The environment, i.e., the world surrounding the subject (Dasein: being-in-the-world1), can be understood as an arrangement that is ordered via consciousness by means of what Heidegger calls hermeneutic intuition2. The environment provides to Dasein, understood as a unique and singular subject, with the material and the tools (das Zeug) to engage through its initially intuitive understanding and its initially classificatory interpretation of the world.
With a view to creating digital worlds, I seek to position photogrammetric capture within this paradigm according to which the environment unfolds as a declination of varied tools (das Zeug), interpretative and associative, which add up to those, situated, which are the body and the sensitive and perceptual system of the artist. In search of significant objects "to be found", the displacement of the body then presents itself as a privileged method allowing the discovery of an environment by means of a hermeneutic intuition which solicits the participation of the imaginary through what Merleau-Ponty describes as the gaze retroversion3(1964).
Ambulatory walking temporarily removes the creator-researcher from the economy of hyperattention (Han, 2015). Likewise, helping him to extract himself from the world acceleration (Rosa, 2020; Virilio, 1977), it predisposes him to contemplative immersion (ibid., 2015) while stimulating all his senses: from proprioception to smell, to hearing. The found object, thus captured then archived by means of photogrammetry, is transformed into what I call a " memory object", in that it incorporates multisensory memory dimensions and is part of a relational experience involving a meshwork4 (Ingold, 2011) between the territory, the body and the psyche of the creator. The collection, interpretation, and classification of found objects, which have become objects of memory, makes it possible to promote, through a form of digital tinkering, creativity through the bissociative cognitive strategies (Koestler, 1964), either analogical or antithetical, that it allows to mobilize. Are thus assembled imaginary worlds that can be described as versions (worldversions) of the initial tangible world as experienced by the designer.
From a poststructuralist perspective, the worlds produced by successive stages of deterritorialization (extraction) of found objects (1), digital reterritorialization of the same objects (2), and assembly (3), are then qualified as immanent (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/2013) because they emerge from a living environment, in transformation, allowing infinite modalities of arrangement and therefore, of expression. These worlds are necessarily anchored into an aesthetics of everyday life, although the process of digital translation, from the tangible object to the digital (memory) object, involves a new sensory and spatio-temporal regime, because allowing to make coexist, within a singular 3D scene, components from different spaces and times5.
The poietic of the making of immanent worlds can be extended to an intersubjective approach if one incorporates methods related to the practice of Oral History such as walking accompanied by participants. The worlds created in a “doing-with”, which Donna Haraway designates by the sympoiesis (2016), will then be co-constructed6.
In an artistic will to create anchored worlds, we can thus propose the first theoretical bases to guide this commitment. Not only does the photogrammetric capture of found objects proves to be a practice allowing the researcher-creator to navigate his living environment with the vehicle of his perceptual body, but it also sharpens his sensitive and cognitive field through a taxonomic construction and an associative practice through the act of assembling memory objects, so as to create worlds.
The artist, philosopher and sociologist Hervé Fisher wrote more than 10 years ago: “The artistic worlds are closely linked to the materials and technologies used. […] Today it is digital technologies that are opening new worlds to us. We discover their new imaginaries, a futuristic sensibility and an event-driven aesthetic” (translated from Fisher, 2010).
At the end of decades of immersion or projection in futuristic digital universes promoting an aesthetic of the spectacular through an economy of hyperattention, it seems permissible to envisage that photogrammetric capture will have the potential to accompany us in this desire to think the creation of worlds beyond the digital transcendence expressed here by Fisher, that is to say through a practice that values immanence, so as to manifest an aesthetic of diversity and relationship emerging from the territory.
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NOTES
1 German term used by Heidegger (Being and Time, 1927) and translated as “being-in-the-world” by Merleau-Ponty.
2 Hermeneutical intuition recalls that "man first experiences [intuitively] the world in the mode of meaning", and that this meaning "sticks to life itself, because it is about a meaning that is experienced (erlebt) more than it is really grasped theoretically” (Translated from Grondin, 2003, p. 58).
3 Retroversion: "Refracting on something, reflecting from it, showing itself by reflecting on something [...] In reality, Dasein is found nowhere else than in the things themselves [...] which daily surround it" (Heidegger, 1975/1985, p.197, quoted in Eychenié, 2016).
4 The notion of meshwork is taken up by Ingold from the work of Henri Lefebvre (1974). It makes it possible to describe the world as a tangle of interdependent and evolving entities, calling into question the "irreductionist perspective of which insists on the singularity of each object” in order to think of the later as a “network of interconnected entities” (Tran, 2012, p. 331). Through the idea of the network, the territory and the body, for example, are no longer completely distinct entities, like the horizon which, he will tell us in The Life of Lines (2015), is not a simple line because it incorporates a transitory and overlapping zone, therefore a mesh that incorporates part of the sky and the earth.
5 Some photogrammetries have seen their tangible referent disappear, at least from the place from which they were captured, such as that of the James McGill monument captured in 2017 on the campus of the university of the same name and since removed, or this ephemeral fishing hut taken in Oka. In reference to Malraux's “Le Musée Imaginaire” essay (1947), one might think that these objects no longer having their equivalent in tangible reality are now part of a new type of imaginary museum.
6 Method I explored through Portals project.