Round Table

Ever since the late 1990s, Maxence has been interested in the impact of new technologies on our societies, particularly in the fields of visual arts (digital arts), sound production (avant-garde, electronic music) and communication. As a mediator, trainer and public speaker, he has also addressed the topics of the body and technology, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, the history of electronic music and new connected behaviours.

Annick Bureaud is an independent art critic, curator and event organiser, researcher and teacher in art and technosciences. She wrote numerous articles,  contribute to the French contemporary art magazine Art Press ans she taught in several art schools and universities in France (Aix-en-Provence art school, Eesi – European School of Visual Arts, Poitiers) and abroad (she has been guest lecturer at the School of the Art Institute Chicago/SAIC in 1999 and at the University of Quebec in Montreal/UQAM in 2001). She is also the director of Leonardo/Olats, an observatory focused recognized as a global leader in the interdisciplinary world of art/science/technology.

Barthélemy Antoine-Lœff is a visual artist whose creations of optical and digital artworks, sometimes interactive, often immersive, express dreamlike worlds crossed by a contemplative and ecological relationship of nature and elements. The artist creates spaces for sharing his feelings about the “forces” of the world: dreams, energies, materials, technologies. Refusing to place himself in the field of the Kantian sublime, he positions himself at the place of wonder and infantile craze, as if to claim the part of the dream that we develop as a child and which remains forever our “desiring motor” throughout our life. (Nicolas Rosette)

Dmitry Gelfand (St. Petersburg, Russia) and Evelina Domnitch (Minsk, Belarus) create sensory immersion environments that merge physics, chemistry and computer science with uncanny philosophical practices. Current findings, particularly regarding wave phenomena, are employed by the artists to investigate questions of perception and perpetuity. Such investigations are salient because the scientific picture of the world, which serves as the basis for contemporary thought, still cannot encompass the unrecordable workings of consciousness.

Simon Meyer has been running the Planetarium for nine years. This facility in Vaulx-en-Velin is an interface between the world of research and the general public. It’s a key vehicle for disseminating scientific knowledge in the areas of space, astronomy and astrophysics. The links between these areas and the world of art and creation are at the heart of the Planetarium’s project to become a place for welcoming artist residencies, an incubator for art/science projects between artists and scientists and, of course, a location for exhibitions and screenings (results of workshops, immersive short films, etc.)