Panel Statement

Theme: (Re)invented Alliances Subtheme:  Symbiotic Organizations

Keywords: Art, Science, Industry, Signs, Sensibility, Technoscience, Blindspot, New cooperative ecosystem, incorporation of experience

How do art and science participate in writing a world of signs and symbols? What do these two human faculties and capaci-ties seek and how do they differ radically? Science has progressively freed itself from its purpose (the search for the why) to model, imitate and master a world in an increasingly abstract manner. If science and art are performative, what world do they draw and what do they tell us (in terms of discourse) about the human? As science gradually becomes techno-science and produced by industries, does art have a singular role to play in the interrelation of these two poles, science and industry, in order to reinhabit the ethical questions and meanings that were originally in these other two creative capacities? Can it and should it?

• Edwige Armand is an artist and a teacher-researcher in art and culture at the Purpan engineering school (INP Purpan, Toulouse,France) and is attached to the LARA-Seppia laboratory. Passionate about the history of science and art, and philosophy, she combines these different disciplinary fields around the question of techniques and sciences. The modifications of the relationship to reality, subjectivity and the body by techniques and sciences are central axes in her research-creation. The transversality of disciplines allows him to question more broadly the processes of creation and the transformations of representations that the arts contribute to. To revive the dynamics of art-science relations, she co-founded and has chaired since 2016 the association Passerelle Art-Science-Technologie, which works to bring these disciplines closer together, and she is also involved in the Transversale des Réseaux Arts Sciences.
• Anne Asensio, after executive and design management positions in the automotive industry, joined Dassault Systèmes (Paris-Saclay, France) in 2008 as Vice President Design Experience. She created the Design function of Dassault Systèmes and the Design Studio, bringing together a multidisciplinary team in innovation strategy through design, experience design and design research. Advocating a participatory approach to new technologies and virtual worlds, the Design Studio supports Dassault Sys-tèmes’ customers in high-growth industries in their transfor-mation, digital and sustainable innovation needs towards virtuous design processes.
• Don Foresta (US/FR) is an art theorist using new technologies as crea-tive tools. Specialised in art and science, he has been a profes-sor at ENSAD and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts – Paris/Cergy and a research fellow at the London School of Economics. He has spent 35 years transforming the network as an artistic tool and is working on the creation of a permanent high-speed network, MARCEL, dedicated to artistic, educa-tional and cultural experimentation . In 1981, he made his first online exchange between the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT where he was a fellow and the American Center in Paris where he was director of the Media Art program. In 1986, as curator of the 42nd Ve-nise Biennale, he made the first computer network used by artists. He was named Cheva-lier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Ministry of Culture.