The Nature of the Artistic Gesture within the Digital

How can an artistic gesture be defined, if each gesture conceals its own logic at the very moment of its unfolding? One therefore cannot specify the nature of gesture without distorting it.

There are, however, remarks, formulas, coming from modes of thought sensitive to the apparatus-based arts, that help us apprehend certain aspects of the gesture that interests us here. These do not aim to pin down the artistic gesture in a precise, rigid and/or complete way. They bring out its characteristic traits and propose a description – peripheral, general – without ever exhausting the intimate core of the artistic gesture, which remains elusive a priori; they thus respect the irreducibility of each singular artistic gesture.

Let us first mention these words by Vilém Flusser, in which we find established the foundations of the artistic gesture under discussion here:

A gesture is a movement of the body, or of a tool connected to the body, for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation¹.

Fundamental aspects emerge from Vilém Flusser’s proposition, which underline the irreducible role of the human body: gesture remains a movement of the body, even if this movement is imperceptible, little problematized or internal; it always corresponds to a movement of somatic matter-energy, even if that movement is reduced or subtle. On the other hand, gesture cannot be deduced from the prior conditions valid for the system; only a posteriori, sometimes, do we manage to associate it with a chain of events, whereas, when it occurs, gesture introduces a rupture in the course of events.

On this basis, a remark by Agamben echoes most of the works considered in this research:

The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such².

Agamben’s sentence is ambivalent, and the two aspects that emerge from it matter to us. On the one hand, gesture brings the medium out of its transparency — that is, what is modulated by gesture, what gesture intervenes in, what harbors gesture. On the other hand, gesture also has an unveiling, revealing effect: it makes visible elements of the processes that precede and transcend the domain of gesture, beyond the boundaries of the medium. Thus, for the works linked to creative destructurings, we have seen how the artistic gesture reveals certain technological means of domination that have been put in place.

Patricia Ribault, for her part, grasps gesture as an event that is first of all affective, the expression of an affinity, however momentary, between the human and the world:

[…] gesture is first of all a “wild” discovery, an emotion, a direct and sensual communication between inside and outside, matter and flesh³.

This trait of gesture, which shows itself as a direct and carnal – material – contact between an inside and an outside (of oneself), echoes the sudden and effective unfolding of intuition as described by Bergson, as we will see below. But before that, it is interesting to compare what is fulgurating in this type of artistic gesture with another sudden, though disruptive, manifestation, which is invariably expressed within the digital despite the enormous technical efforts that try to eliminate it: the glitch.

1. Vilém Flusser, Gestures. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2014, p. 2.↩︎

2. Giorgio Agamben, Moyens sans fins: notes sur la politique. Paris : Éd. Payot & Rivages, 2002, p. 69.↩︎

3. Patricia Ribault, « Du toucher au geste technique », in Appareil, op. cit.↩︎