Média Médiums

With the rise of radio technology in the 19th and 20th century, the global simultaneity of wireless becomes the paradigm of a new temporality. The time signal represents the first global “transmission” to everyone – long before the development of the radio. Here begins the ubiquity of “wireless” media pervading the public as well as the private sphere. The Eiffel Tour plays a central role in this development - it is from here that the first time signal as well as the first European-wide radio program was broadcast. At the same time, artists and writers (Delaunay, Apollinaire, Marinetti, Cendrars) celebrated the commencement of the wireless era in their images and poems relating to the Eiffel Tour. Today, we adopt the coordinates of space and time through mobile communications, GPS navigation and radio-controlled clock directly from global wireless networks. Ubiquity and simultaneity have thus become everyday experiences. With mobile communication technology the wireless has become almost a part of our bodies to a point that the inevitability of its ubiquity has become a quotidian plague – “vacation in the dead zone” is expressed as a tangible desire. This is a topic contemporary artists have engaged with in an innovative, critical, sensual or diverting manner.

Dieter Daniels, born 1957 in Bonn (D); 1984 co-founder of the Videonale Bonn; numerous projects, exhibitions and symposia in the field of media art; 1991–1993 head of the Mediatheque at the ZKM, Karlsruhe; since 1993 professor for Art History and Media Theory at the Academy of Visual Arts (HGB) in Leipzig; 2001 – 2005 concept and co-editor of "Media Art Net" (www.mediaartnet.org); 2005 - 2009 director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media. Art. Research in Linz. Many publications on art of the twentieth-century, on Marcel Duchamp, Fluxus, Mediart; book publications include - Kunst als Sendung (2002) Vom Ready-Made zum Cyberspace (2003); Netpioneers 1.0. Contextualizing early net-based Art (2009) Audiovisuology, An Interdisciplinary Survey of Audiovisual Culture, Vol. 1 Compendium (2010) Vol. 2 Essays (2011) Sounds like Silence - John Cage – 4’ 33’’ – Silence today (2012)

A short ubiquitous lecture that will recount how the Crassula ubiquiste collection came into existence, will explain in what respect these plants are not individuals, will recall the idea of inter-plant communication, will evoke transmission in terms of quantum entanglement, and will end with the suggestion of a relationship free from communication.

Jean-Louis Boissier is emeritus professor of art and aesthetics and director of research at the University of Paris 8. He also teaches at the EnsadLab - École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs. Since the 1980s, he has been curator of new media exhibitions as well an artist working with interactive video programs and installations. His main articles on the question of interactivity in artistic practices were published in the book, La Relation comme forme, Mamco-Genève/Presses du réel, 2009.

Over the course of the twentieth-century, the "schizophrenic" gradually displaced the medium as the primary target of media hauntings. This talk presents a brief overview of schizophrenia as a "disease of information" and considers the historical braiding of psychosis, electronics, and media. How did "the media" become the primary antagonist in paranoid delusions and what does the ongoing proliferation of information technologies portend for the collective "sanity" of the world?

Jeffrey Sconce is Associate Professor of Screen Cultures at Northwestern University. He is the author of "Haunted Media - Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television" (Duke 2000) and the editor of "Sleaze Artists - Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Financing (Duke 2007)." His forthcoming book project examines the historical relationship between electronic media and delusional psychosis.

On occasion, is used as a performance tool, wherein a specific path is carved out of the mass. Voice acts as the interface, allowing interaction with the image archive, documents fleetingly moving in and out of view. is one of those occasions.

Jeff Guess is an artist and professor of digital media at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts Paris-Cergy. His work, be it in photography, expanded cinematic forms, or software-based installations and performances, is predominantly an investigation of the technical image and its multifarious entanglements with language and voice. Some of his most recent exhibitions include - Nouvelles acquisitions, (Les Abattoirs, Toulouse, 2014), Poetics of Light - Pinhole Photography (New Mexico History Museum, Santa Fe, 2014), Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (Young Projects, Los Angeles, 2013). His work will also be included in the upcoming exhibition (Mis)Understanding Photography - Works and Manifestos (Museum Folkwang, Essen, 2014).

Using the whimsical short story, published in 1900 by Kurd Lasswitz, one of the pioneers of science fiction in Germany, as a starting point, we will revisit one of the fantasms opened up by the discovery of X-Rays in 1895 – seeing, not only through the opacity of the body but directly into the cranium itself, in the absolute transparency of exchanges and the desire to free oneself from the obstacle that is mediation.

Pascal Rousseau is professor of the History of Contemporary Art at the Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. He is a specialist of the historical avant-gardes and the origins of abstraction, as well as on the links between the imaginary, science and technology in contemporary culture (20th and 21st centuries). As a curator, he has organized Robert Delaunay. De l’impressionnisme à l’abstraction (Centre Pompidou, 1999) and Aux origines de l’abstraction. 1800-1914 (Musée d’Orsay, 2003) and more recently, Sous influence. Résurgences de l’hypnose dans l’art contemporain (Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, 2006) and Fabrice Hyber. Pasteur’Spirit (Institut Pasteur, 2010). He is currently preparing Cosa Mentale, an exhibition on the links between art and psychic cultures in the 20th century (Centre Pompidou, Metz, 2014).

The interest in the question of the occult for a certain fringe zone of the scientific community came to a head in 1848 following the accounts of the spirit phenomena of the Fox sisters. Table-turning and other paranormal experiences, which became wide-spread in the United States and Europe during the second half of the 19th century, pushed researchers to consider these unexplainable events as new objects for scientific experimentation. In parallel to the numerous inventions which came into view at the beginning of the 20th century, a certain number of researchers attempted to produce tools and machines to analyse these phenomena in their laboratories. From the spirit telegraph to parapsychological applications for smartphone, the inventory of these often forgotten or little known technical objects allows a glimse onto a possible technical history of parapsychology which we propose to retrace.

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Philippe Baudouin is broadcast director at France Culture and the author of features for Arte Radio. He has a master's degree in the philosopy of art and is the author of “Au microphone - Dr. Walter Benjamin” (Inathèque Prize 2009), in the Philia collection, éditions MSH. He recently published a collection of unpublished radio pieces by Walter Benjamin, "Ecrits radiophoniques", éditions Allia. He is currently preparing a book on the archeology of radio, which will be published by the Presses Universitaires de France.

Renaud Evrard is a clinical psychologist working in adult psychiatry and associate member at the psychology laboratory EA 3071 at the University of Strasbourg, France. In 2012, he obtained a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Rouen, with a thesis on clinical differential practice with exceptional experiences published under the title "Madness and Paranormal" (PUR, 2014). With Thomas Rabeyron, he co-founded in 2009 the Center for Information, Research and Counselling on Exceptional Experiences(www.circee.org).

Média Médiums - Vendredi 4 april 2014

Média Médiums - Vendredi 4 april 2014

Beginning in 1791, the optical telegraph was implemented according to the technological and formal choices of Claude Chappe. In 1793, it is validated and adopted by the Convention for its political and military dimensions. In 1794, in order to oppose the English blockade depriving France of precious lead, the government commissioned Nicolas-Jacques Conté to perfect a writing instrument, the pencil, which had both military and civilian applications. However different these two inventions might seem at first glance, they both gave rise to revolutionary narratives and to the celebration of their inventors. It is interesting to analyse them together as transitional moments between 18th century Enlightenment and 19th century industrial culture.

Jean-Louis Boissier is emeritus professor of art and aesthetics and director of research at the University of Paris 8. He also teaches at the EnsadLab - École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs. Since the 1980s, he has been curator of new media exhibitions as well an artist working with interactive video programs and installations. His main articles on the question of interactivity in artistic practices were published in the book, La Relation comme forme, Mamco-Genève/Presses du réel, 2009.

Working as a percussionist, notably for John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, Max Neuhaus turned his attention, starting in 1966, to creating objects, walks, installations and sound exchange platforms. If his small electronic object Max-Feed (1966) is still involved with mechanically jamming radio-frequencies, Neuhaus soon turned to the exchange potential inherent in the medium of radio. From then on he produced projects for and with local and national radio stations, such as Public Supply (1966-1973) and Radio Net (1977), by linking their networks to telephone lines. These acoustical experiments which are both anonymous and collective, belong to Neuhaus' interest in the social dimension of both the radio and telephone. By bringing these two media together, Neuhaus worked hard to give "the impulse and the means to create an international sound exchange – a forum for verbal and acoustic exchange at a global level, a worldwide community of listeners"*. This lecture will explore this constellation of ideas.

* Max Neuhaus, « Audium. Projekt für eine Welt als Hör-Raum », in Edith Becker et Peter Weibel, ed. Vom Verschwinden der Ferne. Telekommunikation und Kunst, Köln, DuMont, 1990

Anne Zeitz is currently working on her PhD within the research group Esthétiques des Nouveaux Médias at the University of Paris 8. She organized the exhibition and film program Mouvement-observation-contrôle at the Goethe-Institut in 2007 and wrote a Master's thesis entitled, Le point aveugle de la surveillance. Her research is focused on the mechanics of observation and surveillance and the way in which these devices are redeployed in artistic, literary and cinematographic productions since the 1960s. Her current focus is on artists who devise "counter-observations" in regards to state surveillance and the behavior produced by this reversal in the observational relation.