3 April 2024

09:50 – 10:35

Amphi 4

Hervé Fischer

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 Théorie de l’art sociologique (1977), 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), La pensée magique du Net (2014), Market Art (2016), Les couleurs de l’Occident. From Prehistory to the 21st Century (2019), The Hyperhumanist Age. Pour une éthique planétaire (2019). He founded the International Society of Mythanalysis.

What is the energy of progress?

Progress is a very broad concept. I’m talking here about collective progress, a myth established by the French Revolution, both human, summed up by the Declaration of Universal Human Rights and the trilogy Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, and technoscientific, formulated by Condorcet, Auguste Comte, which has governed us since the start of the Industrial Revolution, notably the uses of the steam engine, electricity, nuclear, now quantum, fossil and renewable energies, in short based on the progress of energy itself, decarbonized and abundant. This progress in energy is as old as the world itself, like the wind and fire that Prometheus stole from Zeus and gave to mankind, for which he was cruelly punished. It’s clear that fire has always been energy, the driving force behind Homo fabricator’s technological progress, but it’s also linked to punishment, evil and danger, even today. We need it, and at the same time it threatens us. How can we manage this increasingly powerful threat in a beneficial way? Keeping it away from us is today’s big problem. We’re looking to the energy transition for a difficult but sustainable solution. The challenge is both practical in terms of use and mythical in terms of the destiny of the human race, which could destroy itself.