never been so concrete.

With the digital, the world is not transfigured into an image, as Jean Baudrillard’s postmodernism would have suggested; the exact opposite happens: the image attains the dynamism of the world. Silent contemplation, which is in no hurry to say, then becomes conceivable before the digital image when it breathes, just as before a lava flow that, as it solidifies, cracks and becomes rock, or when the block of snow melts on the sunny flank of the mountain, giving birth to a fan of ephemeral streams. If the image espouses nature through technics, it is not because technics crystallizes symbolic coding onto the matrix of the image, but because the fundamental affinity of the ancestral gesture with matter, schematized and multiplied in the machine, meets, within the image, an artistic gesture that reanimates it.

Is it ultimately surprising, in this context that sees the image become world, to see arise within the reflection a play no longer of analogies, but of correspondences, between the dynamism of the digital image and that of other systems, at other scales, which are also part of the real that surrounds us?

1. Raymond Bellour, L’Entre-images 2 : mots, images. Paris : P.O.L, 1999, p. 18.↩︎

2. Bellour pertinently distinguishes the image digitale (digital image), resulting from direct capture, from the image de synthèse (synthetic image).↩︎

3. Jean-Paul Fargier, «Mallarmé a-t-il inventé la vidéo ? L’ange du digital ». dans : Où va la vidéo ? [s. l.] : Cahiers du cinéma, 1986, p. 96–101.↩︎

4. Raymond Bellour, L’Entre-images 2 : mots, images, op. cit., p. 21.↩︎

5. Ibid.↩︎

6. Ibid. p. 22.↩︎

7. This aspect was developed in the perspectives associated with the structurations, in chapter 2.↩︎

8. A drawing on paper, for example, receives a signal of uninformed light, which becomes informed by reflection on the surface of the paper before reaching our eyes.↩︎