The French Telematic Magazine Art Accès (1984-1987)

2023

This event is convened by the research group IMAGO-Cultures Visuelles (Dr. Pascal Rousseau, Professor of Contemporary Art History, Dr. Pierre-Jacques Pernuit, and Ph.D. candidates Léa Dreyer, Evgenii Kozlof and Clara M. Royer) from the Centre de recherche Histoire Culturelle et Sociale de l’Art (HiCSA), with its generous support as well as that of the École Doctorale 441 d’Histoire de l’art, the Collège des écoles doctorales de l’Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and the Laboratoire International de Recherches en Art (LIRA EA7343, Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle). The international symposium Télé—Visions brings together a body of recent work on the influence of emission, transmission and reception technologies in the visual arts and visual culture, from the 19th century to the present. Beyond the medium of television itself, the plural “tele-visions” refers to the variety of remote viewing and image transmission techniques which, from semaphores to wireless telegraphy and up to fiber optics and contemporary networks, have configured new models for the circulation and transmission of images. Dialoguing with the history of science and technology as well as with media archaeology, the contributors to the conference will explore broad topics such as the joint evolution of perceptual regimes and remote transmission techniques, the modalities of “prosthetic vision,” the material effects of image transmission and the spatio-temporal issues inherent to network dynamics. This conference takes as its core hypothesis that the “conquest of ubiquity” by the transport of images at any time and in any place described by Paul Valéry in 1928 anticipated the contemporary society of globalized exchanges and, as such, marks a turning point in the history of art. The association IMAGO—Cultures Visuelles proposes to study this turning point, placing it within the historical panorama of the great artistic changes brought about by technology, in the spirit of the importance respectively given to reproduction and storage technologies by Walter Benjamin and Friedrich A. Kittler. Recent research in media studies shows a growing interest in visual telecommunication technologies through such key concepts of “circulation,” “flow” and “network.” Télé—Visions proposes to broaden the scope of this new conceptual understanding of images by exploring the social factors, cultural strategies and technical-aesthetic concerns that have shaped the history of transmitted images and the artistic use of telecommunications. This event is free and open to the public without reservation. The conference will be live-streamed via Zoom. It will be held in French and English. Venue : Auditorium Jacqueline Lichtenstein, Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA), 2 rue Vivienne 75002 Paris, France.

2015

In 1985, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard curated a groundbreaking exhibition called Les Immatériaux at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The exhibition showed how telecommunication technologies were beginning to impact every aspect of life. At the same time, it was a material demonstration of what Lyotard called the post-modern condition. This book features a previously unpublished report by Jean-François Lyotard on the conception of Les Immatériaux and its relation to postmodernity. Reviewing the historical significance of the exhibition, his text is accompanied by twelve contemporary meditations. The philosophers, art historians, and artists analyse this important moment in the history of media and theory, and reflect on the new material conditions brought about by digital technologies in the last 30 years. Texts by Daniel Birnbaum, Jean-Louis Boissier, Andreas Broeckmann, Thierry Dufrêne, Francesca Gallo, Charlie Gere, Antony Hudek, Yuk Hui, Jean-François Lyotard, Robin Mackay, Anne Elisabeth Sejten, Bernard Stiegler, and Sven-Olov Wallenstein.

New information and communication technologies facilitated the convergence of various components of the media and resulted in the invention of a plethora of digital consumer electronics appliances and web-based applications. This chapter explores pioneering digital technologies in France–Teletext and the Videotex service, Minitel– that are part of the building blocks of modern information and communication technologies. The chapter explores the transformation of the Télétel/Minitel, the French government-owned and controlled online videotex service from innovative, high technology social media of the last quarter of the 20 th Century to objects of technological and cultural memory. The Minitel introduced numerous social media applications that are now taken for granted: the creation of a virtual, online communicational space that we now call cyberspace, bulletin boards, discussion groups, chat rooms, texting/sexting, sex-themed, adult online communication sites with live " animators " (Minitel roses), precursors of the phone chat and Webcam phenomenon, electronic commerce, online sexual capitalism (the commercialization of sex-themed content in cyberspace), and online payment systems. For many people in France and French-speaking countries, the Minitel paved the way for a smooth transition to the Internet.

2018

Slyce contributes an essay to this volume–deriving from the 2018 Verbier Art Summit with the theme More Than Real: Art in the Digital Age–that analyses our moment and its infatuation with the technological sublime. He examines drives towards Virtual Reality in light of both an earlier moment of technological innovation through Walter Benjamin’s writing on 19th century photography and then signal examples of 1960s practices coming out of post-Minimalism and Conceptualism that explored new technologies while not succumbing to their forces or distanced modes of production. Starting with two signal cultural products of the 1980s in a song by the avant-rock band Pere Ubu and then David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, Slyce considers the conditions of making and the experience of virtual reality as art now, some five years before it is imagined–at least by the corporate powers standing behind VR–when ‘we’ will all own at least two such devices. The book, published by Koenig Books, was launched a...

This article maps two divergent trajectories within a narrowly defined sphere of short-form, time-based digital media created between 1995 and 2005. These works are considered in relation to the historical avant-garde -particularly the Structural film movement of the 1960s and 70s -and analyzed as responses to a range of cultural concerns specific to the digital age. The analysis identifies movement toward two terminal points: first, a mode of remix-based montage inspired by open source programming communities and peer-topeer networks; and second, the emergence of a mode of imaging termed the "digital analogue", which foregrounds the material basis of digital production. DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: Aporias of the Digital Avant-Garde

Megarave - Metarave, 2014

Since the early 2000s, an increasing number of artists with a focus on desktop-based practices decided, where possible, to leave the technologies at home when they were invited to exhibitions. Software was converted into prints, videos, installations; performative media hacks were documented and presented in set-ups inspired by the ways in which conceptual and performance art manifest themselves in physical space; and the early adopters of the “post-internet” label, whose practice mainly consisted in appropriating and reframing internet content and playing with the defaults of desktop-based tools, naturally looked at video, print and installation as media to operate in physical space. This text has been commissioned for and first published in Megarave - Metarave, exhibition catalogue, Kunsthaus Langenthal / WallRiss Friburg 2014, pp. 37 - 46. Re-published in Domenico Quaranta, AFK, Link Editions, Brescia 2016, pp. 8 - 22

Documents-Collecting digital art-Volume 2-2007-2018, 2018

Nicolas Bourriaud writes in The Radicant: “home computing has gradually spread to all modes of thought and production. At the moment, however, its most innovative artistic applications stem from artists whose practice is quite distant from digital art of any kind”. Today such a statement — and its implicit distinction between direct use / indirect influence of technology in the arts — doesn’t really make sense anymore. It has been turned obsolete by the way our relationship with digital technologies evolved in recent years, and by the work of the artists who rejected the idea of medium specificity and embraced the post-medium condition. In this process, digital art may have faded as a discipline, as an autonomous practice, but only to resurface as one of the main articulations of contemporary visual arts — the one more involved in the struggle “for the indeterminacy of art’s source code, its dispersion and dissemination.” Of course, it may take some time until institutions, production and discursive structures, and audiences — in short, the art worlds, which are always slower than art — would change accordingly. But it would happen — it has to happen, as artists are going that way. Published in: Documents-Collecting digital art-Volume 2-2007-2018, Les presses du réel, Dijion, November 2018. Preface by Florian Bouquet and Marie-Claude Chitry-Clerc. Foreword by Valérie Perrin. Texts by Cécile Dazord and Domenico Quaranta. Co-published with the Espace multimédia Gantner. English-French, ISBN: 978-2-37896-019-3.

Amsterdam University Press, 2023

In this book, the author explores how video-image technology shapes our psychic and social environments from an art historiographical perspective. We know media technology is dramatically shaping our political and epistemological landscape: this book foregrounds the emergence of performative video images as a key factor in the revaluation of culture and politics. Performative Images draws upon the work of video artists and activists in France between the 1970s and the early 2020s and focuses on significant practices with technology. Video art and video activism are analysed together in the book to revaluate key concepts in media studies and foreground a performative approach to the theory of image technology. The book engages works in visual culture, performance studies, digital studies, critical race theory, and feminist methodologies to account for the changes brought about by video technology in social and psychic life. Performative Images is about art and activists’ engagement in video technology—an engagement that unsettles the hegemonic narrative of dominant media, as well as the apparently politically neutral dimension of communication technology. In the introduction to this book, I engage video art and activist practices to understand how they confront and modulate the effects of image technologies on contemporary life. By means of the concept of the “performative image,” I present a new regime of the image with the qualities of operation. I define the performative dimension of video technology as its capacity to act as an agent of reality. This introduction presents a methodology founded in performance studies and the philosophy of technology to show how video technologies are shaping psychic and social life due to the various operations they perform on cultural practices and historical realities.

"Art in the Age of Ubiquitous Media", 2022

The special double Issue of VCS deals with contemporary art and digital devices, from Virtual Reality to NFT, from neurobiological implications to cybernetics in the landscape of contemporary, algorithmically involved art.

2019