Expérience et explication de l’image à l’ère digitale

That our relationship with art, both in the museum and in society, is currently undergoing radical transformation; that Art History in particular is destined to be revolutionized by the digital; and that the brand-new Digital Art History is poised to tell us and show us something other than what we have been able to see and know up until now: this can now seem seductively evident. This is then the starting point for the paper, which at the same time aims to return to some preliminary questions : What, on the one hand, is it to see and explain a painting better, and how do we go about it [§1]? How, on the other hand, can research linked to the digitization of images—coming well after the one on languages and texts processing—help us to enhance and sharpen our gaze [§2]? These are the issues addressed here in a frontal and critical manner. The article finds its initial impetus in a certain conception of what experiencing & explaining the picture means, in its fundamental knotting. It is argued that the enterprise of knowledge cannot be cut off from it: hence, by contrast, the gnoseological limits inherent in automatic processing, based on the scanning of large corpora. At the same time, certain key principles of analysis in Art History, Aesthetic theory and Visual Semiotics are reviewed and discussed: motifs (in a critical conception of traditional iconography), diagrams (in close relation to the notion of figurality), and the interweaving of the visual and the verbal (an essential and delicate issue in our relationship to the work of art, which Digital Humanities must by no means sidestep) [§3]. In the light of this assessment, the article proposes a series of original digital devices capable of better tying together, and enhancing, the experience and explanation of the painting [§4]. Drawing on some case studies of Gustave Courbet’s paintings, the aim is to combine the phenomenological demands of a singular encounter with each painting with those of an invention of semiotic value that is fundamentally linked to an active edition & montage of the artworks themselves. In short, we want to show the positive paths to a renewal in which machines could be an essential adjuvant, provided we do not stick to the research directions and to the intervention modalities we have seen celebrated and programmed to date.