The Automaton and Its Number

Western thought functions according to an epistemological, political, and phenomenological divide that pits subject against object. The use of computer technologies within artistic practices, however, has largely disrupted this state of affairs. Although subject and object continue to function as key notions, recent art has radically altered their meaning. The metaphysical and signifying paradigm that once determined the subject/object divide has been replaced by an algorithmic paradigm deploying digital and economic logic. Therefore, to reflect on animate objects in recent art implies that one consider how computer technology has undermined the subject/object dichotomy either by displacing subjectivity itself or by reasserting the very “objectness” of objects. The modalities of this new paradigm are numerous and include the subordination of the analogic to the digital, the animism and serialization that prevail in the process of effacing the singular, and the morbid absence of the subject in the staging of the object as a ruined and solitary entity.

Lacking subject or object, interiority or exteriority, everything becomes a modular surface, a superficial and pragmatic modulation, a plastic operation that is determined by a digital code that only involves thresholds.