“Ou Le Captaine Nemo De L’aventure Concrete” presented by Dallet

Symposium:


Session Title:
  • Medium and Media

Presentation Title:
  • Ou Le Captaine Nemo De L’aventure Concrete

Presenter(s):


Abstract:

  • Once upon a time, there was a sort of musician, called Pierre Schaeffer, between the time of the Double-Croches and the Computers …”

    To summarize the work of Pierre Schaeffer is a challenge. To evoke his itinerary continues to make him dizzy, as his personality and his artistic influence take part in contemporary battles for creation. However, despite all the curiosity that the character arouses, I think you do not expect from me a biography of the past, but tools or weapons for the future. Schaeffer himself defined his approach by this cryptic formula:

    “I am a founder, not of orders but of services”.

    I will summarize very quickly an extraordinary history whose risk of artistic risk eclipses, in my opinion, that of contemporary essayists, André Malraux and Walter Benjamin, until reaching the prophetic qualities of men as diverse as the philosopher Gaston Bachelard or the filmmaker Serguei Eisenstein.

    The work of the Polytechnic engineer Pierre Schaeffer (1910/1995) has several indissoluble facets: from 1934 to the 1980s, he is known as a playwright and novelist; from 1948 on, he became the inventor and theoretician of musique concrète; it is finally one of the major essayists of the contemporary world who, like Canadian Mc Luhan, offers a global analysis of audiovisual simulacra. In addition, this resistant is not an academic but a senior official of the public service: he knew, in a constant administrative guerilla, to bring together technicians, artists and scientists around creative projects and to accompany the technological mutations by a total upheaval of the ways of working together.

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