1. A Programmatic View: Symbolic Forms and the Digital Humanities

3This issue of Signata aims to reconsider what has already been achieved and the categorizations that have become tacit; at the same time, it seeks to offer a second chance to investigative paths that have been considered dead ends or sterile approaches. To make this re-examination more effective, we believe it is important to link current cultural conditions—the digital revolution in the human sciences, with the latency of a tradition—to the history of symbolic forms, which has been unable to express its potential because of a lack of adequate resources. Indeed, without the support of digital technology, it is impossible to work comparatively on large corpora of images, and therefore to annotate and list recurrent features and motifs that are subject to a variety of evolutions. That said, the fact that theories of the past have remained, at least in part, programmatic, even at the level of intuitions, should not now lead to a “devolution” of the historian’s or semiotician’s work to machines and software. If computer-assisted analysis has been much discussed, it is because automatic data processing can only remain a passage within an interpretative practice that goes beyond machine horizons and embraces additional critical means to achieve these goals. Basically, we could reverse the usual rhetorical expression to emphasize the complementary dimension of “interpretation-assisted” computation.

4This “chiasmatic” version of mutual assistance between machine and interpreter may be a good way of correcting some of the errors of the past, but it may not yet be able to take account of advances in available technologies. When we speak of deep learning, we are referring to machine learning structured on architectures with various levels of representation; these levels are hierarchical and can take over from one another, thus supporting non-linear and recursive data processing. Most computations could be reduced to information extraction and pattern recognition; but as soon as deep learning is assumed as a prosthesis by a researcher, it seems to build a new perspective on the phenomena investigated and, although not neutral, it brings knowledge and therefore involves a new range of meaning to the results that evidently goes beyond simple recognition.

5To follow through on the reflections and investigations that this issue of Signata aims to promote, it seems to us that, as if in a loop, the artistic forms that we wish to bring to light and study not only become observable through digital devices, but are also illuminated by the symbolic forms that the latter express. In fact, digital symbolic forms become another modality of understanding—or, if we prefer—of self-understanding of our culture. At the same time, we find symbolic forms assumed as a corpus of analysis, i.e., as a semiotic object, and a digital eye that also brings its symbolic form to the level of objectification, as a descriptive semiotics.

6This intersection does not indicate a one-sided hierarchical construction. In the human sciences, the object cannot be constructed unilaterally by an analytical eye, given that this object exerts constraints due to its status as a cultural heritage and to its own epistemic aims. In short, this issue is also a critical dialogue between art and science, an encounter between symbolic forms that display homologies but also resistances, recognitions but also blind spots, proving conclusive results and insignificant others. It is from this not so innocent perspective of the machine, which is still capable of having a “depth” of its own, that we wish to take stock of the actual (or potential) contribution of the digital, of the study of artistic corpora and of the objectification of form genealogies according to the axis of diachrony. The objective is also to understand the issues pertaining to the “digitality” of digital art history (thus, as endowed with its own symbolic form), as well as the perspectives of an art history that considers it can take advantage of the digital process while objectifying its contribution as one way of accessing heritage. Putting symbolic forms into perspective and questioning their mediation requires the intervention of a semiotic reflection. In this sense, Signata has been able to integrate, in a relevant way, contributions which will touch in an implicit and explicit way the problematic points that we try to illustrate in this introduction.

7Finally, it seems to us that, in order to establish a dialog between observed images and observing instances, the notion of form can work as a fruitful mise en abyme, or even as the most appropriate system of reflections. The symbolic form is therefore no longer idealistic, but anchored in technical devices, linked to a tradition of practices and evidenced by a genealogy of representations. Each artistic image responds to other images; this response can be the result of a project but it can also emerge in an unintentional way as a progressive revelation of its belonging to a family of images.

8The archaeology of artistic forms works on a conjectural inquiry to bring out possible genealogies, causal determinism being only the fruit of a reductionist approach. The cultural environment, the period, the techniques available, the artistic encounters, and the collective movements remain multiple, and copresent factors of which the artistic form assumed by the artwork is but a synthetic response, readable only from patterns of convergent or divergent intentionalities (cf. Baxandall 1985). But precisely, these patterns may only be described retrospectively and from a position that must make explicit, in turn, its own perspective, for example the pattern of intentions which constitutes its own disciplinary current.

9By presenting the symbolic form as the intersection of intentionalities and as a genealogy of representations, we try to bring together the perspectives of traditional art history and its digital version, those of the iconologists and of the semioticians, and those of the humanities and of computer science. But to the scientific figures, we must add all the taxonomies and informal histories of symbolic forms to be found in our digital society. They transparently manifest a viewpoint and produce genealogical reconstructions that may indeed be unscientific and even aberrant at times, but that are capable, in any case, of exemplifying a symbolic form. The latter is not always to be patrimonialized and, essentially, to favor its analysis also means to promote its demystification, if not its critical deconstruction, if necessary. To this end, this issue also promotes comparisons between acquired and reconstructed symbolic forms, by analyzing the differences in vocation (self-assigned) and in social status (artistic, scientific, mythical, etc.).

2. Different conceptions of the image and its symbolic form: a diagnosis

10This issue presents a series of critical reflections on the relationship between digital mediations and approaches to art forms. This diagnosis begins with an archaeological reconstruction of the relationship between augmentation and the life form of the work of art. In this sense, Ralph Dekoninck shows how this amplification of the frame of reception was largely inscribed within the usual practices of the art domain. This extended framework of reception is demonstrated with a precise philological reconstruction of the case of Caravaggio’s Madonna of the Pilgrims (1604-1605), located in the Basilica of St. Augustine in Campo Marzio in Rome. The “augmentation” is immediately linked to the concept of symbolic form, a concept mobilized by all the authors who took part in the issue according to diversified interpretations, and which shows its lasting fruitfulness after the major contributions of Cassirer and Panofsky. Ralph Dekoninck interprets it as an encounter between three dimensions: semantics (the significant purposes of a poetic), kinesics (the movements in space-time of the spectator towards the work and vice-versa) and aesthetics (sensory and emotional reception). In this sense, there’s nothing structural about the symbolic form; if there are some specific devices of a poetics, then we need to take account of an experience in which the two instances (work and viewer) can continue to express themselves, to reveal a latent potential. Against a “positivistic” vision, still anchored in prior systemic networks that frame standardized interpretations, Dekoninck thinks in terms of a “historical phenomenology” according to which we can think together, at least in terms of meaning production, the local catalysis of an experience of the work, possibly augmented, and the modeling of an act of knowledge production, an act that can be defined as reflective.

11We find here a strong convergence with the theses supported by Gian Maria Tore and Yves-Marie Visetti: the reflexive approach should focus on the close encounter with the work as a form of augmentation irreducible to encyclopedic knowledge and personal know-how. Experience takes precedence over any comparative appraisal still grounded on paradigms, and frees itself as situated experimentation; an experimentation carried out through image “montages” favoring new explanatory syntheses. It is this “manual” montage of images that allows the viewer to escape norms and habits, and the work to reveal itself as a “field of metamorphic forces” (Dekoninck). In fact, against a “textualist” perspective on the image, these two contributions to the volume point to “figurability” as the principle of the image’s becoming in the experience of what it releases in contact with the circumstances enveloping it. This internal work of “infiguration”, as an inchoative process of making visible, unfolds fruitful relationships. The effects of animating the work and reconfiguring an imaginary (Dekoninck) characterize the encounter with the work in its singularity.

12If “experience remains attentive to its own emergence, every return to it is an event, a rekindling of feeling” (Tore and Visetti), then there is indeed an “unlimitedness” of the image “in its encounter” through the multiplicity of possible crossings of the gaze, “a coming and going between elements that thus makes them revisit and redefine, in short, that infinitizes the canvas itself”. Clearly, we’re well beyond recognizing the density of image languages (Goodman), which simply explain why “in the visual, perceptual stakes are more decisive” (Tore and Visetti). The idea is rather to recognize in semiotic productions “forms in formation”, motifs endowed with an “intrinsic variability” that allow a search for “value through compositional force”. These tensions are recorded not only at the level of corpora, and therefore of genealogies of works, but also within the same image: “Expressivity can be said to exist when an image emerges from itself” (Bertrand Prevost, quoted by Tore and Visetti). Marion Colas-Blaise distinguishes between the “becoming-form” (form in formation) and the “becoming of the forms” (the life of forms, according to Focillon).

13Semiotics and art history meet thanks to an aesthetic that is less bound by, or even emancipated from institutional norms and horizons of expectation, and founded instead on a propaedeutic of montage and on the experience of the encounter for the benefit of the “invention of semiotic value” (Tore and Visetti).

14Marion Colas-Blaise also mobilizes the “montage of images”, bringing it back to operations of “dehistoricization”, operations once promoted by Warburg in order to break free from the deterministic empire of attested influences (we indeed know the “immediately heuristic” role played in art history by documents that bear witness to encounters between artists in a city or within a school, or journeys that have enabled one to see major achievements and new formal solutions). Colas-Blaise’s montage, however, seems to have a very different purpose: it is not to prepare a situated encounter that picks up the thread of figurability with its latent potentials, but rather to help us reveal, through the “iconology of intervals” (Warburg) it promotes, the life-forms of the works in relation to their paradigmatic and syntagmatic dimensions. In this sense, Marion Colas-Blaise seeks not only to identify the different principles that accompany the becoming of forms, but also to understand how each one can constitute its own internal movement through the combination of several semiosic moments (the figurative and the plastic) arising from dialectical operations (desaturation, redensification). The text is caught up in a “becoming of forms”, and its organicity is by no means a stable integrated totality, but an indexical network subject to successive phases of composition and semiotic articulation. The tensions that the image harbors sometimes lead back to the past, sometimes to a present, interconnecting their irreducible and internally multiple layers.

15If the text is not closed and enclosed (Colas-Blaise) and the montage is propaedeutic, semiotic analysis remains distinct from aesthetics, all the more so as parameters for validating or invalidating its results can be made explicit and applied. In the same vein, comparatism remains the epistemological anchor of Lisa Paillussiere’s analyses, a comparatism that underpins the emphasis on the discontinuity of the forms of life represented (the cases studied concern forms of spirituality), and which nonetheless enables us to promote diversified and even creative theoretical paths. The scene of analysis is a montage of criteria, without forgetting the demands of the method and of the objectivation, the latter also having repercussions on the pedagogical dimension (a traversal of the work that can be redone, or even reproduced). Encounters with the works are intelligible and comparable through itineraries characterized by explicit assertions and stakes, all the more so as they propose themselves as possible trajectories for guided tours.

16Just as Lisa Paillussiere can draw on classic methodological principles, such as the semi-symbolism of the Greimasian tradition of the iconographic tradition, Lynn Bannon can take advantage of Peirce’s triadic models to ensure the continuity of the semiotic grasp of artistic phenomena. Indeed, using the example of Canadian artist Laurent Lamarche’s digital photographs, Bannon shows that the theoretical modeling of reality exercised by the mind must necessarily pass through a “materialization” of concepts; in turn, the latter exemplifies a new reality, with a more or less mimetic vocation, which sooner or later reveals an indexical rupture to the point of assuming a distinct symbolic scope (in the case studied, a supernatural, even oxymoronically fanciful “scientific” reality). As in the cases studied by Paillussiere, the possibility of objectifying the deformations undergone by a symbolic form (in the case of the photographer Lamarche, belonging to the scientific domain) remains a primary stake in semiotic description.

17Basso Fossali considers that the relationship between art history and semiotics can be renewed on the basis of the notion of symbolic form conceived of as a node of articulation between planes of relevance, an articulation that also makes sensible the distance between the instrumental formatting of a configuration of meaning (model for) and the aspiration of this configuration to propose itself as an exemplification of a general reorganization of issues of meaning (model of). This distance is remedied and transposed through a recursivity of semioses that allows each model to “fit” into the other. In this way, even the most apparently marginal object can have the ambition, through its being a model of, to exemplify an ecology of values valid for other instances, and the evolution of the symbolic form of which it is the bearer can rise to a form of life endowed with a paradigmatic potential in relation to other cultural, subjectal or objectal existences. In this sense, the image may well play an articulatory role between different social domains, such as art and religion. It should be noted that enunciation is also a structure of articulation between the space of implementation of the textual object and the possible world staged by the discourse; it is both a model of linguistic intervention in a social situation (this is the showing dimension of enunciation) and a model for elaborating and predicating values within its linguistic structures (the saying dimension). As for textual analysis, it cannot cut its links with a philological approach and a genetic background since its aim is not the description of a local experience of the object studied, but the commensurability of interpretations that follow and protect the fecundity of the structural germ it contains, given that this fertility is subject to the variations of the host environment.

18Camilla Balbi and Anna Calise’s contribution adds another important issue to the question of objectifying a symbolic form, namely, that of being able to unmask its biases, its ideologies. If the scope of Panofsky’s contribution can be reread as a “denaturalization” of the use of perspective and, in this sense, as the starting point of a mediology, then even big data, apparently collected by pure accumulation, and above all databases, already organized by an application and by query models, hide a symbolic form that is by no means “neutral”. Although attentive to the semiotic relations between image and text according to Mitchell’s critical iconology, Balbi and Calise’s contribution focuses the attention on the symbolic forms that the digital introduces, mostly unthinkingly, through software and algorithm parameters. Not only is there the risk of reproducing traditional canons, but also of re-editing them with further opacity; and if there is any revival of iconographic approaches, it is through simplifying imitation, given that computer processing cannot manipulate sophisticated concepts such as those of style, genre or motif.

3. Critique of computer reason (and sensibility)

19Symbolic forms would be both indicative of the reductionism characterizing many digital treatments of visual data, and an indication of the latter’s lack of critical reflexivity, given that they operate without being able to make their perspectives and canons explicit (Balbi and Calise). The problem of the articulation to be proposed between semiotics and art history then turns to the question of the digital approaches already operational in current institutions and practices, a question that reveals not only simplifications in the adoption of old methods, but also a lack of genuinely new approaches. In this sense, Balbi and Calise point out that current digital treatments are most often limited to the use of descriptors based on simplified, fixed ontologies, and that their application gives rise at most to rankings and attributions, reproducing a performatively valid “art of the connoisseur” to meet the demands of the market, including the market for cultural products and the market for information.

20Indeed, while open to contributions from fields including computer science, this issue of Signata finds itself conducting, for contingent but hopefully also convincing reasons, a critical examination of the real contributions of digital technology to the interpretation of works from other disciplinary horizons. On the one hand, very ambitious models of articulation between semiotics and art history are proposed, which are rather difficult to implement with the computer tools available today; on the other, it is shown that the heuristic claims of the methods directly born within the digital humanities are rather limited and rather opaque, even ideologically compromised, at least as far as the field of art is concerned. Thus, the politics of the gaze that passes through artificial intelligence leaves non-Western art in a blind spot (Balbi and Calise). On the other hand, with a certain ingenuity in the face of our aesthetic traditions, pre-existing categories are being flattened out, accompanying a “museum drift” (Tore and Visetti) in a confused attempt to modernize through “fashionable themes”.

21On the one hand, we may well be taking into account a “much broader visual culture” (Tore and Visetti), but on the other, it’s legitimate to wonder whether this might not later weaken the possibilities of digital technology to record new observables for us. Indeed, there is a risk that machine-operated comparisons between images will be arbitrary and immemorial to the status of sources, and at the same time linked to the thoughtless application of essentialist and/or reductionist categories. However, the diagnoses put forward by the contributors to the issue differ widely in terms of theoretical frameworks and expectations. Lisa Paillussiere’s position seems to suggest that, above all, “new theoretical constellations between art history and semiotics, on the one hand, and art history and new technologies, on the other” need to be worked out, without unilaterally claiming priority scientific responsibilities: there is work to be done, and the pre-eminent objectives are less the accompaniment of an individual aesthetic relationship or the reconstruction of the historical conditions of an experience than a pedagogy of/through the image that is lacking in traditional training courses. Marion Colas-Blaise is directly experimenting with the use of computer resources to create richer frameworks in which to operate montages; however, the validation or invalidation of results obtained through the machine requires encyclopedic knowledge and indexical frameworks mobilized by the interpreter, and the computer-assisted analysis aims to recognize semioses articulated by the latter’s movements and elements of the image that catch his/her eye. In this sense, the analysis of a work by Rosso Fiorentino displays all the problems and issues encountered.

22For Lynn Bannon, “the symbolic activity of the mind” can bring knowledge and artistic imagination into tension under the signs of digital mediation. The digital becomes the terrain in which to appreciate analogies anew, as well as distinctions between regimes of meaning. Balbi and Calise suggest that digital approaches, against all expectations of immediate normative performativity, should involve the denunciation of failures and limits encountered.

23Admittedly, the encounter with resistance and validation constraints still draws a theoretical horizon that can be considered “positivist”. In this sense, we cannot claim to augment the work of art according to a relevant framework or montage, since the work already triggers, through the figurability that runs through it, an “augmented” experience (Dekoninck). Thus, digital technology can only be useful on condition that it continues the experiential tension catalyzed by the work, for example, by accompanying other forms of perception and understanding (ibidem). The digital should then intervene less as a device than as an operator of deconditioning (of the viewer) and of disfiguring (of interpretative frameworks), in order to follow a “multi-dimensional image [that] continues to move between different levels of reality” (ibidem).

24From a different perspective, Basso Fossali argues that a “critical augmented image” is needed to continue to ensure the conditions of individuation of the work under study, whose patrimonialization calls for a double mandate of usufruct of inheritance: to respect and develop the project of meaning structured by its symbolic form, which articulates devices and instances of enunciation positioned on different planes of relevance. In this way, digitally-mediated augmentation can aim to “rearrange the symbolic form of the work, once mediated by the digitization of its genetic and dialogical sides”, so as to ensure the continuity of its life form.

25While there is a certain convergence of contributors around the idea that the “digital environment produces its own symbolic forms” (Dekoninck) and that it should be accompanied by a reflexive and interpretative posture—an idea that was already set out in the arguments that circulated in the call for papers—positions diverge on the modalities and purposes of these forms and this accompaniment. Image production and the catalysis of the imaginary go hand in hand in the paradigm of figurability, and digital technology can only intervene to enable a re-edition of this symbiosis. Following this renewal of the experience of encountering the work does not have the same methodological and heuristic demands as trying to explain how experience is individuated and limited by the articulation of configurations internal to the image with the scene of its original or current implementation. We can’t ask the digital process to lend itself to several disciplinary projects at the same time in order to respond to all the proposals available, and it can’t just play a servile role. Nor can it be accused of having categories and classification parameters as its starting point, which simply construct “similarity effects”, since it has yet to be demonstrated that human intellectual activity can make judgments without passing through a prior normativity, i.e. with mediating Thirdnesses.

26Obviously, experimenting with the unlimitedness of the image in the encounter (with its synthesis and invention of a semiotic value, cf. Tore and Visetti) does not have the same objectives as an analytical reconstruction of the conditions of commensurability between the interpretations of the planes of relevance around which a work is put forward for public appreciation (Basso Fossali). On the other hand, critical assessment of the current role of the digital in the field of visual studies and digital art history cannot overlook other approaches that are also diagnostic, and that pursue conditions of articulation of meaning with a resistant idea of reconstructive science and objectification of conditions of interpretation. But it is precisely from these tensions between epistemological perspectives that we can draw an extremely rich assessment of this dossier. While it is true that the reader will note a marked gap between the current renewal of approaches in semiotics and art history, and more generally in the field of visual studies, the scientific trails opened up outline promising programs in which the digital seems to “increase” the ambitions of theoretical approaches, but also obliges researchers to find proportions and limits, and to recognize blind spots (Balbi and Calise).

27On the one hand, we’re tempted to entrust them with “all-too-human” tasks, that is, to think, read and re-elaborate culture in our stead; on the other, we’d like to use them as prostheses. The idea of using digital technology to turn explanation into an “assumed gesticulation” by producing “our own transformation of the forms in the painting” (Tore and Visetti) is undoubtedly a step in the latter direction.