Proceedings of the International Conference TEXT & IMAGE6

Texte [s - on] Image : vers un nouveau contrat social de l’errance
editors Carole Brandon, Gaëtan Le Coarer, Marc Veyrat, Khaldoun Zreik, Richard Spiteri.
Art direction: Marc Veyrat & Rudy Rigoudy.
published by CoolLibri, Toulouse, 2025, 21cm x 21, ill., 257p., ISBN 9782959429736

“Text/Sound/Image: towards a new social contract for random searching”
This conference was originally intended to take place in October 2020, but due to the pandemic, was postponed to a later date. It took place at Valletta, Malta Society of Arts, on 2-3 September 2021. Behind the organisation of the conference were especially the research centre CiTu – Paragraphe of University Paris 8 and research centre LLSETI of University Savoie Mont-Blanc. On the Maltese side, the participants were the Department of French, Faculty of Arts, and the Centre for Distributed Ledger Technologies.

The proceedings start with a foreword by the then Advisor for Cooperation and Culture at the French Embassy, Mme Marine Debliquis, who braved the early September hot and humid weather to inaugurate the conference.

Several papers extoll the vital contribution of hypermedia in 21st century art. Philippe Franck, from Belgium, was — he passed in January 2025, r.i.p. — director of Transcultures, a centre for creativity through sound and digital applications. He was organizer in Mons and Louvain-la-Neuve of the two-yearly festival, City Sonic, open to anyone passing by. In the festival Heartscopes, held in Besançon, strollers were invited to listen to different sounds in the city. The organizers made available brief sound transmissions inside objects like a traffic sign, a roof gutter, a window etc. and curious visitors could listen to them by means of a stethoscope!

Franck mentions “sound sculptures” by Bill Fontana from the USA. Before 1940, Anhalter Bahnof at Cologne was one of the busiest train stations in Europe. After heavy bombing, Anhalter Bahnhof decreased in importance and two decades later the former train station made way to an open space. With his project “Distant trains”, Bill Fontana reclaims, through sound, a lost territory. In this big empty space in Cologne, he created the sounds of train engines, voices on the loudspeaker blaring out the time of the departure or arrival of trains. A generation of Germans could nostalgically relive a recent past.

Marc Veyrat catches up with and interviews one of the most dynamic visual artists of our times, Alessandro Bavari (born 1963). Bavari’s formative years seem to be quite ordinary: he registered at the Rome Academy of Fine Arts where he excelled in scenography. About the videos and photography he produces, he says it is the digital equivalent of Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities (1972). The Gothic atmosphere of his output caught the eye of Ridley Scott who invited Bavari to join his team as artist director.

One exciting aspect of this conference was the marking of a junction where digital art meets literature. Gaëtan Le Coarer defended, some years back, a PhD thesis entitled Graphic Novel and mixed reality: towards new spaces of narration. This time, working with the Department of British and Irish Civilisation at Savoie University, he singles out a Gaelic legend of the 13th century: The Tragic end of the Tuireann brothers. For committing murder, the brothers are ordered to venture into unknown territories and bring back from there renowned swords, precious objects etc. Le Coarer demonstrates how to transpose this crude legend on the digital screen. Being a keen admirer of Pierre Soulages (1919-2022) who makes a stunning use of the colour black, Le Coarer quotes the definition which the painter gives to Outre-noir (beyond black). “Outre-noir is not simply an optic phenomenon…it is the colour black leading to another mental sphere.” In fact, it is with India ink that he starts tackling the Tuireann brothers legend.

This volume contains another interview, this time with Philippe Boisnard (born in Paris, 1971) poet and multimedia artist. Boisnard has close connections with research centre CiTu-Paragraphe. He started with experimental writing, then joined the group LittéraTube which looked on YouTube as a nursery of poetry. Later, by opting for the style of “words galore”, he was borrowing a leaf from Marinetti.

Boisnard started to invent software for producing poetry and which he shared with colleagues. His hypermedia knowhow helped him set up installations like phAUTOmaton (2013) where visitors, by means of words, created the image of their face which was uploaded on website. This ever-growing crowd unsettles our sense of identity on social media.

Though critics think of Boisnard as a digital artist, he says he is in fact a poet for, even in his explorations of immaterial territories, the linguistic content remains primordial. His short novel Life and death of a transsexual (2018) puts human identity to the test as we approach ever closer to what Boisnard calls post-history.

In the proceedings of the conference the name of Marc Veyrat decidedly stands out. He authors the preface, co-authors two academic papers and is behind the Bavari interview. The list of contributors is the following: Carole Brandon, Khaldoun Zreik, Richard Spiteri, Claire Azéma (University of Bordeaux), Gaëtan Le Coarer, Anaïs Bernard, Nasreddine Bouhaï, Matthieu Quiniou, Philippe Franck, Marc Mercier, Salima El Aissaoui, Yves Doyon, Jordan Fraser Emery, Philippe Boisnard, Alessandro Bavari, Sabrina Mazigh, Shumin Liang, Alyse Yilmaz, Stanislas Kurakin, Manon Micaletti and Thomas Pactole.

To all the friends who collaborated with the University of Malta, the Department of French says à la prochaine!