ATMOSPHERE, ATMOSPHERES – THE MEANING, THE SENSES, THE ESSENCE OF ATMOSPHERE
Jean-Marc CHOMAZ is an artist physicist, director of research at the CNRS, professor at École Polytechnique. He co-founded the Hydrodynamics laboratory of CNRS-École polytechnique (LadHyX), the laboratory of excellence Systems and Engineering, and La Diagonale of Paris Saclay University in 2012 and the Chaire arts & sciences in 2017. Alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), he advises or has advised 32 PhD including 4 in art and co-authored more than 250 publications. He received the CNRS Silver Medal, 2007 and the Ampere Grand Prize of the Academy of Sciences, 2012, was appointed « Fellow » of the American Physical Society, 2001 and of the Euromech, 2018. His research concerns the dynamics of soap films, theory of instability, vortex breakdown, geophysical and stratified fluids, biomechanics and arts & sciences. As an artist, he created the installations Un chemin qui chemine, Time traces, Terra Bulla, the tryptic Une solution au problème de raréfaction du Temps Futur, Bogota, 2019, Passé, Anamorphose, Bourges contemporain# 2021, Thousand shades of Green, OU\/ERT, 2019, Incipit Temporis, Silmarils, Veridis Sol, Reshift-becoming machine, Instandsetzung#3, 2022, Irreversible Abstraction, Bogota, 2023, Et mainte page blanche entre ses mains froisée, Quai des savoir Toulouse, 2023, Five black rivers at the Cité de la musique, Paris 2024, Percevoir le bruit du monde, CWB Paris 2024, The Compass Rose, CWB Paris 2025 and the poem series N56u3N4A published in the review Plastir. In collaboration with the Duo HeHe, Anaïs Tondeur, Ana Rewakowicz and Camille Duprat, Aniara Rodado Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand, Olga Flór, Anouk Daguin, Tania le Goff, Laurent Karst and François-Eudes Chanfrault of the collective Labofactory he has created more than 30 collective installations presented worldwide. A regular contributor to Plastir (see Plastir 73, 06-2024 (Incipit temporis), Plastir 67, 12-2022 with A. Daguin, Plastir 50, 06-2018 and the special issue ‘Les plis de la mémoire’ published in 2015 in digital and paper formats, Jean-Marc Chomaz does us the honor of presenting here his unique approach to atmospheres, shared by many artists and scientists during the fifth edition of Useful Fictions, the art-design-science summer school of the Institut Polytechnique de Paris, held last September at the Centre Wallonie Bruxelles in Paris. He summarizes it as follows: « The atmosphere, whether physical or metaphorical, is omnipresent, invisible but perceptible, a structured breath that carries meaning and signs. It flows through us, envelops us, connects us to the Earth, the ocean, the solar wind, in a common, infinitely multiple breath, but one that is now wandering, in search of meaning. Could the atmosphere have its own meaning, seeking to communicate something to us? The void, its opposite, reveals the power of absence, the immense pressure of the atmosphere that surrounds us and prevents two Magdeburg hemispheres from separating even under the traction of fifteen horses. Sometimes, the air itself becomes a danger, as in a cave where carbon dioxide, invisible and heavy, suffocates silently. From Antarctic ice to the depths of the oceans, the atmosphere preserves traces of the past. Air bubbles trapped in ice or dissolved in water tell the story of climate cycles, petrified forests and fossil fuels. Keeling’s measurements, begun in 1957, show a changing atmosphere, marked by human footprints, vibrating to the rhythm of the seasons. Beneath the surface, gravity and pressure organize matter, connecting the gaseous atmosphere to the liquid iron at the Earth’s core. Continents float, plates dive, and lava, imprinted with air and life, rises from the depths. In this great cycle of life, oxygen and carbon dioxide circulate, transform, and punctuate the millennia. An endless conversation, without centre, where colours breathe, mingle and fade away in an infinite cycle, an eternal whisper. »
Filipe SALLES is a photographer, filmmaker, philosopher, and visual artist. He holds a degree in Social Communication (Cinema) from the Armando Álvares Penteado Foundation (FAAP, 1994), a master’s and doctorate in Communication and Semiotics from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP, 2002 and 2011), and HDR in Theoretical Foundations of the Arts from UNICAMP (2024). As a researcher, he is part of CIRET – Centre International de Recherches et études Transdisciplinaires and also DASMind UNICAMP – Transdisciplinary Cooperation Network in Research and Innovation, and works mainly in the research line that integrates Philosophy, Analytical Psychology, and Art, with the aim of fostering research with scientific rigor in the field of Philosophy of Art and Aesthetic Theory. He is also an amateur musician and researches the symbiosis between music and image and its unfolding. He is the author of several articles on art and analytical psychology, as well as three published books in this area: Música visual (visual music), A Ideia-imagem (the image-idea), and Harmonia Mundi. Mariana THIERIOT LOISEL is a French-Brazilian philosopher, poet, and painter, and a Canadian resident. She signs her works as Mar Thieriot. Born in Brazil, with both Brazilian and French cultural roots, she was raised in France. In 1992, she obtained a Master’s degree in Educational Sciences from the University of Lyon, followed in 1995 by a Diplôme d’Études Approfondies (DEA) in Educational Sciences, with a specialization in Philosophy of Education. In 1994, she returned to Brazil, where she completed a PhD in Education, Culture, and Society at UNICAMP, begun in France. She worked there for 14 years as a professor of philosophy at UNIFIEO in Osasco, located in the outskirts of São Paulo, surrounded by areas of deep poverty. She emigrated to Quebec in 2006 and undertook a postdoctoral fellowship in philosophy at Laval University on the relationship between philosophy, science, and new technologies. Her training also includes studies at the Montreal School of Fine Arts and the teaching and practice of Yoga (CTY). She is a member of UNEQ in Montreal, sits on the board of CIRET (International Center for Transdisciplinary Research) in Paris, is an Associate Researcher at NII Tokyo on international conflict mediation, and an active member of the Institute of Psychoanalysis and Management in Paris. This article addresses grey zones, i.e. major problems and accidents that users currently encounter in their professional fields due to unintentional human error: factors that are beyond mechanical behaviour and are linked to unconscious conflicts. The text therefore highlights the urgent need for human dialogue training, through a transdisciplinary process, enabling the sustainable and democratic development and application of new scientific discoveries. This improved training would involve philosophical methods of conflict resolution (mediation/negotiation), focused on awareness of unintentional attitudes and, consequently, on ways of working in the grey area: knowing how to deconstruct biased representations, refraining from acting hastily, allowing the necessary time to take a step back and collaboratively develop possible, concrete and applicable solutions. Such mediation solutions could bring part of the world’s population out of the shadows: confined to debt, disease, poverty and suffering in all its forms.
ART AND MEMORY IN PLACES OF CONFINEMENT: A CREATIVE RESEARCH APPROACH.
Nitouche ANTHOUSSI is an artist and lecturer-researcher at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, where she is completing a PhD in Fine Arts and Art Sciences under the supervision of Professor Jean-Marie Dallet. Her research examines how individuals inhabit and reinterpret constrained or transitional spaces — from asylums and psychiatric hospitals to prisons and the virtual architectures of the metaverse — through an artistic, philosophical and anthropological lens. She recently joined Columbia University through the Columbia Alliance Doctoral Mobility Program and worked within the Justice in Education Initiative under the supervision of Professor Neni Panourgiá, developing a comparative project on carcerality between Ellis Island and the island of Leros in Greece. She previously earned a Master’s in Fine Arts and Contemporary Creation at Paris 1 Panthéon – Sorbonne University and graduated from the School of Fine Arts of the University of Ioannina in Greece. Early in her career, she became the first international Erasmus student accepted as a photographer at the Centre Georges-Pompidou for the modern art collection. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions in New York, Athens, Paris and Rhodes. Nitouche Anthoussi summarizes his approach as follows : “In spaces of confinement, walls often become the only topos capable of holding a form of mnēmē the institution never intended to preserve. On Ellis Island, on Leros, and on Rhodes, the marks left behind-drawn faces, scattered words, interwoven alphabets-compose a fragile actual palimpsest in which a discrete yet remarkable resistance to anonymity can still be sensed. These inscriptions, often barely visible, restore a presence that official records tend to overlook. The research carried out across the three islands brings together fieldwork, archival investigation and detailed artistic 3D scans. Aiming not only to depict suffering, moreover, to understand how spaces designed for control can, despite themselves, transformed surfaces for private projection and, at times, gestures of catharsis.”
ARTS AND SCIENCES / INFUSION VS CONFUSION
Christian RUBY holds a PhD in philosophy, is a senior lecturer at ESAD-TALM in Tours (until 2023) and a member of several institutions, including the Research Commission of the Ministry of Culture (until 2020), the board of directors of the FRAC Centre Val de Loire (until 2023), the ADHC (Association for the Development of Cultural History), the editorial board of the journal Raison présente and the Observatoire de la liberté de création. He has been a columnist for several cultural and research journals and websites. His latest book, La fécondité du vide, was published by MkF in Paris in 2024 (see reviews in our Publications section and at www.christianruby.net Christian Ruby is also a regular contributor to Plastir (N° 53, 56, 59 in 2019/2020, Plastir N° 68 & the last one Plastir 71, 12-2023), as is his latest book on the potential and real relationships between the arts and sciences (A&S), open to relationships with one or more audiences. The argument is based on two necessary distinctions: avoiding subjecting the first relationship to an abstract universalism according to which everything would be indifferently identical, especially from an absolute point of view, or to an exoticism of one in relation to the other (in both directions). For the author, the logic of this graph (A&S) must remain the positive tension in a reciprocal acceptance or openness, which already works in practice.