Not Meanings but Intentions – The Work Before Sense
Maybe we’ve overestimated the importance of meaning. Or rather: we’ve overestimated its necessity. Contemporary narrative,whether aimed at a broad audience or a niche one, too often moves within a space where everyone seems to search for a semantic harbor, a safe landing, as if every work were required to say something, and say it well, say it clearly, say it immediately. A kind of sentimental education of meaning that ends up inhibiting what is most fragile, and therefore most precious, in art: what we will call intention.
Intention as a preliminary gesture, a small vibration that makes no claim to be interpreted. A territory that is infinitely more human, less rigid, less colonized by theory. And perhaps for that very reason, so often overlooked: because it is easier to analyze a meaning than to listen to a nuance.
Let us not be misunderstood, interpretation is a respectable game, even a fascinating one. But it is a game that should come after, not before. When interpreters rush in, when they descend upon a work like anxious cartographers eager to draw borders, the risk is suffocating the first breath of thought, that simplicity which is not banality but origin.
And so yes, allow us a small polemic,gentle, almost with a smile: perhaps we need to unlearn something. To let the work present itself not as a riddle to be solved, but as an intention to be recognized. Not the hunt for meaning, but the listening to an inner movement.
An invitation, in short, to slow down. To read less and see more. To resist the urge to fill the silences of art with reassuring explanations, when those silences are often the intention itself, its most sincere and generous form.
Dynamics of Signification and Interpretive Regimes in Contemporary Art
The recent history of art criticism has gradually consolidated an interpretive paradigm that tends to transform every artwork into a closed semantic device, a text to be deciphered through increasingly complex reading protocols. What in the 1960s was still an open field of inquiry, an attempt to understand how the artwork generated meaning through its relationship to visual, political, and perceptual contexts, has progressively become a rigid apparatus, almost an epistemic automatism, in which meaning is not only expected but prescribed.
This configuration, we might say, produces a form of semantic overproduction: a kind of hypertrophy of meaning that precedes even the perception of the work itself. The viewer is trained to look for what must be found, not for what might emerge spontaneously. The question “what does it mean?” acts as a disciplinary device that reduces the artwork to a container of content, losing sight of the complexity of its generative processes.
Technically speaking, we are dealing with an interpretive regime: a set of norms, expectations, and methodologies that regulate the reading of images and that, in the case of contemporary art, end up overwriting the processual dimension of the work. This regime, seemingly neutral, is in fact rooted in an idea of signification that privileges conceptual stability over the dynamic unfolding of thought.
From this perspective, art is no longer a field of emergences but a repertoire of recognizable formulas: symbol, allegory, political stance, identity statement. All this simplifies, reassures, and produces order. But it is an order that distances us from the very core of artistic experience, which often does not originate as a message but as a tension, an intuition, a form of knowledge still raw and not yet fully organized.
The issue is not signification itself, which remains a legitimate tool, but its transformation into dogma. When meaning becomes a methodological obligation, it ceases to be an analytical option and imposes itself as an exclusive interpretive filter, neutralizing everything that resists translation into language. In this sense, criticism, even with the best intentions, sometimes ends up colonizing the work, silencing the most fragile and vibrant area of its formation: the pre-semiotic phase, where what matters is intention, not yet meaning.
The task of a more aware analytical practice, and this chapter anticipates it, is therefore to recognize the limits of its own regime, suspend the urgency of interpretation, and open a methodological breach that restores to the artwork the possibility of not being fully articulated, of remaining process, inquiry, movement. A form of criticism that is less normative and more permeable, capable of distinguishing between what the work means and what the work intends.
Phenomenology of Intention: The Pre-Semiotics of Creative Processes
To speak of intention means shifting our attention from product to process, from meaning to its pre-condition. In other words, it means recognizing that every artwork emerges from a preliminary mental zone, a not-yet-codified territory in which thought has not yet assumed the form of a concept, but already contains its direction.
This dimension can be described as pre-semiotic: a space where language does not yet dominate, but begins to organize itself as potential energy.
In this sense, intention is neither a rational purpose nor a conceptual program, but a vector, a minimal orientation of thought that precedes any symbolic articulation. It is a cognitive posture, a perceptual tension, an internal movement that manifests before it is formulated.
It is not yet meaning, but no longer pure indeterminacy.
Phenomenology, useful here more as a method of suspension than as doctrine, allows us to observe this originary moment without pressing prematurely toward conceptualization. Intention cannot be captured by traditional structural analysis because it is not a structure; it is a condition of possibility for meaning.
A kind of pre-form, or a form-in-waiting.
Art criticism, especially in recent decades, has often attempted to retrace the path from artwork to concept, from surface to motivation, but has done so through a vocabulary that immediately translates intention into meaning, flattening it into interpretive categories that diminish its complexity.
The question “what was the artist trying to say?” is, paradoxically, among the most misleading: it assumes intention is always already linguistic, when it is often a non-verbal configuration, a mental image, a perceptual disturbance, an urgency.
From a pre-semiotic perspective, intention appears instead as a fluctuating field, a cluster of impulses that do not yet seek to be understood. Here the artist does not formulate: they react. They do not construct: they perceive. They do not argue: they recognize an internal pull, a minimal necessity, almost a micro-crisis of cognition that must find a form in order to emerge.
This is why understanding intention does not mean interpreting, but listening. It means observing the way a thought takes shape before becoming articulated thought. It is an analytical exercise closer to description than translation, closer to perception than explanation.
This chapter therefore proposes that we consider intention as an autonomous epistemic category, capable of freeing the artwork from interpretive excess and returning it to its originary movement. Where meaning tends to close, intention opens; where meaning stabilizes, intention destabilizes; where meaning fixes, intention dissolves.
Recognizing the pre-semiotics of the creative process does not mean rejecting language, but understanding that language is only one of the possible outcomes, and not always the most faithful one, of that preliminary energy that sets the work in motion.
It is an invitation, once again, not to forget that before the word there is an impulse. And that it is often this impulse that contains the most radical truth of artistic practice.
Creative Micropractices: Between Cognitive Gestures and Formal Materialization
If intention represents the pre-semiotic threshold of the creative process, micropractice is the place where that threshold becomes action. Not yet a method, not a technique in the strict sense, but a constellation of micro-decisions, deviations, adjustments, and occurrences that punctuate the trajectory of a work as it comes into being.
It is here that intention ceases to be pure impulse and begins to become form, while still retaining its inherent instability.
Creative micropractice is never linear: it moves through oscillations, returns, leaps, and productive errors. In this operational space, the artist does not apply a predetermined plan but continuously interrogates the material, whether physical, digital, conceptual, or perceptual, allowing themselves to be transformed by its behaviour.
It is a form of cognitive gesturality: a mode of thought that unfolds not only in the mind but through interaction with matter.
From an analytical perspective, it is crucial to distinguish micropractice from methodology. Methodology can be described, codified, communicated. Micropractice, instead, is situated, contingent, often irreproducible. It consists of minimal choices that rarely enter the official narrative of the creative process: the way a line is adjusted by a millimeter; the decision to leave an error visible because “it works”; the moment in which the resistance of a material suggests a direction the artist had not anticipated.
These micro-decisions are not mere technicalities: they are traces of thought in motion. They document an operative logic that escapes the domain of meaning and lies in the more fluid territory of continuous adaptation.
We might describe them as a form of embodied reasoning, in which the artist’s body, the hand, the eye, the posture, the rhythm of attention, operates as an integral part of cognition.
The picture becomes even more complex when we consider digital and post-digital contexts, where micropractice also includes algorithmic decisions, software parameters, and the unexpected responses of interfaces. The artist is no longer only the executor of gestures but a co-author alongside systems that introduce new forms of resistance and unpredictability.
In this scenario, micropractice becomes negotiation: an unstable dialogue between intention, technique, and contingency.
It is significant that many contemporary artworks find their identity precisely in these processual deviations, in these unplanned divergences. Criticism often reads them as conceptual elements, when in fact they are accidental outcomes that the artist has recognized as necessary.
Micropractice does not explain the work: it generates it.
Recognizing the centrality of these dynamics means shifting our analysis from the idea of the artwork as object to the artwork as process. It means reading operative traces not as effects but as causes, not as symptoms but as agents.
This chapter therefore leads us to a preliminary conclusion: if we wish to truly understand a work, we must observe how the artist thinks while acting, and acts while thinking.
Creative micropractice is, ultimately, the hidden grammar of the work: not the sentence, but the syntax. Not the discourse, but the rhythm that makes the discourse possible.
Critique of Overinterpretation: Toward a Non-Oppressive Model of Reception
Within the current ecology of contemporary art, overinterpretation functions as a genuine structural pressure. The reading of a work is often driven by a hermeneutic urgency that seeks to saturate every ambiguous space, every uncertainty, every residue of the unspoken. In this scenario, we no longer encounter the work itself, but a set of interpretive expectations that precede the experience.
Overinterpretation is a form of symbolic control: it transforms the artwork into an object compliant with critical narration, reducing it to a linguistic vector. The risk, evident enough, is the erasure of precisely what makes art a territory of perceptual freedom, the possibility of not being fully explained, of not being immediately converted into discourse.
Understanding the limits of overinterpretation does not mean rejecting analysis, but recognizing that analysis is a gesture that can become invasive. Methodologically, this implies adopting a less oppressive model of reception, one that does not project predetermined content onto the artwork but allows room for its semantic resistances.
These moments of resistance, the gaps, the opacities, the deviations, are fundamental components, not accidents to be filled with theoretical surplus.
The model of reception we propose can be described as analytic listening. It is not passivity, but an epistemic shift: criticism refrains from colonizing the work and instead positions itself to follow its internal logics. This listening does not search for a final meaning but for a movement; not for content, but for a configuration.
It is a form of analysis that does not impose closure but recognizes the methodological value of incompleteness.
From this perspective, reception becomes an act of responsibility: no longer an attempt to overwrite, but an exercise in restitution. To restitute, in this sense, means keeping open the tension between what the work allows to surface and what withdraws from discourse. It means legitimizing the presence of intention even when it does not crystallize into meaning, or when meaning remains plural, mobile, resistant to coercion.
Such an approach allows us to rethink the relationship between viewer, artwork, and criticism within contemporary dynamics. The observer is not called upon to decode but to co-exist with the process: to recognize that the artwork is a complex ecosystem, not a theorem.
Criticism thus becomes a practice that is more ethical than explicative, a practice that seeks to make visible the conditions of perception rather than impose its direction.
The concluding proposal is simple yet radical: allow the work to keep breathing.
Resist the temptation to secure its meaning once and for all; accept that its vitality depends precisely on its capacity to remain open, unstable, processual.
A non-oppressive criticism does not renounce interpretation; it suspends it when necessary, acknowledging that the task is not to saturate the work with meaning, but to protect its intention.
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Founded in 2021, Fakewhale advocates the digital art market's evolution. Viewing NFT technology as a container for art, and leveraging the expansive scope of digital culture, Fakewhale strives to shape a new ecosystem in which art and technology become the starting point, rather than the final destination.
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