On October 4, 2007, Franck Ancel will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first launch of an artificial satellite, 1957-2007: from Sputnik Satellite to Explorer Art, a creation that will be broadcast exclusively over the Internet between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. Paris time. In collaboration with Joachim Montessuis for the sound environment and Julien Bittner for the editing of the images, in partnership with France Streaming, this work will be broadcast to any computer QuickTime video player, streamed over the Net from this address: rtsp://qts.zonepro.fr/ancel.

While this international year of the Sputnik - one of this year’s national commemorations in France - is giving rise to scientific conferences, the event presented by Franck Ancel creates an original, live link between past and future, expanding to other fields of research. The site of the great Meudon wind tunnel, part of ONERA’s heritage, illustrated in the work From Aerostation to Aerospace, is the venue from which this conference / performance about the history of the arts of the conquest of the skies and space will be broadcast.

From the late-19th century painter Odilon Redon and “The Eye Like a Strange Balloon (that) Mounts Toward Infinity”, to Jacques Polieri with his “Satellite auditorium project”, contemporary with the lunar astronauts, by way of V. Tatline or L. Fontana… the sky has struck the imagination and the cosmos has become visionary for artists. In the age of sustainable development and emerging economies, the whole world does not yet communicate directly via satellites for mobile telephony, for long-range weather forecasts and other tools such as GPS devices, but they set the pace of our daily life. As in the past, contemporary creators make their own times their subject matter. Some are even imagining how to test weightlessness in ways other than as future space tourists.

In 1957 we could hear the beeping of the Sputnik, in orbit around the earth, as a moving virtuality; in 2007 there are new avenues for the arts, the technologies and science that lead us towards other infinite spaces.

ONERA is France’s leading player in aeronautical, aerospace and defense R&D. A force for innovation, expertise and forward planning, ONERA has had a part in the greatest aerospace successes: Ariane 5, the Airbus and Eurocopter series, Rafale, Falcon 7X, etc.

Take a virtual tour of ONERA’s great wind tunnel thanks to 360° images by Laurent Thion, a photographer for Ecliptique.

Franck Ancel has been raising questions about technology for twenty years, tracing a line from the avant-garde art movements of the last century to the recent changes in creation on a planetary scale. He has organised and coordinated conferences, exhibitions and performances, including a retrospective of “Jacques Polieri: creator of a modern scenography” at the French National Library in Paris in 2002. Since the 9/11 attacks, he has set up an interactive, collaborative triptych called “A.I.T.”, which raises questions about architecture, images and technology, on 20th century heritage sites. In 2005, he concluded a cycle of five communications for five continents entitled “From scenography to planetary network” with a world première on the Internet, from a plane in flight from Shanghai to Munich. In 2006, he held a conference “From scenography to planetary network for Shanghai 2010″ in Silicon Valley during the ISEA/ZeroOne Festival.