This month, the 10th ISEA (International Symposium of Electronic Arts) took place in Paris. In precise, there were conferences, round tables, seminars, presentations of work, concerts, vidéos, interactive installations as well as expositions, concerts, performances, videos and dance in various Parisian places… Because of the significant number of presentations, I wasn’t able to see all the events. So, I will give you only information about the most important things I’ve seen.

The most interesting event to me was introduced at the margin of the ISEA. This event is Numer.00, a meeting of designers that discussed the subject of the review of electronic design.

Nevertheless the first debates of Numer which took place within the framework of the ISEA, seem to match what I have met afterwards. This debate brings up the following question: is a designer a technician or an artist? To go further, does the contemporary art has to be electronic and has creation by electronic means has to be art: Art seems to sound like an ambiguity.

I have the impression that this ambiguity rests due to the fact that we don’t make a difference between contemporary and electronics. Thus I observed different work :

1. Legitime work that was produced by an electronic tool.
2. Electronic media that has been introduced as artistic work.
3. Work which asserted to be electronic because it was diffused by electronic media.

Polemics was boring but that highlights that todays’ electronics are really a symptom of our contemporaneity. To conclude, there was really exciting work for many multiple groups of interests that I can’t report to you but I’ll entrust you with some URLs of work that has been presented: GRATIN, Postales, Content = No cache, Ghost City

ISEA (International Symposium of Electronic Arts) 2000
Date: December 7th and 10th, 2000
Place: Ecole Nationale Superieure Des Beaux-Arts
Address: 14 Rue Bonaparte, 75006 Paris
http://www.isea2000.com