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chatonsky
France Paris Intro： Since the mid-1990s, Gregory Chatonsky has been working on the Web and mainly on his affectivity, leading him to question the identity and new narratives that emerge from the network. From 2001, he began a long series on dislocation, aesthetics of the ruins and extinction as an artificial and natural phenomenon. Over the years, he has turned to the ability of machines to produce results that resemble a human creation in an almost autonomous way. These issues have become convergent thanks to the “artificial imagination” that uses the data accumulated on the Web as learning material to produce a similarity. In the context of a probable extinction of the human species, the network appears as a desperate attempt to create a monument in anticipation that would continue after our disappearance.
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Post-Contemporary Art
We will sketch here too briefly a definition of postcontemporary art, the object of which will not be to add a new fetish word to the panoply of discourses, but to respond in some way to the notion of contemporary art that remains dominant. Let it be immediately pointed out that the author is not an art historian or critic, but an artist, and that his point of view is thus involved, rather than engaged, in a practice that undoubtedly overdetermines the definition he will propose. But he would like his reflection not to be limited to illustrating his practice and to serve as a possible, and only possible, reading of a turning point in time. Artistic production can be considered as being constituted around temporal narratives. Each epoch seems to have constructed a relationship to a time other than its own, dissociating and associating itself, according to a sometimes messianic promise, and to have « used » artistic representations to propose an image of it. It is not that one must identify an epoch with a given temporal narrative, but rather that several temporalities coexist in the same epoch, which we must consider as shifting polarities whose relationships define the tone of the epoch. We are going to sweep away sections of history that would deserve infinitely more precise developments, but we are pursuing an objective that is not that of a historian. If Christian painting has given itself as the repetition of the Way of the Cross, it is because each believer should follow, that is to say repeat, the passion of Christ, a past event that must return unceasingly (the Christian body does not cease to flow through the stigmata). This repetition could never take place identically, the initial path remains irreducible, but at least it made it possible to orient the Christian’s existence. Certain pictorial representations of the Renaissance, for their part, show an ancient ideal, rediscovered from the Ancients, a repetition here again of a rebirth which is also a first time. It is a past that does not pass away because it was not fully realized and it must finally be brought to the present to make it identical to itself. Modernity constructed time as a future promising emancipation and artists appeared to be in the vanguard of these changes towards greater autonomy, so that the autonomy of the medium, for example through abstraction, and autonomy as freedom of the individual were identified. Contemporary art was finally the adhesion of the present having itself. Becoming contemporary to oneself in the face of the collapse of modern promises, an amused look at those speeches and images that only promised. Disillusionment, end of party. All that remains is the present in its actuality, the flood of advertisements and industrial objects, whose waste must be seized to desimplify them and help, at least, to understand and feel this present of which we are woven. These narratives, suggested here, are second times, as there is a second Earth, syncopated times that split the present in two, putting it in relation to another where the relationship sometimes goes upstream or downstream. In recent years, contemporary art has appeared to some people as excessively cynical, sometimes foolishly decorative, repeating certain aesthetic commonplaces, and often having a part to play in the financial economy, so much so that it has lost all strength of shift and reflexivity. The adherence of the present with itself, which allows us to define the contemporary, then appears to have become a bad strategy for understanding the return of historical dramas, wars, environmental crises, etc. Some artists, without always conceptualizing it as such, have developed a time that is already no longer contemporary. These are often strange environments, where the human being is absent, and which mix natural and technical organizations as if the difference between the two no longer held in their autonomy towards us. What is this weather like? Strictly speaking, it is after the contemporary: these environments are placed after our present, in a future that is no longer that of modernity, because its driving force is no longer the will of the human collective. The present no longer promises the future, it is the future that determines the present. It is a future that could be near or far, it doesn’t matter, because its nature is less temporal than structural: we are not there, our species has disappeared and now only the technical, that is to say logistical, traces of what we were remain, only our waste, some of which may be endowed with a quasi-autonomy of movement. They continue to move without us, without witnesses, without anyone. Almost alive, zombie technique. The industrial revolution has endowed us with a power haunted by a thousand technical ghosts surrounding us without our knowledge. An exhibition could then be strictly defined as a space for projection into this uncertain future, and we look forward to it because precisely this gaze, the human gaze, will have been absent from it. We imagine the absence of our gaze, our eyes become hollowed out not by blindness, but by the doubling of the absence. We advance in a geological space, there are the ruins of the datacenters, a residual computer activity, but who would be able to decipher its presence? The stones are lying on the ground in an eternity that is not for anyone. Images scroll by, a synthesis of this past memory accumulated on the Internet. An organism or a disease is perpetuated without anyone knowing it. Postcontemporary art is to be understood as a future without us and it is paradoxically the speculation of this absence that allows reflection on our present condition, because the present can no longer be approached in its contemporaneity without repeating the domination of which it is the object. It must be shifted not only temporally, but also anthropologically. The question is no longer even that of survival because this will is not unrelated to the evil it wished to resolve. The human species has thus disappeared. There will be so much left of what we once were. But they will be destined for no one. The Earth will be emptied of our presence and this gaping void allows us to better perceive the involutive, disnovative movement blurring the boundaries between the organic and the inorganic, the living and the dead, of which we are the subjects and the objects. The autonomy of the without us is very different from the Greenbergian autonomy or the sublime Burkian and Kantian. It allows us to intuit the unravelling, that is to say the absolute. So this is our era. His memory, again.
After Contemporary Art, Or Before?
Contemporary art in France is a subject that we like to debate. We oppose it, we defend it by projecting all forms of unfounded preconceptions on both sides. Its definition is most often lacking, since the practices it covers are heterogeneous and seem to be unsubsumable except through a reductionism which, while it has the advantage of presenting a certain clarity, subjects artistic practices to a discursive overhang. Let us hold on to its contemporary character, that is to say, to a time that adheres to itself in order to understand what can oppose it to the modernity that rises up in the future of a possible emancipation. This time contemporary with itself might seem a simple repetition of the identical, but the fact that time temporalizes itself as future protention and past retention, produces shifts that the works seize upon and crack them from within. The effectiveness of this strategy has proved to be very real in the apprehension of new phenomena, whether in the field of industrial production or in the mass media field. Its limit has undoubtedly been a certain irony that can resemble a form of passivity accepting forms of domination. This limit has been redoubled by an inevitable institutionalization and increasingly academic forms which, leaving aside the experimental to take the most common forms, ended up resembling the dominant forms (common because dominant). The trouble that could cause the cracks in the contemporary has become over time a game of dupe, the most obvious sign of which was the repetition of standard formats and an increasingly homogenous and bourgeois aesthetic. If contemporary art continues on its path due to its institutionalization and an aesthetic moutonage, even in the form of forgotten historical micro-narratives, « our » time is already no longer contemporary. It no longer adheres to itself and is therefore not even « ours ». « Time is another » because the past opens up cosmologically to unimaginable vastness and because the future has become equally unimaginable through a tension between extinction and the cosmic. Other immensities are opening up, a void where galaxies are collapsing and where, at the same time, « ours », that is, a generalized finitude of the living is happening. Something in the future is beyond us and this beyond is also embodied in a near end signifying an absence of already known witnesses. In the current artistic production, this change is already underway in the paradoxical perception of autonomy, in the setting up of « living » devices as much as technical ones, etc. This past and future are incompatible with art that has been called contemporary. It is not an end of (contemporary) art, an end that has been part of the narratives since Vasari, because art is « now » caught between infinite ancestrality and posterity as well as impossibility, implying a reinvestment of the question of finitude and the transcendental. Post-contemporary art is no longer untimely, its shift is deeper and more radical. The dimensions with which it is confronted are immense. It is even difficult to name this articulation between the absolute and finitude. We can only advance that if the time of art is no longer « ours » it is also undoubtedly because the work of art is no longer just « ours » and that a turning point is taking place: extending artistic production beyond anthropological limits, that is to say not only on the natural side, but also, and inseparably, on the technical side.
Degenerative Art or the Autonomy Effect
The generative art we speak of to designate programmed devices that generate always different results, evokes a properly poetic form (poïésis) in the sense not only of the production of a work of art, but of a « cause that, whatever the thing considered, makes it pass from non-being to being » (Le Banquet, 205 b). The genealogy of the concept of generation is complex. It must be linked to the question of the living and reproduction (Aristotle). Generative art is at the crossroads of technique, nature and art, which would be founded by the community of an unceasing production bringing creation to infinity. There is something diemurgic here, placing art on the side of a creation at the level of nature, a generation that should be reread with the help of the romantic ideal. This art that never ceases to be created and to become, in the Parmenidian sense, is a flow understood as continuous fluidity making it impossible to stop, capture, seize, stabilize. It allows us to envisage a pure creative act and, in short, a form of purity and innocence of becoming. It may lead us to believe that computer programming makes art pass to the side of nature and that we thus let the thing itself happen, something autonomous that unfolds before our eyes, whether those eyes are those of the alleged author or of the public, but which could also unfold without any witnesses. A number of installations dig this furrow in the naturalness of the code by taking the plant, the sky, the liquid, etc. as a metaphor. This overlooks both the infrastructural and cultural conditions of these productions, which mobilize a significant amount of logistics. Because for there to be processors, for there to be electricity, for there to be even a place of monstration, there has to be a whole system of references and instrumentation where the question of autonomy and the thing itself becomes difficult to defend. It is not only a question of the autonomy of generative art, but also of everything else, including the human being. It takes a complex system with multiple interactions for all this to take place. From a cultural point of view, the occultation is even greater, because not only the programming of lines of code, the models available to generate, and the preliminary data are not accidents, but constitute the practical reality of the generative work. Historically, considering nature as something autonomous, living, complex, and retroactive constitutes an ideologically determined moment. In such productions, randomness is also often confused with contingent, variation with what is outlawed. I will come back to this in another text. I would therefore like to propose replacing the term generative art with that of degenerative art. If the reference to degenerative art is explicit, it should be added that degenerative is not on the side of a fluid flow, but a tumultuous flow, in the Lucretian sense, which can be rapid as it can slow down to the unstable halt of a drying up or mineral matter. The de-generative generates and degenerates, there is in it living and morbid, neguentropy and entropy, to put it another way of saying virtual and possible. There is no reason to value only emergence, the positive, life, while concealing destruction, extinction and nothingness. The degenerative art makes it possible to make sensitive the inextricability of these polarities. It also points out the conditions of possibilities for the emergence of what I would like to call the effect of autonomy. If we take the example of AI, it is possible as a statistical induction because there has been an accumulation of data on the web, and this accumulation is indicative of the extreme heteronomy in which the species has and has been placed. If AI gives the impression of an autonomy that is taking place before our eyes, it is at the price of an extreme heteronomy whose autonomy effect is memory and trace. The notion of generative can be reproached for bringing the creative act back to life in its purity, was it ever considered non-human. The degenerative seems to us to recall the material, social and cultural background of these devices. With neural networks, we degenerate existential data. The degenerative is then closer to what happens: a finitude brought to its infinity in the disorder of an inspiration and an expiration.