New “engines of discourse” (neural networks, algorithms and other forms of artificial intelligence, combined with the devices that record and interpret viewer actions) bring to the fore rhetorical concerns that challenge discipline-based notions of process and form. We shall focus here on the tradition of intermedial art practices to better understand the ever more complex question of how to inter-relate three aspects of digital communication: authorial “intent”, the digital sign and its interactive exploration by a “spect-actor”. We shall argue that the digital sign is an extension of intermedial thinking rooted in a pre-digital, photographic practice and esthetic. The writings of several French theorists on the subject of interactive digital design will provide a context for understanding examples of “virtual art-realities”, whose specificity is staging relationships between objects and people.
Keywords:
Rhetoric; Discourse; Intermedia; Interactivity; Digital Sign; Esthetics; Artificial Intelligence; Behavior-based Art.</p
