The Région Grand Est organizes with {CORRESPONDANCES DIGITALES] on Wednesday June 19, 2024, in conjunction with the Festival Constellations, a professional day as part of the Rencontres Internationales de la culture, de la connaissance et de l’Immersif (RICCI) in Metz. This year’s event will focus on the following theme: Digital artistic and cultural projects – creativity, transmission and mediation. Discover the program and register.
This one-day event is aimed at cultural and artistic professionals: festivals, events, local authorities, cultural venues, artists and creative structures.
Conferences, presentations and a visit to the festival in Metz are planned. They will feature a wide range of feedback from local and international communities, cultural venues and festivals working to create and disseminate digital artistic and cultural experiences.
A second session of the Rencontres Internationales de la Culture, de la Connaissance et de l’Immersif (RICCI) will take place from October 14 to 16 in Épinal, in the form of workshops, and will focus more specifically on creative, digital and immersive projects in cultural venues (museums, cinemas, planetariums, media libraries, etc.).
MORNING – “Transmissions – implementing mediation around the digital arts”.
The theme of this morning’s event is accessibility and the approaches to public mediation involved in these forms of artistic expression in a digital environment.
10:00 am – 10:30 am – To kick things off, feedback from Constellations.
For the past 8 editions, from June to September, the Constellations has been showcasing numerous artistic and digital installations throughout the city of Metz. In 2023, more than a million spectators discovered 82 artists represented in 28 works shown over 73 days. Jérémie Bellot, artistic director of the festival, will talk about the program for the 2024 edition and the impact of one of France’s biggest digital art trails on Metz residents and tourists alike.
The City of Metz’s Constellations festival makes the public space a privileged vector for making digital art accessible to the general public in places they frequent on a daily basis. In 2024, the City of Metz is focusing on artistic education and the active participation of the public in digital works through the Black out in variations project, developed with the support of the GRACE project, dedicated to the generalization of artistic education in the Greater Region and financed by the European Union’s Interreg program. The project was born out of a cross-creative residency between Collectif 804, Catmac, Desaxismundi and Romain Barthélémy, organized by Bliiida and the City of Metz in March 2024, and includes an original educational component in the form of workshops for all audiences, focusing on body movements, sounds and images. The preview will take place under the geodesic dome on Metz’s Place de la Comédie, at the foot of the Opera Theatre.
10:30 am – 11:30 am – Conference – Setting up mediation systems around digital and immersive creation”.
Numerous art centers and cultural venues give pride of place to digital art and creativity. Drawing on their wealth of experience in terms of mediation, they will share their experiments and projects to better welcome and support audiences, and encourage them to participate in and contribute to these different artistic and digital forms.
If ” digital arts espouse the concept of ‘relational aesthetics’ where art enables encounter, ‘interhuman’ proximitý, and contributes to ‘relational societý.” (source: study HACNUM 2023), it appears, nevertheless, important to raise awareness and support audiences towards these forms of artistic expression. For 27 years, the Saint-Ex digital culture center in Reims has been committed to this vast awareness-raising project, offering an ambitious program of exhibitions, events and workshops. One of these emblematic events is La Nuit Numérique. Géraldine Taillandier, the venue’s director, will present this major event to raise awareness of the digital arts and introduce them to a wide audience. Similar events are also organized in Belgium, for example at Namur’s KiKK, which over the years has expanded to cover the whole city and become a creative, long-term territorial platform for digital culture. Gilles Bazelaire, co-founder of the festival, will talk about this dual dynamic of expanding audiences and extending the festival in other forms between seasons.
In addition to the approaches to raising awareness among a wide and diverse audience favored by festivals, other approaches to participative mediation between the arts and digital creativity are being experimented with their audiences by contemporary art centers. This is the case, for example, at the Kunsthalle in Mulhouse. Marine Ambrosini, Mediator at the contemporary art center, will talk about a digital sound creation project designed to record the emotions of visitors during their visits and play them back in a workshop, ultimately giving rise to a participative digital work.
11:30am – 12pm – School pitches and experimental programs – Training and nurturing creative talent.
While the challenges of transmission to the public are particularly acute, they are just as essential in terms of training and educating creative talent. In fact, this is one of the missions that Bliiida and the ESAL art school in Metz are developing with regard to the digital arts, in order to encourage and promote numerous artistic collaborations between this third-party venue and art students. These initiatives will be presented by Gautier Raguenaud, BLIIIDA’s Development Manager.
An opening will also be made towards other European projects led by a group of partners (including the K8 Institute), to be launched in 2022 and 2024 respectively, which offer major prospects in terms of creativity and art education. The first, the Cyanotypes project, presented by Sónia Alves and Soenke Zehle, focuses on education and transmission issues for art school students in the face of the development of Generative Artificial Intelligence. The second, the IMPULSE project, to be presented by Julia Hartnik, brings together 11 European partners to develop approaches to the patrimonialization of digital artistic and creative works, with the aim of enriching the possibilities of re-use and regeneration for new projects.
The challenges of bringing the digital arts to the general public cover a wide range of approaches, in the form of events and festivals (such as Constellations, KIKK, St-Ex) or mediation/creation initiatives involving the public (such as Kunsthalle). These different approaches to mediation and creation are also the focus of ambitious programs aimed at developing particularly exciting approaches to experimentation and innovation.
AFTERNOON – “TRANSMISSIONS – SUPPORTING DIGITAL CREATION
In her book Digital Art, Christiane Paul, former assistant curator of new media art at the Whitney Museum in New York, explores two distinct approaches to the use of digital art by artists. Some see it as a tool for creating traditional art forms, while others see it as a medium in its own right for producing innovative art forms. Two perspectives for a multitude of potential works to be created, resulting from both the technologies employed and the creative methods specific to each artist.
The considerable diversity of digital artistic formats poses a major challenge for the dissemination of digital artworks. A number of venues are committed to integrating these works into their programming, in order to support digital artists and creators in the development of their projects. Numerous cross-disciplinary initiatives are springing up, bringing together various disciplines such as the arts, science and technology, as well as different infrastructures such as monuments, museums, universities, digital arts centers and third places. These include exhibitions, events and research and development programs.
2:30 pm – 3:30 pm Conference – Encouraging the emergence of talent and structuring creative, cultural and artistic projects – some experience feedback
Most art centers dedicated to digital creation are not only venues for distribution, but also for residency, experimentation and acceleration of artistic projects.
This is the case, for example, with the Cube. Located in Garches-Les Gonesses, the site is defined as a 10,000m2 cultural innovation hub with a wide variety of spaces: exhibition, performance and cinema halls, a media library, a fablab, recording studios and workshops. With such facilities, the teams are able to offer programming at the crossroads of artistic and digital practices, proposing a wide range of activities around contemporary art, creative workshops, artistic training, access to culture and digital fabrication. Clément Thibault, its Director of Visual and Digital Arts, will present a series of exhibitions and experiments carried out in situ, with the aim of producing, disseminating or growing them.
Other venues dedicated to the performing arts are also developing experimental programs at the crossroads of the arts and sciences. Jonathan Thonon, Deputy General Manager in charge of European projects and innovation at the Théâtre de Liège in Belgium, will talk about a number of arts/science projects developed recently in collaboration with a wide range of players (companies, laboratories, artists, venues, etc.). Since 2006, the theater has been recognized as a European center for theatrical and choreographic creation. It recently launched an international program, IMPACT, focusing on collaboration between the arts, science and technology. Based on feedback, Jonathan will present how this arts/science/technology creative hub has been structured to stimulate cross-sectoral innovation in a cluster of 3 countries, 3 languages, 5 cultures and over 4 million inhabitants.
As experimentation shows, digital arts are increasingly intersecting with other fields of cultural creation, such as music, theater, heritage mediation, fine arts, technological training, and even advanced sciences. This convergence has led to the emergence of hybrid venues that integrate digital art formats into their programming. Two concrete examples will illustrate this trend during the conference: the MédiaLab program at l’Arche in Villerupt, Grand Est, and the Pali Pali project, a gas pedal of artistic, cultural and solidarity initiatives aimed at converting heritage sites through hybrid approaches. These various third places, “with their multiple spaces and intertwined vocations”, combine innovative artistic proposals with more traditional practices, emphasizing social and territorial development objectives.
Rich in their diversity, these different venues make their teams, expertise, networks, spaces and resources available to artists to create creative and innovative projects. These approaches, often exploratory, encourage the emergence of ambitious artistic projects, but are also confronted with a range of issues and obstacles that this meeting will put into perspective before tackling, by way of opening, the challenges of disseminating and transmitting such works to a wide audience.
3:30-4pm – Presenter pitches – festivals / venues
Festivals play an essential role in this dissemination, both among professionals (see the HACNUM article Un marché des arts numériques (enfin) structuré?) and the general public. With this in mind, various representatives of digital arts festivals will present their positioning, their challenges and their future projects.
The Strasbourg festival Ososphère will be presented by Thierry Danet, Director of Artefact. Born in Strasbourg in 1998, this cultural event was initiated by the creators of La Laiterie, a contemporary music venue, to explore new artistic forms. L’Ososphère has developed a program of actions around digital cultures that unfolds over time and in the urban space of Strasbourg: electronic nights, exhibitions, art trails, screenings, concerts, sound cruises, workshops, conversations and radio.
Mathieu Vabre, Co-director and Artistic Director of Seconde Nature and Zinc in Marseille, presents the Biennale des Imaginaires Numériques Chronicles. Initiated with a dozen partners in the south of France, this festival offers innovative programming combining visual arts, sound arts and live performance. In 2023, over 80 artists have been invited to work on the theme of night, while in 2024, the festival will explore pleasure in relation to the recommendation and personalization algorithms inherent in new technologies. Presented as a biennial, the event will run from November 7, 2024 to January 20, 2025.
The Scopitone Festival will be presented by Anne-Laure Belloc, Director of Arts & Digital Cultures at Stereolux in Nantes. Organized by Stereolux, the festival is an international event dedicated to electronic culture and the digital arts. It attracts between 25,000 and 50,000 festival-goers, depending on the format, and showcases some sixty artists through concerts and performances, artistic creations and installations, conferences/workshops and b-to-b meetings, and proposals specifically dedicated to young audiences.
Finally, Julien Pavillard, Director of Events for the City of Lyon and general coordinator of the Festival of Lights will present the challenges facing the next edition of Lyon’s famous cultural event.
In recent years, the digital arts have gradually spread to a wide audience in France and abroad, thanks to the mobilization of large-scale events, festivals and arts centers. This proliferation is also largely fueled by the creative vitality generated by a variety of venues, programs, events, festivals and teaching structures at the forefront of experimentation and creativity on a territorial, national and international level. This one-day event will highlight all these dynamics of transmission.
