Ownership
The Relation of Authorship to Ownership in a Theater Bridging Arts and Sciences
Antoine Conjard
We are based in Grenoble Alpes Metropole, a new political and administrative division gathering 49 municipalities and 450,000 inhabitants. The theater that I am directing is located in a town within the suburb, which is part of the metropolitan area.
The first reason I conceptualized the theater’s current arts and sciences project was to feed artists and boost their development with the characteristics of our territory, i.e. with a great local concentration of new knowledge and new technologies being invented.
The theater stage is where everything begins and ends. This 560-seat venue presents 30 shows a year and also organizes a biennial, the »Biennale Arts Sciences Les Rencontres-i;« an arts, sciences, and technology fair called EXPERIMENTA, exhibiting devices imagined through encounters between artists and scientists; and 200 artistic and cultural activities around artistic projects. It welcomes approximately 60,000 spectators a year.
Hexagone’s main missions are:
1 – Research between artists and scientists
2 – Creation and production of artworks
3 – Presentation of shows on Hexagone’s stage and their distribution through artistic networks
4 – Artistic, cultural, and educational outreach activities
In the aim of becoming the French National Center for Arts and Sciences, the assessment of Hexagone’s activities will be based on:
- Renewing artistic forms and emerging writing;
- Promoting and nurturing research, development, and technological transfer with universities and industries;
- Providing the general public with the keys to understanding important contemporary intellectual currents – promoting a secular and state-sanctioned point of view;
- Developing a network of French and European artistic organizations connecting arts, sciences, and technologies.
In autumn 2002, Hexagone launched the Rencontres-i Festival of Imagination, a cultural event bringing together artists, scientists, universities, social workers, and companies. Their objective is to facilitate the cross-pollination of ideas and boost creativity across our area and to open the outcomes of arts and sciences projects to the public.
Our latest project is Atelier Arts et Technologies de l’Attention, which we are building with CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) and Unité Mixte de Recherche Litt&Arts of Université de Grenoble Alpes. It will apply our action research methodology to scientific disciplines such as neurosciences, cognition, literature, media archaeology, media futurology, theater studies, geography, and urbanism.
The Projet Galilée refers to Bertolt Brecht’s Leben des Galilei (The Life of Galileo). Brecht wrote many different versions of his play, modifying it with the evolutions of the international situation, with the evolution of scientific questions. With the very rapid recent evolution of scientific and technological knowledge, how could Brecht write The Life of Galileo today? I did not choose to ask our affiliated authors and people engaged in new forms of writing to write a play immediately. I rather decided to organize meetings between artists and scientists, and ask them for small texts or devices to present to our audience.
We work with theater authors, science-fiction writers, choreographers, circus artists, and digital artists.
Didier Ruiz – voice of scientists
Carole Thibaud – story of scientists
Boris Gibé – playing with magnetism
Alexandros Mistriotis – Homer and technological advances
Christian Ubl – new mythological gesture
le Groupe les N+1 – how does it work in your head? how does action work?
Mael Le Mée – biological research and biological stories.
Danielle Martinigol – energy and science fiction novels
L’Atelier Arts Sciences
Since the first edition of the biennial, CEA has been providing its contribution to realizing a groundbreaking experience. Having coorganized four festivals and numerous shared projects, the two organizations joined in a mutual commitment to go further in this cross-fertilization by founding the Atelier Arts Sciences in 2007, a research and experimentation platform shared by artists and scientists.
Residencies spanning a few days or several months result in a public stage performance, a showcased object, software, or methodology. These are also followed up by a written publication, the Cahiers de L’Atelier.
Common works are set up according to three possible scenarios: 1) a scientist conceives the technology turning the artist’s dream into reality; 2) the artist imagines applications for an innovation by the scientist; and 3) changes in worldview or shifts in humankind, triggered by new knowledge and technology, are analyzed at the crossroads of common interests.
Since its creation, the Atelier Arts Sciences has administered around 30 residencies including Adrien M/Claire B – Les Paysages abstraits (2009–2011), Daniel Danis – L’Enfant lunaire and Traces (2011–2013), and EZ3kiel – Les Mécaniques poétiques (2007–2009). The latest residency by the beatboxer Ezra and the software developer Thomas Pachoud with the Bionic Orchestra 2.0 project (2013–2014) represents a typical Atelier process: Through simple hand gestures, Ezra controls the recording and transformation of his voice, the sound and light travel in space using an interactive glove designed and tailor-made by two glovemakers in Grenoble as well as the artist’s developers and a team of researchers at the Atelier Arts Sciences. This glove yields to multiple possibilities of application in various sectors, such as health, domotics, gaming, and both industrial and collaborative digital devices. This residency is an outstanding example of synergy between artistic imagination, craftsmanship, know-how, and scientific research.
To organize the connection between artists and scientists, we present EXPERIMENTA, a four- day exhibition taking place each second week of October, in which artists, scientists, and companies present their new artworks and devices.
Among all the activities of Hexagone Scene Nationale Arts Sciences, it is at the Atelier Arts Sciences that the connection between authorship and ownership is the most significant.
How do we work?
- CEA researchers want to test a technology they have developed, under new conditions. They explain that today’s technological research is guided by an incremental process and confined in a financial system pursuing the lowest risk possible. But you cannot innovate inside the borders of a known horizon. This is why they invited us along with the artists that I gather. The basic rules for all the workshops we organize is that each person retains ownership of what he or she brings to the workshop, while what emerges during the workshop can be used by everyone and becomes collective property. It is important to note that CEA is in a position to register and finance a patent.
- Artists have a question, a technological issue, they want to do something; they have an idea they want to put on stage. And you know that ideas are not patentable.
- Searching for new representations of the world induced by new knowledge and new technologies; something between imagination, knowledge, mythology, fable, and legend. And perhaps here is the seat of the most interesting and significant part of our exploration at the roots of our relationship to technology. It has something to do with media archaeology – the object of the Atelier Arts et Technologies de l’Attention, the new laboratory we are building with Université Grenoble Alpes in agreement with CNRS and the French Ministry of Culture. It is based on Yves Citton’s works and will give artists the opportunity to work with humanities researchers. And it is very difficult here to identify ownership possibilities in Atelier Arts Sciences or in Atelier Arts et Technologies de l’Attention. We intervene in the second or third stage of innovation, working more on the point of view than on developing a patentable object. It’s something like basic research. Fréderique Aït Touati, a researcher in history of science, explains how Kepler used a fable to open the minds of his contemporaries, to prepare their imaginations for the new points of view offered by the knowledge developed by astronomy. He first imagined humans going to the moon and looking at the earth, challenging the idea that Earth was the center of the universe. These are the types of groundbreaking ideas we are looking for. But that third way usually doesn’t have a technological object driving the research. It is more difficult to drive such a project.
Coexistence of Three Models
Ezra wanted to find a new way to control sound and light on the stage. He first used an iPhone, but the phone was not user-friendly enough for him on stage, making him lose visual contact with audience members and thus their attention.
We visited different laboratories, searching for a suitable brain-computer interface. Then came the proposition of using a glove. Ezra worked with Thomas Pachoud, a digital maker, and during the realization of the project they toggled between CEA-owned and open-source technologies. They had to find sensors, conductors, batteries – all very small technologies embedded in the glove. Over the course of a year, they explored different technologies from ownership to open source. We are in two parallel worlds.
The glove is now technologically sound; the show is great. Ezra and his team decided to keep the glove open source, hoping that a model may emerge between open source for the technology and basic applications, and ownership for specific applications. CEA does not agree with that model, all its activity being based on ownership as a source of employment and development. Adding to the dilemma, Ezra also decided not to register copyrights for his show.
Since Atelier Arts Sciences was created, we have explored the coexistence of these three models: ownership, authorship, and open source. We did so without freezing the relationship, remaining ready to explore what new fields technologies would open, acknowledging that new technologies enable social innovation and thus new forms of property models – while social innovation also drives technological innovations.