Unfaithful Matter

When it comes to identifying the concrete configuration that the hypermaterial takes on as the support of digital images, we are confronted with a complexity that is nonetheless very familiar to us. The material management of the digital image – in capture, processing, rendering and storage – relies on the joint functioning of several types of supports of inscription, whether permanent or volatile: the magnetic platters of hard disk drives (HDDs), the NAND chips of flash memory supports (such as SSDs, USB sticks or SD cards), DRAM chips for random-access memory (RAM) and VRAM for the graphics card. There is therefore no self-sufficient digital hypermaterial, but a plurality of “hypermaterials” that function together, depending on whether the image is managed as trace or as flow. Hence there would be neither a “hypermatter” in its natural state – one we would be able to modify as needed at the microscale – nor a “hyper-material” (hypermatériau), elaborated from matter, capable on its own of meeting the requirements of the digital image¹.

It thus becomes clear that there is no “immaterial” (immatériau) that humans would have designed according to the “needs of the project,” thanks to operative calculation or to a mobilization of codes drawn from science². Lyotardian Platonism runs up against the resistance of an unfaithful matter³. Indeed, the development of digital supports has relied less on the intelligible principles of science than on the experimental tinkering carried out by engineers⁴.

Let us also stress that the inadequacy of individual concepts – the Deleuzian time-image, the Derridean trace – which seemed obvious to us when it came to characterizing the digital image from a theoretical point of view, finds its equivalent on the plane of matter, where no single material can manage the digital image on its own and where a multiplicity of materials must be mobilized.

1. In terms of materials, the integral trace-flow management of the digital image relies on the coordinated action of magnetizable alloys based on cobalt, nickel and iron – which make up the platters of hard disk drives (HDDs) – and of the various forms of purified or doped silicon – at the basis of NAND chips (SSDs, USB sticks, SD cards), DRAM and VRAM.↩︎

2. See on this subject Jean-François Lyotard, Les Immatériaux. 2: Album et inventaire. Paris : Centre Georges Pompidou / CCI (Centre de Création Industrielle), 1985.↩︎

3. A notion evoked by Gilbert Simondon. See on this subject LESSARD Clémentine « La matière infidèle. Penser l’activité de la matière d’Aristote à Simondon », in Guillaume Coissard and Arnaud Pelletier, L’activité de la matière. Paris : Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 2024, p. 141-162.↩︎

4. We could say as much of the development of generative neural networks.↩︎