Le Laboratoire: Ryoji Ikeda & Benedict Gross; Shilpa Gupta & Pamela Sklar; R&Sie(n) & François Jouve :: Schedule below :: Le Laboratoire, 4 rue du Bouloi, 75001 Paris.

Conceived and initiated by the Franco-American scientist and writer David Edwards, Le Laboratoire is a ONE YEAR OLD experimental art and design centre located in the heart of Paris. Here artists and designers conceive and develop ideas in collaboration with scientists working at the cutting edge of science today. These ‘experiments’ produce unconventional art and design exhibitions that reflect the work-in-progress nature of the creative process. Through exhibition we invite the public into this analytical and intuitive, deductive and inductive creative process that is shared by artists and scientists alike. We call this artscience, an institution-agnostic process underpinning cultural, industrial, humanitarian, and educational kinds of innovation

We are pleased to present the artistic program of the second season:

Ryoji Ikeda & Benedict Gross: V≠L (Oct 11 - Jan 12): Le Laboratoire is pleased to present, for the first time in Europe, a personal exhibition of the Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda, a major figure of the sound and visual electronic scene. From his correspondence with the American mathematician Benedict Gross, he has conceived a work where the definition of the sublime blends with the immateriality of infinity. Welcome to a world of millimeter precision.

“As an artist/composer, my intention is always polarized by concepts of “the beautiful and the sublime”. To me, beauty is crystal; rationality, precision, simplicity, elegance, delicacy. The sublime is infinity; infinitesimal, immensity, indescribable, ineffable. The purest beauty is the world of mathematics. Its perfect assemblage amongst numbers, magnitudes and forms persist despite us. The aesthetic experience of the sublime in mathematics is awe-inspiring. It is similar to the experience we have when we confront the vast magnitude of the universe, which always leaves us openmouthed. The aim of this project is to engage in dialogue with the mathematician Benedict Gross and other number theorists to find a common language on aesthetics.” Ryoji Ikeda

In partnership with Festival d’Automne à Paris, with the support of Nomura, Fondation Franco-Japonaise Sasakawa and Fondation pour l’étude de la langue et de la civilisation japonaises acting under the aegis of la Fondation de France. Within the framework of 150th anniversary of French-Japanese relationships

Shilpa Gupta & Pamela Sklar: Is fear genetic? (February - April, 2009) - Shilpa Gupta (an Indian artist currently living in Mumbai) investigates the power of images in terms of how they affect the way we think. Are images so influential that they can change how we perceive reality? The work of Pamela Sklar (neuroscientist, geneticist, psychiatrist and professor at Harvard) echoes Gupta’s investigations.

Through her research, the scientist Sklar has developed the hypothesis that certain psychiatric illnesses are hereditary. What if fear, depression, and other mental issues had genetic origins? Shilpa Gupta and Pamela Sklar are launching an interactive experiment and invite visitors to Le Laboratoire to participate. This project is realized in the context of an annual conference at Le Laboratoire on global health, supported by the non-governmental organization Medicine in Need (MEND), based in South Africa, France, and the United States.

R&Sie(n) & François Jouve: Architecture of Moods (May - July, 2009) - The architecture studio R&Sie(n) unveils the research it has undertaken with the mathematician François Jouve (Professor at the University of Paris VII and Lecturer at école Polytechnique). Together they explore new modes of structuring architecture.

Until now, housing criteria has relied on obvious visible data (area, lifestyle, number of rooms…); R&Sie(n) are establishing a new set of criteria, one that is invisible, based on the neurobiological signals of each visitor to the exhibit. An urban structure, created in real time using robotic machines, has great potential for variability and indeterminability as it aggregates and materializes the detected desires of these “future homebuyers”.

An interview is used to understand fluctuations of emotional state, which are translated into algorithmic data to generate a “neuropsychological” architecture, an architecture of moods.

A sales desk allows the “visitor/client” to place an order for his/her bio-architecture to be implemented as part of the collective structure.