[ISEA2000] Paper: Jean Paul Longavesne – Aesthetic and rhetoric of technological art: The interface machines

Abstract

Art throughout the XXth century has advanced towards an increasingly large place to interactivity, performance, installation, and appearances by the public. The emergence of an aesthetics of Media Arts where networks, machines – interfaces, the sensors play an increasingly significant role in the processes of creation raises the question of the statute of the artist and the nature of work. Erasing the old aesthetics and cultural categories, the technological interfaces, mainly in the fields of Visual Arts, are disseminated according to sensory and extra methods’ sensory, using multimode processes where proprioceptivity, tactility, emotivity, attitudes, become forms, new indices of the return to senses. The multimedia installations do not rest any more on one medium, but on processes in action, feedback, becoming. It is then, with a disappearance of the support, material substrate which one assists. Where is gone Painting, when machines are going to paint? What becomes the work of art at the era of its data production? How these art forms contribute to the emergence of a new aesthetics?

  • Jean Paul Longavesne, France. Artist of media arts, Jean Paul Longavesne is a professor at University Paris XI and Ensad – Higher National School of Decorative Arts, and a part-time lecturer to the HAM. Since 1987, he has worked with GRIP (Computer Pictorial Research Group), which he founded within the University Paris Xl. Since 1980, he takes part in international symposia of technological arts with installations / performances through network, bringing into play Painting Machines.

Full text (PDF) in French p. 160-168