Grande Image

Originating in experiences with contemporary art practices, a preoccupation with the urban, art on the scale of the landscape, a thinking on the context of art, a pedagogical idea within an art school along with a favorable urban context and strong partners, Grande Image is a project that has, over three years joined together questions and committed partners. The development of Grande Image has led to the formation of a network of contacts and of a working group that has since been built in a more formal manner, bringing together participants, as much in artistic practice as in theoretical thinking on art, the image and the city.
Carried by the higher school of fine arts, Grande image has enlarged its scope of action to other partners in France and abroad. Its development, as much on a theoretical level as in the production of experiences and artistic works required the setting up of a structured and coordinated research programme. This programme completes and enriches the territory of work developed within the school to join with a thinking on the status of the image in contemporary art, on the relationships between art and the urban context, between art and specific technologies, particularly digital, and deepening the view of contemporary productions that bring the whole of these questions into play.

Synthetic

The Synthetic research programme aims to question the impact of computationalism on modes of production and of work in our technological societies, specifically in the domains of art, design and architecture. This impact is especially comprehensible as a climate of radical, theoretical and practical innovation, in all domains where the computational mode provokes a convergence of knowledge (symbolic, calculative and experimental). Synthetic thus proposes gathering together different actors (academic, scientific and industrial) and envisages production in the context of design and architecture from the angle of automation, vision of computers, advanced materials and the cognitive sciences.
One of the major objectives of the programme is to dissolve the idealism that too often governs research in the domain of the digital, that accompanies the banal fascination with the technical element transported outside of its usual field and because of this can not consider the true consequences issued from a generalized use of calculators on the shaping of knowledge, on the conditions of production and on the creation of value. It is from a realist point of view that finds it impossible to exclude the challenge of technological determinism, that Synthetic attempts, through collective experiences such as workshops, seminars, experimental platforms for creation and the making of prototypes, to perceive the concrete effects of the computer on forms (objects, environment and symbolic), on work and its organization and on the costs of fabrication.
Synthetic is open and collaborative in nature, in a context where culture, technology, work and politics are linked by way of the computer.