IMAGE ROUSSEL
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When I work with digital objects, I do not take them as things ready-at-hand, nor as appearances destined for sensible presentation. Rather, I engage them as transcendental structures—as conditions that make possible, yet resist, phenomenalisation. In Kantian terms, these objects do not present themselves to intuition as space-time unities. Instead, they remain suspended in the schema of potential, their form unrendered, their temporality recursive. Their reality is not in what they show, but in what they withhold.To render a file is to submit it to he aesthetic imagination, to allow the synthesis of the manifold under a rule—flattened, finalized, resolved. But I resist this move. I keep the file unflattened, versioned, and endlessly renamable. This refusal is not a technical indecision but a **moral stance** against premature closure. I choose not to make the object appear because I question the value and truth of appearance within systems of forced visibility. For me, the digital object must retain its unpresentable intelligibility. It must remain thinkable yet withdrawn.Heidegger reminds us that all revealing is also a concealing. Every time a digital object is disclosed through rendering or output, its deeper logic is obscured: its recursive structure, historical latency, and invisible architecture of deferral. I prefer to dwell in this concealed zone, not because I fetishize secrecy but because I seek to preserve a space in which the artwork is not reduced to a function, an image, or a transaction.In Yuk Hui's terms, the digital object has not yet individuated. It remains in a state of pre-individuation—a technê that has not submitted to the homogenizing pressures of global technics. Releasing the object into circulation risks detaching it from its cosmotechnical specificity—its philosophical grammar, layered recursion, and contingent locality within my system of creation.Thus, I wager on the non-appearance of the digital, not as failure but as fidelity to the object’s inner temporality. I withhold the image to sustain the possibility of thinking it otherwise. In this sense, the digital object is not a file to be opened, but rather, a question to be preserved.
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