record

Thesis Info

LABS ID
00471
Thesis Title
WHAT TOUCHES US, WHAT WE TOUCH: EMERGENT MATERIALS TO THE TEST OF CONTEMPORARY ART.
Author
Dominique GONIN PEYSSON
2nd Author
3rd Author
Degree
PhD
Year
2014
Number of Pages
608
University
Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbone
Thesis Supervisor
Olga Kisseleva
Supervisor e-mail
olga.kisseleva AT gmail.com
Other Supervisor(s)
Language(s) of Thesis
French
Department / Discipline
Contemporary art
Languages Familiar to Author
French, english
URL where full thesis can be found
Keywords
emergent materials, smart materials, responsive materials, physics, shape, hylemorphism, tangible, interactivity, complexity, matter and life, ethics,
Abstract: 200-500 words
The emerging matter designed nowadays in our laboratories is cleverly effective: scientists reproduce smart arrangements that the living matter has optimized over generations, or they structure the infinitely small to attain previously unimaginable properties. While an immaterial art has developed since the twentieth century, this new materiality in contemporary art renews its way to approach the ancient hylomorphic couple of matter / form. The artist does not sculpt the external form but the internal sub-structures of matter, not the object but its properties. Taking note of its passage through the world of ideas, matter arises both as a tangible and intangible presence, matter and gray matter. A material “which has a weight, which has a heart”, in the words of Gaston Bachelard, whose touch – from the poetic caress to the containing tactility, from the embrace of love to the destructive crushing - can touch us deeply. A performer substance, since it is effective and active, which intense presence and ability to make reality foreign to us arouse very rich aesthetic feelings. It becomes responsive, to embody interactive works of another kind with which we enter into relation directly through the language of matter, bypassing digitality. A matter to be thought of, since our thoughts are originally corporal. Thinking the limits of matter, for example, at the beginning of our process towards artificial life.