EXPERIENTIAL ART: A TRANSFORMATIVE APPROACH
Based in Montreal (QC, Canada), Louise BOISCLAIR, PhD, is an international lecturer, art critic (AICA–Canada), essayist, painter and poet. After a career in communications and video, she completed a doctorate at UQÀM (MAGG) and a postdoctorate at UdeM (FQRSC grant). Recipient of several awards and grants, she has written numerous articles in art and semiotics, book chapters and published, in Quebec and France, five essays specializing in immersive, interactive and sound art (2015-2021) followed by a collection of poetry (2024). Since 2018, she has also self-published five textimage notebooks. Under the LouB signature, Louise Boisclair explores a pictorial and scriptural language, interwoven and liberating, whose works are regularly exhibited. Like the aesthetic experience, she describes the artistic experience as a transformative process.Part essay, part poetry, this article follows on from a previous publication in PLASTIR N°76. The author sums it up as follows: “ The first movement – Collage – brings together the foundations of our transformative approach to the work, the body and the aesthetic experience whereby contemplation is accompanied by participation-research (Louise Boisclair, L’installation interactive : un laboratoire d’expériences perceptuelles du participant-chercheur (Presses de l’Université du Québec 2015); Art immersif, affect et émotion; Émersivité du corps en alerte; Art écosphérique: de l’anthropocène… au symbiocène, L’expérientiel 1, 2 et 3 (L’Harmattan 2019, 2020, 2021). This collage proceeds from a set of experiential works whose narratives map the arrangements of expression, content and intervention (Félix Guattari, L’inconscient machinique. Essais de schizo–analyse (Encres–Recherches 1979); Cartographies schizoanalytiques (Galilée 1989). Affects – forces, qualities and intensities – and emotional reactions serve as binders for the aesthetic event that emerges from the diagram of their becoming. The second movement – Manifesto – advocates an ecosophical aesthetic in these grave climatic times. From the experimentation of the works to the theorization of the process and the issues raised, the body becomes ecologized through contact with critical, utopian or revelatory visions. Inspired by the symbiocene (Glenn Albrecht, Les émotions de la Terre : des nouveaux mots pour un nouveau monde (Les Liens qui libèrent 2020), the participant-researchers contribute to the respect of all living species. Synthesizing 4 essays in transdisciplinary arts between aesthetic experience, immersive and interactive arts, and experimentation with the plasticity of the works, the present essay constitutes nothing more nor less than a condensation of our advances and research proposals on the experiential-in short, a legacy. » Artist website: artloub.com
ARTICULATIONS ART ET SCIENCE(S): MATTER AS A TERRITORY FOR PLASTIC DIALOGUES
Nathalie GUIMBRETIERE is a postdoctoral researcher in design at the Laboratoire d’Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative (LESC – CNRS – Université Paris-Nanterre) as part of the PEPR O2R Organic Robotics program. She is also a research associate at the Centre de Recherche en Design (École NationaleSupérieure de Création Industrielle ENSCI, and ENS Paris–Saclay) and at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale (IAS) d’Orsay. Her work focuses on the intersection between anthropology, technology, design and speculative narratives, with a particular interest in technological imaginaries. She is currently involved in the Maison des Humanités Potentielles research project (PEPR O2R) exploring the trajectories between hard, soft and weird in technological ecologies. Frédéric BAUDIN is an astronomer (eq. University Professor) at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale (IAS), a laboratory of the University of Paris-Saclay. His research focuses on the Sun and stars, in particular the internal structure of stars using stellar seismology techniques, as well as their magnetism. To this end, he relies on observations obtained by various space missions. He is also involved in disseminating knowledge outside the university, whether through traditional mediation with the general public, or by using an artistic approach to reach a wider audience. Their article examines how matter, as a shared object of study, becomes a fertile meeting ground for artists and scientists, enabling new forms of knowledge to emerge. It sums up their approach as follows: « Through the analysis of two installations that we have designed – Kiruna and L’harmonie des mondes – we question the way in which the processes of materialising and transforming scientific data into artistic works generate new epistemological paradigms. Our main theoretical contribution consists in mobilising Fuller’s concept of tensegrity (1961) as an epistemological model: we show how, in art-science articulations, the tensions between scientific rigour and creative freedom are not cancelled out but stabilised in dynamic configurations that produce meaning. This approach reveals that art-science practices, far from being a contemporary novelty, are part of a long tradition dating back to the chronophotographs of the nineteenth century and the experimental laboratories of the twentieth. The analysis shows how these tense dialogues transform our understanding of disciplinary knowledge and constitute an ecology of practices that redefine the boundaries between art and science ».
Bernard TROUDE is an engineer in industrial architecture and product design (CNAM Paris) and has a PhD in art sciences and materialologies and in the philosophy of social sciences (Panthéon Sorbonne and R. Descartes Paris V Universities). His current research focuses on my end-of-life sciences and medical ethics in hospitals, touching on various areas of neuroscience, physiology and psychology (intuition, perception, understanding). He is a regular speaker at international conferences in England, Italy, Tunisia, Morocco and the USA, and publishes regularly in PLASTIR (PSA Éditeur), Elsevier-Masson and the journals M@gm@ International (Italy) and TAKTIK (Tunisia). In recent years, the author has focused on the study of the relationship between philosophy and mathematics, and has published a series of articles (Plastir n°59, N°63, N°65-06/2022) in this transdisciplinary perspective, the latest of which appeared in Plastir N°70-09/23) on immateriality in mathematics and philosophy. This new article explores the intricacies between the technological-artistic value and the ethics of a work, as well as the morality of art, the ethics of creation, and the freedom and responsibility of the artist. The author’s reflections raise a multitude of interconnected questions: can an ethical approach coexist with the artist’s freedom? What are the main ethical challenges linked to the integration of artificial intelligence in the field of biotech art, and how can artists be prepared to meet these challenges? Does an artist have the right to create hybrids and give birth to chimeras that coexist with human beings, or to design living-artificial beings that are half-living and half-machine? What dangers do we run by adopting a reductionist and materialistic approach that reduces living beings to mere objects or cells? Aren’t we precisely at the dawn of post-human art?
AT THE LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE, THE REAL
Alain DEPAULIS is a psychoanalyst, member of the Freudian School, member of CIRET, member of UPEMM, Toulouse. Independent researcher. Founder of PLURIACT, a multidisciplinary workshop dedicated to helping vulnerable people. Alain DEPAULIS co-founded a care service for disabled children. His work inspired the partnership clinic project and forged the concept of extended diagnosis, then extended Consciousness His books reflect his career: Clinique de la demande en consultation infantile, PUN, Nancy, 1993, – Le complexe de Médée. De Boeck, 2003, 2008, – Travailler ensemble, un défi pour le médico-social. Complexité et altérité, in coll. with Jean NAVARRO and Gilles CERVERA, preface by Axel KAHN, Eres 2013, – L’agir pluridisciplinaire, Ethique et réflexivité, in coll. with Alain MOLAS and Jean NAVARRO, preface by Michel CHAUVIERE, L’Harmattan, 2021, – Naissance de la transdisciplinarité, preface by Pascal ROGGERO, preceded by exchanges with Edgar MORIN, L’Harmattan, 2024. He argues as a pretext for the genesis of his text that with the acceleration of climate disruption, the disintegration of our world and the annihilation of our species are becoming plausible. The need to imagine a meta-system, capable of dealing with insoluble problems using the keys of past systems, becomes imperative. Dreams of intellectual mutation (Bachelard), metamorphosis (Morin) or human revolution (Nicolescu) are no longer the preserve of ethereal thinkers. Following in their footsteps, the promising galaxy of transdisciplinarity is opening up new avenues for rethinking man’s relationship with the world. And yet there is resistance! Why is it so difficult to come to terms with the complexity of the world? The question of reality is emerging as an obstacle to the transdisciplinary project.