Des outils, des mots et des figures. Vers un nouvel état de l'art

Résumé Fr

With the increasingly complex computerization of images, historic categories of representation and already vague artistic criteria are no longer operative. The result is a certain degree of confusion, particularly between art and technology, and even more so between art and science. This article goes far upstream and considers, from an anthropological point of view, the question of contiguity between figurative, verbal and technical thinking, in other words, between figures, words and tools. These different forms of thinking have the same function - simulation. Linguistic symbols and figurative symbols (required in aesthetic perception), notably, are associated or opposed in a mode of differentiated organization within the brain. We try to show what changes in these relations when technology artificially extends natural simulation by numeric simulation. The introduction of simulation models into modes of representation (visual, voiced, gestural), all products of technoscience, profoundly disturb artistic practices and place artists in a totally unusual position - that of no longer operating on raw material from the real world, but on formalized languages which are already interpretations of it - without however ruling out the possibility of continuity with certain existing aesthetic endeavours. A new state of art and of subjectivity corresponds to this new state of images and technology.