In emancipation from the traditional circuits of manufacturing and trade, fablabs and techshops are spreading around the world their free and open source techniques to build Internetready machines, the most famous being the 3D printer. This is where artists, DIY coders, hackers, engineers and neophytes learn and share knowledge. In October 2010, the first Plastic Hacker Space Fest took place in Vitry-Sur-Seine, near Paris. The first Plastic Hacker Space Fest, organised by /tmp/lab wa...

We are living through one of history’s swerves. Over the past decade billions of people have hooked themselves up to the Internet via the computer and more recently mobile devices. This communication revolution is now extending to objects as well as people. Object-to-object communications has been long predicted, but has always seemed to be perched safely on the horizon. Now it is rushing into the present. The so-called Internet of things (IoT) is, after the modern computer (1946) a...

Internet is usually presented as an utterly dematerialized universe bound to infiltrate the reality of the physical world in a quasi-immanent way. This idealized vision of the network, however, seems to be a fantasy far from the reality of a disembodied heterotopy. Indeed, the existence of Internet is highly dependant on the traditional industry, which provides the physical framework to ensure the storage, management, transmission and diffusion of the information the Web is made of. ...

The emergence of new technologies redefines Man’s relationship to his environment in the same way that the invention of perspective in the 15th century placed Man, and not God, in the centre of creation(1). We are increasingly close to the technologies we invent and they have acquired considerable influence over our beliefs and symbolic relationship with the world: "Since the industrial revolution, and with unprecedented acceleration, technology has become a factor of civilisatio...

French-born 27-year old interaction designer Mikael Metthey, harnesses his profession's very specific procedural mechanisms, to produce artworks which investigate the development and interaction between new technologies, science and design. It is an equation of relationships in which human behavior each time embodies the unpredictable and unavoidable variable, which defines each result. Concretely, Mikael Metthey's artistic practice consists in the creation of interaction design pro...

Robots and Avatars was launched in November 2009 with a Forum at NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts), attended by an international group of 80 experts, professionals and young people in London. The programme continues throughout 2010-2011 with educational events, an exhibition, a website, vodcasts with key experts, further forums and a book/DVD. We are moving into an era where technology is greatly expanding the possibilities of representation, with the ph...

Introduced at Berlin's February Transmediale, Coïncidence Engines, by the Quebecois [The User], with its 1240 radio alarm clocks — beyond its obvious homage to Ligeti’s metronomes — provides an interesting perspective on working in a duo. With the diversion of their materials, via the prism of new technologies and the new social relations they create, and the poetic overlapping of structure, space and sound, the aesthetic and exploratory universe of [The User] has discovered an i...

 Basing its work on the relationship between new technologies and art, the Belgium entity LAb[au] has succeeded in centering its reflection - and its production – around principles linked to architecture and urbanism. A multidisciplinary approach conveying the innovating character of architects active in the field of digital art, as demonstrated by their installation Binary Waves, last year on the Canal Saint-Denis. Els Vermang, one of the four members of LAb[au] (with Manuel Abendroth, JérÃ...

 Platform dedicated to networked actual art, Synesthésie decided to promote in an original way its online Centre of Virtual Art on the occasion of the release of a presentation DVD. A good opportunity to get interest in the citizen action engaged by this structure on the front of the "confrontation between contemporary art with the specificities of networks and digital". Manières de Fluer Last autumn, the digital news tool arrived at the Biennale Art Grandeur Nature, organized by th...