Olivier Auber: Difference between revisions

Olivier Auber born in 1960, in Sainte-Adresse in Normandy is an independent researcher. He is best known for his project: the "Poietic Generator".

Biography

Olivier Auber was born in 1960 in Sainte-Adresse in Normandy. He lives and works in Paris and Brussels. He holds an engineering degree from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts et Métiers and a Master of Design from the same school. His engineering thesis focused on the calculation and implementation of nonlinear optical elements (holograms) for avionics (aircraft head-hup display). This initial specialization in optical work has earned him early in his career as a research engineer, first in the avionics division of Thomson Csf (now Thales group) and at CERN in Geneva.

In 1984, he takes the status of independent consulting engineer and was the first customer of the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie de la Villette, then under construction, to work first on the development of exhibits, then quickly as project manager responsible for the design and development of several permanent and temporary exhibitions of scientific and cultural target . As such, between 1984 and 1996, he designed the scenario and led the implementation of several highly technological exhibitions and media as diverse as the sun, mathematics, electricity, symmetry in the arts and science subjects, nonverbal human behavior, etc. In this period, he also developed exposition projects for other Parisian cultural institutions: the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Institut du Monde Arabe, the Palais de la Découverte... The creation for the ISC Expressions et comportements exhibition, devoted to behavior and nonverbal human behavior, inaugurated in early 1987 marked a milestone in his career, leading him from a predominantly scientific and technical culture to another more artistic and open to all components of the humanities.

End of 1987, while working with Tod Machover (MIT Medialab) and Catherine Ikam (artist) for the staging of VALIS, contemporary music opera based on the work of Philip K. Dick, he designed what would become his best known work, the "Poietic Generator", a free social artwork for all that can be played in in real time. This same work in 1988 became the central concept of a monumental, architectural and technological project, one of the seven winners of the international competition for the creation of the "France-Japan Monument" on Awaji Island in the Bay of Kobe, launched under the aegis of François Mitterrand. This Monument never saw the day, but its various implementations were exhibited at the Centre Georges Pompidou (exhibition "Communication et Monumentalité", 1989), the City of Science and Industry (exhibition "Machines à communiquer ", 1994) and in various galleries and art events including ARSLAB in 1995, where he was awarded the prize "art and science" by the city of Turin, Italy. The exhibition "ARSLAB - The senses of virtuality", sponsored by the City of Turin - Promoter of Fine Arts, was organized by Ars Technica, Cultural Association with Extramuseum Scientific Divulgation and was curated by Claude Faure, Maria Grazia Mattei and Franco Torriani. It took place from October 26 to November 26, 1995, in Turin, Italy and was "an exhibition of dialogues: between science and art, biology and culture, nature and artifice" (...) and presented " a selection of installation of international authors who, in their research, in their working methodology and in the free creativity which marks them reflect on this process and they inform us with great advance in times, untold way of creation, of enjoyment, of participation. "

In 1995 still, he was invited to the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications (now Telecom ParisTech) to develop the project, not just on the web, but focused on an experimental network foreshadowing the future shape of the Internet (IP v.6); perhaps the first network to experience the global collective interaction in real time. In 1996, he developed a version of Genératéur Poïétique for the web so that all users can access. Several experiments followed through electronic art festivals and academic research, Ljubljana 1998, X-00 in 2000, Conference Human-Computer Interaction IHM-UTC 2002 L3D Lab, University of Colorado at Boulder in 2002, and so on. From 1986, he theorized Genératéur Poïétique as an experience of a new kind of perspective: the "temporal perspective" analogous to the spatial perspective of the Renaissance. In 1995, his theory was prolonged as a conjecture: that of the "digital perspective" on which he wrote several articles whose terms were continued in the works of many philosophers and historians of art and science, including Anne Cauquelin José-Louis Lestocart, Mario Costa, Jean-Michel Cornu, etc..

In 1997 he founded with the architect and urban planner Bernd Hoge, the developer of virtual reality Emmanuel Mâa Berriet and film producer Philippe Braunstein, Laboratory Culture A + H to develop interdisciplinary projects. One of the first is the creation of the Nibelungen Museum in Worms Germany, a virtual museum built on the base of a wall of the thirteenth century on the European myth of the Nibelungen. One of the pieces in the museum, the virtual reality installation "The treasure of the Nibelungs" was also exhibited in numerous festivals including ISEA 2000, Paris and Boston CyberArts 2001.

In 2004, he founded with visual artist Yann Le Guennec the research group ANOPTIQUE that develops viewing experiences on Internet. In this regard were conducted several projects in partnership with the Fondation Internet Nouvelle Génération (FING), Orange Lab / France Telecom R&D and INRIA who led from 2005 on the development of many visualization tools. As integrated group AH ANOPTIQUE commonly advises organizations such as UNESCO, the Ministry of Culture, the French Development Agency on their strategy of free software, groupware, interactive mapping and opening data. In 2010 and 2011, he contributed to the creation of a multidisciplinary Research Chair in Telecom ParisTech devoted to "modeling imaginary" with the help of Dassault System, Ubisoft, Orange Lab, Peugeot-Citroen, Alcatel Lucent BNP Paribas, Datar and MINATEC.

In 2012, Olivier Auber divides his time between consultancy, design and project management of cultural projects under the Cultural AH Laboratory, and research and development on the Genératéur Poïétique. He also contributes to many working groups (New Generation Internet Foundation, French Society Internet, P2P Foundation, @ Large Internet Engineering Task Force), writing articles, teaching and conferences and seminars on all matters related to digital culture, practices and politics of the Internet.

Theoretical arguments

Olivier Auber takes into account the relationship between the collective author and net art.
His most known work, Le Genératéur Poïétique, is in fact a social network game: it uses the web as a meeting place between users who experience the creation of a collective image across the network.
This work was presented during the exhibition "Arslab - The sense of virtuality", which was constructed around the concept of virtuality and its influence in the sphere of communication and art.
"In the virtual experience (...) it's already contained something of the changing which is underway the image doesn't look anymore as the dominant sense, the new forms of man-machine relation refer to a more extensive consideration of the body with the world, the same interactivity is actually put into practice and thus becomes a land of unusual experiences between artist and public, between work and enjoyer". So, the Auber's interactive installation reflected the aim of exhibition to be an exhibition of dialogues: between science and art, reality and virtuality, public and work.
He involves public in a new communication process and experiments a new kind of creative and interactive experience: everyone can choose to participate and be the centre, the engine of the experience he will live.
"The artist gaining experience, supplies and stimulates the supply of proof, supporting the human vocation of experimenting. Interactivity is thus based on the necessity of the other, on its acting in the 'community' produced or, at least, manipulated by the artist." Auber, as author, "produces the work, placing himself as the covariant element of the 'community' which he become part of. In the process which continues between project and opera, creativity is shown as an experience of production - procreation." "The artistic ecosystem works on human sensitivity it wants to extend the world's knowledge, experiment with the new connection between the artificial and the nature". In this direction Auber also pay much attention to the study of interfaces, in order to suggest an other way "to project and pick up the world."
So, according to the guiding lines of Arslab, his work is far away from the particularization of the technologies employed, and is a reflection around the unheard of linguistic dimension handed out by technologies.

What is the "digital perspective?"

This is a guess, we'd actors a major invention, similar to the " spatial perspective ", which marked the passage of the hierarchical world of the Middle Ages, that, geometrically, the Renaissance also similar to the " time horizon "born two centuries ago with the invention of the telegraph, which currently dominates (its" vanishing points "are television transmitters, search engines and websites that we know of). The digital perspective , it is based not on vanishing points as the previous two perspectives, but on codes leakage , digital, biological, genetic, or quantum capable of organizing forms of switching acentrée, synchronous or asynchronous, within the human community. This latter perspective is required to take precedence over précédentes.Elle suggests upheavals of all kinds, comparable (or incomparable?) To those that lived the reborn. perspective-numerique.net

Quotes

'Mais seul l'art peut pré-voir, simuler, modéliser, trouver et éclairer les mythes, désamorcer les explosions peut-être. L'art est seul en situation d'opérer sciemment la réduction interdite de l'homme à sa représentation. L'art seul, peut célébrer en pleine lumière le sacrifice de l'éthique dans le champ esthétique. Et dans un retournement paradoxal impliquant tout l'univers, il a ce pouvoir de désigner précisément ce qui échappe à la réduction, ce qui est commun et éternel : l'invisible, l'imprésentable (11), l'ininstrumentalisable ( But only art can pre-view, simulate, model, find and illuminate myths defuse explosions perhaps. Art is only in a position to make knowingly permitted the reduction of man to his representation. Art alone can celebrate in full light the sacrifice of ethics in the aesthetic field. And in a paradoxical reversal involving the entire universe, it has the power to designate precisely what escapes the reduction, which is common and eternal: the invisible, the unpresentable, the ininstrumentalisable.).'

Bibliography

• 1998, Arslab. I labirinti del corpo in gioco. published by hopefulmonster, Turin, Italy.
• 1995, Arslab. The senses of virtuality, published by RCS Libri & Grandi Opere Spa, Milan, Italy.

by Olivier Auber

• "IPv6, a new perspective for social networking": conference in 'Talks of the new industrial world', Centre Georges Pompidou, Institute for Research and Innovation (IRI), Cap Digital, October 2008.
• "Game Over, change the Internet": contribution to the Digital Audience of the Secretariat to the Digital Economy, June 2008.
• "Digital cartography and territorial development": prospective study commissioned by the Observatory of Digital Territories OTEN, 2008.
• "The Net, a Common Good", Liberation under Rebounds, March 2007.
• "From Generator Poïétique to digital perspective" in the aesthetic review, led by Anne Cauquelin. January 2005.
• "Aesthetics of Digital Perspective", conference ARTMEDIA X, Paris 2004.

on Olivier Auber

• Olivier Auber / démarche générale. Technology Review, MIT, March–April 2008. .
• Les nouvelles cimaises. Maison et Parcours Rimbaud , Sonovision, 2004.
• L'Invisible-Monument, Metz, tête de pont d'Aillagon , Libération, 10 May 2003..

See also

• Poietic Generator

External links

• http://km2.net (transdisciplinary projects)
• http://anoptique.com (visualization, meta design and collective intelligence)
• http://perspective-numerique.net (reflections on "perspectives" networks)
• http://www.arpnet.it/arslab/boulevard/symposium/aub1.html