Annick Bureaud

Kitsou Dubois and the Weightless Body

Exploring dance in weightlessness echoes many of the issues raised today in other fields of contemporary art and theory. Weightlessness relates to cyberspace in the sense that there are no privileged directions or hierarchies. But, unlike cyberspace, weightlessness can be physically inhabited, and has the potential to build upon and expand new media art discourses. Weightlessness is inscribed in the limits of the self and the human body, in an inside and an outside that we can see in current technological trends in smart architecture and clothing. French dancer and choreographer Kitsou Dubois pioneered microgravity dance in the early 1990s. She started her career in the 1980s, when contemporary dance was blooming in France. Dubois quickly moved away from the cozy environments and clean horizontal floors of theaters to dance on building facades and in former factories, looking for unusual venues that would help reconsider the different spaces of dance - the architectural space around the dancers, the space created by them, the space between them - and allow for new inquiries about movement. Weightlessness emerged as a logical step in her artistic path.

Water is in the Air—: Introduction

In June 25 and 26 2012, in the framework of the European StudioLab project, Leonardo/Olats co-organized with IMéRA in Marseille, France, the workshop “Water is in the Air”.

Introduction: From Aesthetics of Communication to Net Art: The Artmedia VIII Symposium

In December 2002, the international symposium “Artmedia VIII: From Aesthetics of Communication to Net Art,” co-organized by the artist Fred Forest, the philosopher Mario Costa and myself, was held in Paris. The Artmedia symposium series was launched in 1985 in Italy by Mario Costa. Its goal was to discuss and promote the works of artists using the means of communication as the tools and materials for their creation. Seventeen years later, the topic seemed more current than ever, and after seven meetings of Artmedia in Italy, and following upon Fred Forest’s organization of a seminar on the aesthetics of communication at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nice from 1995 to 1998, the time appeared right to present Artmedia in France. We had five main aims for this ambitious symposium: 1. To root net art within a historical artistic context. The Net and net art were the hot topics within the international new media art community. However, even as new and different kinds of artworks are produced, new concepts are not created at the same rate, and many net art pieces actually rely on concepts that were expressed by artists, theoreticians and/or philosophers in the mid-1980s, among them the concepts of the “Aesthetics of Communication” movement founded by Forest and Costa, not to mention earlier works such as Telephone Pictures by Moholy-Nagy (1923) or the Radia Manifesto by the Italian Futurists (1933). Telepresence, for instance, did not await the arrival of the Internet to appear at the heart of many artworks. A few of the works that were made using regular phone lines include Transatlantic Arm Wrestling by Doug Back (1985), the early Ornintorrinco projects by Eduardo Kac, The Telephonic Tap by Fred Forest (1992) and Telematic Sculpture by Richard Kriesche (1995). Another example is the artworks created using the Minitel (Videotex system), mainly in France (between 1978 and 1989), the country that invented the device, and in Brazil, which bought the system from the French, the Minitel being a kind of electronic network predating the spread of the Internet. Two major exhibitions, Electra in 1983 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris), curated by Frank Popper, and Les Immatériaux (The Immaterial) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1985, curated by Jean-François Lyotard, presented artworks for the Minitel. Heiko Idensen writes:

Pour une typologie de la création sur Internet (A Typology of Creation on the Internet)

The monograph “Pour une typologie de la création sur Internet” (A Typology of Creation on the Internet) was originally published in French on Observatoire Leonardo des arts et des technosciences (OLATS), Leonardo’s French-speaking website (http:// www.olats.org). This monograph belongs to a broad, long-term project designed to provide the French-speaking community at large with documentation of art and technology topics in various areas: history (the Pioneers and Pathbreakers project); resources (CDROM and website reviews, bibliographies, etc.); and in-depth analyses (Livres et Etudes). “Pour une typologie de la création sur Internet” is a first attempt to consider Web (or Internet) art in its different forms and to define a typology beyond the hyperbole. Based on the study of available artworks, the author identified four different categories in which to organize Internet art, giving examples of each : (1) Hypermedia Works; (2) The Message Is the Medium; (3) Communication, Collaborative and Relational works; and (4) Cyberception. For each of these forms an analysis was conducted during 1997–1998 to see: (1) how and if the forms are related to other art forms that exist outside the Internet, as well as to other trends and concepts throughout twentieth-century art history; (2) how the forms propose new concepts and ideas, create their own artistic languages and define new aesthetic perceptions.