Hervé Fischer

Biography

A multimedia artist-philosopher, Hervé Fischer initiated sociological art and today practices tweet art and tweet philosophy. His work has been shown in numerous international museums and biennials. The Centre Georges Pompidou devoted a retrospective to him, Hervé Fischer et l’art sociologique, in 2017. A digital pioneer in Quebec, in 1985 he founded the Cité des arts et des nouvelles technologies de Montréal, the first Café électronique in Canada, the International Multimedia Market, the International Federation of Multimedia Associations, the Téléscience festival and Science pour tous. His research focuses on art, the sociology of color, the digital, social imaginaries and hyperhumanism. He designed the Quebec medialab Hexagram. His publications include L’Histoire de l’art est terminée (1981), Le choc du numérique (2002), CyberProméthée, l’instinct de puissance (2003), La planète hyper, de la pensée linéaire à la pensée en arabesque (2004), La société sur le divan (2007), L’Avenir de l’art (2010), La divergence du futur (2014), Market Art (2016). He founded the International Society of Mythanalysis.

Conference: Posthumanism or Hyperhumanism?

Mythoanalysis postulates that everything that is real is fabulist, everything that is fabulist is real, but you have to know how to choose your fabulations and avoid hallucinations. In the past, time stuck to existence like reality sticks to the eyes, creating the ordinary sensation of life. Today, however, its acceleration detaches it from the everyday. It erases the present like digital files, projecting us into the fabulous future. Now at the heart of the human adventure. Pastists wait fatalistically for the apocalypse, while fundamentalist digital prophets denounce the obsolescence of carbon man, and herald our mutation into the silicon of trans- and posthumanism. These cyber-Promethean promises of power have replaced the political utopias of the 19th century. Denying our instinct to live and the fragility of nature, which is also ours, they will do no better. We oppose them with an alternative digital technohumanism: hyperhumanism. Hyper for more humanism and for the multiplication of real-time digital hyperlinks that create our augmented consciousness, and planetary ethics: human progress that’s much more uncertain than technological progress, but much more decisive for our future.