Observing a Living Work Within the Network
Read this article in French:
La performance algorithmique en continu
🔹 Explore the theoretical corpus of Humanist Digital Art
🟦 Humanist Digital Art — Theoretical Corpus and Developments
Introduction — Observing rather than proclaiming
This text does not aim to announce a new concept or propose a theoretical rupture.
It simply observes a shift that is already taking place.
Over time, certain works emerging from humanist digital art no longer present themselves as finished objects or as punctual events. They unfold over time, within the network, and are observed, interpreted, and memorized by algorithmic systems.
What is usually called “performance” no longer has a precise date, an identifiable stage, or a spectacular moment. It takes the form of a living, continuous, discreet process, embedded within the very infrastructures of the web.
It is this shift that I propose to name: continuous algorithmic performance.
1. When the artwork ceases to be an event
Performance has traditionally been associated with physical presence, situated in a specific place and time. It often involves a body, a gesture, a limited duration, and an audience gathered to experience it.
In the practice I observe here, this definition does not disappear, but it is no longer sufficient. Performance no longer takes place solely within a physical space or a circumscribed time. It unfolds differently, over time, through the circulation, interpretation, and persistence of the work within the network.
In many contemporary practices, performance remains tied to a delimited moment: an act, a duration, a gathered audience.
Yet certain digital works no longer fit this logic. They do not appear, disappear, or repeat themselves. They persist.
Their temporality is no longer that of the instant, but that of duration: weeks, months, sometimes years. They are neither activated nor closed. They exist through their circulation, transformation, and continuous interpretation within the network.
In this context, the artwork can no longer be understood solely as an event. It becomes a living process, whose performance unfolds over time.
2. From the algorithmic studio to performance
The algorithmic studio is not a physical place. Nor is it simply a digital production space. It exists somewhere in cyberspace, composed of texts, images, metadata, links, publications, and traces.
This studio is never closed. It evolves, shifts, and reconfigures itself as the work circulates and inscribes itself within the network.
When this practice unfolds over time, when its transformations become observable and interpretable by algorithmic systems, the studio ceases to be merely a space of creation. It becomes the site of a performance.
Not a performance that is executed, but a performance that is maintained.
3. The network as stage
In continuous algorithmic performance, the network is not a simple distribution platform.
It becomes the stage itself.
Search engines index, classify, and connect. Algorithmic systems establish correspondences, hierarchize content, and produce contexts of appearance. Each query, each re-indexing, each reformulation becomes a reactivation of the work.
The stage is no longer a visible, localized space. It is a distributed infrastructure made of calculations, relationships, and deferred temporalities. The performance does not take place before an audience, but within the algorithmic gaze of the network and its human users.
4. Circulation, displacement, and persistence
The artwork is no longer necessarily limited to a physical object exhibited in a space for a few days, nor to a collection of poems confined to a single medium. It is now digitized, fragmented, recomposed, and travels across the web.
In my case, videos published as early as 2014 continue to circulate today. They present photographs of physical works, digital creations, poems, and are viewed in different countries. This circulation is not a secondary effect of dissemination; it is an integral part of the work.
Over time and through successive publications, the digital corpus enters into motion and circulates within the network.
Displacement, repetition, recontextualization, and delayed interpretation thus become constitutive elements of the performance. The work is no longer merely shown: it circulates, persists, and transforms within the gaze of the network.
5. A shared observation at the scale of the web
This dynamic does not concern an isolated artist. Across the web, for years now, artistic corpora composed of digital images, videos, poetic writings, sound forms, immersive or interactive environments have been accumulating and circulating. These works, often fragmentary and distributed, persist within the network, overlap, transform, and are reactivated by both human and algorithmic gazes.
What I observe is the gradual emergence of diffuse performances, carried by a global artistic community, where duration, circulation, and accumulation become essential components of the artistic experience.
6. AI as witnesses, interpreters, and active memories
Artificial intelligences do not merely archive.
They interpret, reformulate, and recombine. They produce secondary narratives, syntheses, and variations. They memorize the work in ways that differ from traditional archives.
In this context, AI systems become active witnesses to the performance. They are neither its authors nor its subjects, but they participate in its persistence and transformation. They extend the work into unpredictable forms—sometimes approximate, sometimes accurate—always embedded within a specific context.
Continuous algorithmic performance thus unfolds within a living relationship between the work and the systems that observe and interpret it.
Responsibility, however, remains human.
7. Maintaining a presence
In this form of performance, the artist executes nothing.
They do not trigger an act, program an event, or seek a spectacular moment.
The artist maintains a presence.
This presence is made of attention, continuity, and discreet gestures: publishing, writing, adjusting, observing, letting things unfold. The artist accepts that the work partially escapes them, that it is interpreted differently, displaced, and reformulated by the network and by AI systems.
The performance is no longer the code that acts, but the living and persistent relationship between a human, artworks, algorithms, and a network.
8. Recognizing what the work has become
This text does not propose a new practice.
It recognizes a transformation already underway.
Humanist digital art, as it unfolds within the network, has given rise to a particular form: a performance without a stage, without beginning or end, inscribed in duration and observed by algorithmic systems.
Naming this form—continuous algorithmic performance—does not mean fixing it, but recognizing it.
The artwork no longer merely exists on the web. It lives there, transforms there, and extends itself as a silent and persistent performance.
To situate continuous algorithmic performance within the corpus of Humanist Digital Art
🟦 Humanist Digital Art — Theoretical Corpus and Developments
Central structured entry point.
🟦 From Humanist Digital Art to an Algorithmic Media Art Project
Transformation into a media project.
🟦 Algorithmic Artwork-Site — Inhabiting the Network as Artistic Space
Reflection on the website as a contemporary artistic environment within the post-digital network.
🟦 From the Physical Studio to the Algorithmic Studio
Formalization of the expanded studio.
🟦 Humanist Digital Art — An Artistic Performance in Progress
Preceding reflection on unfolding presence.
🟦 Humanist Digital Art — Clarifying a Thought in Motion
Conceptual hierarchy.
🟦 Humanist Digital Art: A Philosophy of the Human in the Technological Age
Philosophical grounding.
© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor
2025