Les Immatériaux: Épreuves d’écriture & Album et Inventaire (1985) [French]

“Les Immatériaux was a landmark exhibition co-curated in 1985 for the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris by philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and design historian and theorist Thierry Chaput, attracting more than 200,000 visitors during the 15 weeks of its duration.

The exhibition brought together a striking variety of objects, ranging from the latest industrial robots and personal computers, to holograms, interactive sound installations, and 3D cinema, along with paintings, photographs and sculptures (the latter ranging from an Ancient Egyptian low-relief to works by Dan Graham, Joseph Kosuth and Giovanni Anselmo). The Centre de Création Industrielle (CCI) – the more ‘sociological’ entity devoted to architecture and design within the Centre Pompidou, which initiated Les Immatériaux – had been planning an exhibition on new industrial materials since at least 1982. Variously titled Création et matériaux nouveaux, Matériau et création, Matériaux nouveaux et création, and, in its last form, La Matière dans tous ses états, this exhibition, first scheduled to take place in 1984, already contained many of the innovative features that found their way into Les Immatériaux.

These features included an emphasis on language as matter, the immateriality of advanced technological materials (from textiles to plastics and holography), exhibits devoted to recent technological developments in food, architecture, music and video, and an experimental catalogue produced using computers. The earlier versions of the exhibition also involved many of the future protagonists of Les Immatériaux, such as Jean-Louis Boissier (among several other faculty members of Université Paris VIII, where Lyotard was teaching at the time) and Eve Ritscher (a London-based consultant on holography). Furthermore, Les Immatériaux benefited from projects pursued concurrently by other groups within the Pompidou which joined Lyotard’s and Chaput’s project when it was discovered that their themes overlapped. Thus, an exhibition project on music videos initiated by the Musée national d’art moderne and a project on electro-acoustic music developed by IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique) were incorporated into it.” (from a study by Anthony Hudek, 2009, edited)

Volume 1 contains an experimental glossary of 50 terms with contributions by twenty-six authors, writers, scientists, artists and philosophers including Nanni Balestrini, Michel Butor, François Châtelet, Jacques Derrida, Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers. Volume 2 reproduces the works exhibited.

Publisher Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, March 1985
ISBN 2858502994 (I), 2858503001 (II)
263 (I) and 142 (nonpaginated A4) pages (II)

Épreuves d’écriture (Volume 1, 11 MB, added on 2014-7-30 via Norkhat)
Album et Inventaire (Volume 2, 103 MB, via Arts des nouveaux médias blog of Jean-Louis Boissier)
See also other documents and literature about the exhibition (Monoskop wiki).

Astrid Lorange: How Reading is Written: a brief index to Gertrude Stein (2012)

This thesis grows out of a set of interlinked questions to do with reading Gertrude Stein: in particular, how to account for the experience of reading a body of work that is largely resistant to conventional and interpretation-based models of literary criticism. What is being read? What is an effective and explanatory way of writing about the reading experience of a Steinian text? And finally, what constitutes a contemporary critical judgment in relation to an experimental poetics such as Stein’s?

For the one who reads Stein, the question of what is being read is a complex one. If Stein is not writing representationally, then there is no singular meaning to be interpreted. Stein, however, is not writing non-representational poetry as a project in itself. Thus, to read Stein’s work exclusively as a meditation on the plurality of meaning makes for a limited discussion of her poetics. Stein did not regard writing to be a representational or metaphorical process: she regarded it as an aspect of experience and a form of thinking. This study argues that Stein’s work elicits a reading approach that is productive of knowledge.

The thesis seeks to answer the question of how to find a way of writing about the reading of Stein by proposing a series of traverses across selective instances, rather than by engaging interpretative textual methods. These trains of thought are inclusive; they are not necessarily congruent or parallel with each other. It is, rather, a grouping of inter-related concerns. The thesis proposes that a network of understandings can accordingly capture something of the non-normative nature of Stein’s writing as well as the multifarious activities of knowing, unknowing, speaking, eating, resembling, noticing, playing, dancing, walking, forgetting, collecting, teasing, joking, proposing, and writing which, among others, constitute Stein’s oeuvre.

Lastly, and in relation to the final question, this thesis attempts a critical response to the reading of Stein. If reading Stein occasions thinking, then the present study is a record of a reader’s account, as well as a theory of reading. The thesis is structurally and conceptually an index to Stein’s poetics. It reads Stein alongside writers and thinkers across discourses of philosophy, science, queer theory, and literary criticism. In particular, it reads with Alfred North Whitehead, William James, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Karen Barad, Daniel Tiffany, and Sianne Ngai. It aims to construct an intellectual episteme for Stein’s work—one that connects with contemporary contexts as well as repositioning Stein in her moment of transnational modernism.

Doctor of Philosophy
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney, 2012
212 pages

Publisher
Forthcoming as a book (November 2014)

PDF (an unedited version, different from the one to appear as a book)

Wolfgang Ernst, Friedrich Kittler (eds.): Die Geburt des Vokalalphabets aus dem Geist der Poesie: Schrift, Zahl und Ton im Medienverbund (2006) [German]

Daß das Melodische an der Stimme notierbar wurde, ist eine kulturtechnische Leistung der altgriechischen Vokalalphabetisierung der Gesänge Homers. Verblüffenderweise wurden mit diesem Alphabet jedoch nicht nur Sprache und Musik, sondern auch Mathematik und Geometrie angeschrieben. Der interessante Befund liegt darin, daß damit von Beginn an – und einer inhärenten medienästhetischen Logik folgend – “alphanumerisch” avant la lettre operiert wurde. Diese sonst disziplinär entfernten Bereiche medienarchäologisch zusammenzudenken eröffnet eine neue Dimension von Kulturgeschichtsschreibung. Führende Vertreter neuester Forschungen aus den betroffenen Fächern (Altphilologie, Ägyptologie, Archäologie, Epigraphik, Gräzistik, Mathematik und Musikwissenschaft) werden zu diesem Zweck mit Vertretern der Kultur- und Medienwissenschaft – in dieser Form erstmals – ins Gespräch gebracht.

Mit Beiträge von Barry Powell, Rudolf Wachter, Friedrich Kittler, Jesper Svenbro, Wolfgang Rösler, Joachim Quack, Ludwig Morenz, Eva Canik-Kirschbaum, Sandrina Khaled, Gerald Wildgruber, Maarten Bullynck, Thomas Götselius, Joachim Latacz, Martin Carlé und Wolfgang Ernst.

Publisher Wilhelm Fink, Munich, 2006
ISBN 9783770542673
314 pages

Cultural techniques on Monoskop wiki

Publisher

PDF (56 MB, no OCR)
View online