ISEA2000 Welcome


Symposium:


Introductory / Welcoming Notes Title:
  • ISEA2000 Welcome

Introductory / Welcoming Notes Presenter(s):

Category:


Abstract:

  • Introductory Statement

    After ISEA98 ‘Revolution’, ‘Revelation’ embodies the theme of this tenth edition of ISEA. Revelation, because the real question when facing the transformations of a world whose references are fading away is to go beyond the visible and understand the deeper meaning of the new issues that govern us.

    The bid to hold ISEA2000 in France began in 1998. At that time we were developing the desire to unify numerous initiatives in Paris and in the provinces around this large nomadic gathering of the international artistic community. Bet won. This symposium invites you to share the thoughts of 300 experts, as well as to discover the diversity of digital creation through a program planning spread out over more than 30 cultural places.

    ISEA is thus successfully keeping on its role as a unifying, interdisciplinary and multicultural event. If ISEA were able to draw up an international ‘appraisal’, thanks to the participation of artists and experts from more than 30 countries, it would set out to understand the ever-budding history of a digital civilization whose technologies of ‘knowledge’ and ‘life’ will have, in only a few years, banished the past discoveries to the rank of works for museums only. A brave new world where genetic transgressions will herald the end of ‘Homo Sapiens’ in favor of the birth of the ‘Son of Man’ (as opposed to the ‘Son of God’?). Where humanitarianism creates its own zones of exclusion and where innovation – the self-proclaimed golden calf of marketing logic – raises cultural expectations which merge with a new quest for meaning.

    Even if it might not bring any answers, ISEA2000 will without any doubt allow you to better understand the emerging phenomena and how they interrelate. Creation is ISEA’s most distinguished guest since the artist, more than anyone else, ‘makes the invisible visible’.

    We welcome you to ISEA2000 and hope that for each and everyone of us this event will prove to be the enthusiastic story of a ‘revelation’.