The Intention-Image and Its Becoming

The intention-image can designate the intention to do a particular thing, the intention to think – about an aspect in a certain way –, to say this thing or that, to take a stand – for or against an aspect of the real… It can also, sometimes simply, be a desire likely to provoke pleasure when it is satisfied: the desire to see this image or that, or else to discover what a certain dispositif or assemblage – in any configuration whatsoever – can produce. But above all, the intention-image knows that it will be subject to a becoming, that it will integrate new elements, sometimes unforeseen, that it will have to leave others along the way, that it will discover unprecedented links with aspects of the real and unsuspected problems… The intention-image will evolve, without ever – paradox aside – losing a form of identity. In the words of Michel Guérin:

Intention is in search of itself, and it is by leaning on the conditions that limit it, constrain it or even seem to combat it that it manages to grasp empirically its rhuthmos, that is, a general bearing, a creative silhouette capable of drawing along the procession of elements, old or incidental, random or calculated as precisely as possible, which, coalesced, will yield the finished work. Intention must therefore be thought, not as the immediate spark that first releases the idea all at once, but on the contrary as the ultimate product of conditioned mediations¹.

As it defines itself, artistic intention discovers the regularity of its own movement (rhuthmos), says Guérin: its proportions, its internal order, as if intention were itself indebted to a structure. It may, we add, retain a sensible, unstated component, even after the work has been completed — a component that will perhaps become clear one day. Guérin further emphasizes how intention works, constructing itself with the conditionings it encounters; these appear, in this light, as necessary to the becoming (indeed to the birth) of artistic intentionality.

However, the artist is aware that, for his intention-image to become a work, he will have to prepare the ground so that, sooner or later, a gesture (or several) may occur. This involves setting up processual structures, protocols, methods, while letting oneself be guided by intuitions. It will be a work founded on the preponderance of perception, on the sensible reception of forms in the process of emerging. Yet this gesture will be able to appear only in close relation to certain forms of uncertainty likely to arise within the digital medium.

1. Michel Guérin, « Qu’est-ce qu’un médium artistique ? », in Appareil, op. cit.↩︎