About the Book

The use of media invades the artistic space. The philosopher Jean-François Lyotard takes up the phenomenon and organizes the exhibition Les Immatériaux at the Pompidou Centre. The early days of digital art intrigue, from the Minitel as a telematics fiction tool to the composer Rolf Gehlhaar who transforms the visitor's wanderings into a 45-minute concert on magnetic tape.
Today, Lyotard has passed away, but his initiative has survived him.

Looking back at LES IMMATÉRIAUX. When, in 1984 at the Pompidou Centre, Jean-François Lyotard was called upon to take intellectual direction of an exhibition planned on the theme "new materials and creation", he intended to question each of these three terms by naming it Les Immatériaux and proposing to structure the exhibition around the words material [matériau], matter [matière], matrix [matrice], hardware/material [matériel], maternity [maternité]. The exhibition would give the visitor "the feeling of the complexity of things" because "a new sensibility is born" as "new genres of art based on new technologies appear in creation". The exhibition opened exactly 20 years ago, on March 28, 1985.
Today, it is a matter of bearing witness to this major exhibition that has become mythical, and of considering the theoretical and historical destiny of these "immatériaux", which designate not simply what is immaterial but, in an open way, "a material that disappears as an independent entity", a material where "the model of language supplants that of matter" and whose principle "is no longer a stable substance but a set of interactions". Ciren (Centre interdisciplinaire de recherche sur l’esthétique du numérique) University of Paris 8