From a socio-historical point of view, it was generally when the international art world was in the throes of its most serious crises that new regimes of the image appeared in the artistic field. These crises were simultaneously social (increasingly narrow access to the best careers), aesthetic (a lack of renewal in plastic practices, the academization of the last avant-gardes), and moral. They were even more violent as the consecration of nearby avant-gardes prevented the recognition of new cohorts, and as the frustration had had time to grow on an international scale. Yet the most vehement of crises have all been marked by a reflection on the automation of art - whether we think of the invention of abstraction, the readymade, Surrealist automatic painting, the Zero generation’s automatic art around 1960, or the Net Art of the 1990s; or indeed, the artificial imagination of the past ten years. It could almost be assumed that by giving up their creative capacity in favour of machines, artists give birth to the most interesting aesthetic reflections. On the basis of a few examples, this lecture will try to understand the place of the machine in this process, why artists turn to it in moments of crisis, and why automatism can bring about symbolic revolutions and new regimes of the image.
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