At the beginning of the 21st Century those changes which were ushered in by cybernetics half a century ago have started significantly to affect man’s sense of his place on the planet. Space and the distances between entities and our human counterparts have shrunken, without however allowing things and people to become better acquainted nor interrelate through heightened closeness of contact.

Media, data programming, progress in understanding, communicating the here and now and the very place of human presence have undergone major transformations giving direction to the future of society. Today therefore it is relevant to query the “figures” cross-linking and alienating human groups, these historic “figures” in social bonding which are today distorted by development in technologies and in digital technology.

The European school of visual arts (ÉESI)) fulfills its role as overseer and as a higher education academic institution, in analysis, research, educational method and in that artistic creativity best able to lead the way forward on the path to addressing these basic issues.
Together with the University of Poitiers and the Université du Québec à Montréal, the ÉESI and the Espace Mendès-France have devised the launch of a two yearly international multidisciplinary series of meetings from the Fall of 2008, in the form of a think-tank focusing on the “Figures of Interactivity”.

The first international conference, “Cinema, Interactivity and Society” calls upon artists and research fellows to seek to broaden horizons from the standpoint of cinema, by scanning a range of issues associated with the perception and the creation of images in motion, viewed from the critical angle of interactivity.
Far beyond a mere glance at today’s digital design and production, the conference seeks to provoke thought by focusing on the ceaseless permutation of data dissemination via forms and supports of communication in process-controlled time.

Prefacing Gene Youngblood’s book on the “Expanded Cinema” which came out in 1970, Buckminster Fuller wrote “His book Expanded Cinema is his own name for the forward, omni-humanity educating function of man’s total communications system”. Just where is cinema today, and where is it going to be forty years on after a vision of experimental cinema caught sight of a “Universal Scenario principle”, “which must be employed by humanity to synchronize its senses and its knowledge in time to ensure the continuance of that little, three-and-a-half-billion member team of humanity now installed […]”?

Is it possible today for us to conceive teaching methods for the cinema, after and before Jean-Luc Godard, and to get a “logic of being produced” (Théodore Adorno) in order to promote and project film making, in the cinema-theatre or at home, to the core of society?
Where have we got to with “the intermedia network of cinema and television” as Gene Youngblood saw it in McLuhan’s terms, like a “nervous system of mankind” and a later “murder of cinema” by remote-controls in the eighties, as Peter Greenaway pointed out?
Where are the ethics of media within cinema today and what are the levels and tenor of a technological system such as digitalization cinematographic narration all the way to “Images at the End of the World” (Wim Wenders)?

The conference will attempt to cast light on these issues with the cooperation of film-makers, artists, theorists, critics and programmer-engineers.

The Figures of Interactivity international conference biennial has as its avowed intention the development and perpetuation of an international network for digital research and conception to which the ÉESI and the Espace Mendes France closely subscribe in the Poitou-Charentes Region of France and in Europe along with its partners.

Hubertus von Amelunxen, Rector, ÉESI
Didier Moreau, Chief Executive, Espace Mendès France