Arts/Sciences#12: Jean-Paul Fourmentraux

Artists in Labs: research and creation in the digital era

A virtual actor, a crossmedia circus, intelligent agents and interactive images ... This conference concerns the way the artistic creation and the technological research - areas that were historicaly separated - are now so entangled that any innovation within the one interests and bends the development of the other one. In the new laboratories of art and computer creation (Ircam, Hexagram, Lip6, CNAM, Orange Labs), hybrid works make irreversible the division of the ancient borders setting art and science.

By articulating interdisciplinary contributions, digital art engage a fragmentation of the creative modes and plural designation of what constitutes the artwork. The logics of conception are now directed to a plurality of issues: art exposition, technology invention and academic knowledge.

The review of these developments in France and Canada reveals new ways of doing "common work" and raises several questions: Can art be a research? Writing computer can it itself cover a theoretical dimension and become a creative challenge? How the interdisciplinarity transforms methods of attribution and valuation of shared works of art and science?

About Jean-Paul Fourmentraux

Jean-Paul Fourmentraux is a sociologist, lecturer (HDR) at the University of Lille 3 and researcher at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS Paris) at the Raymond Aron Center for Sociological and Political Studies (CNRS)