About
Photography has not put an end to painting, cinema has not replaced live performance, and video has not supplanted performance art. The history of artistic forms is shaped by these turbulent evolutions, stimulated each time by the arrival of new tools, without the old forms disappearing — they shift, rub shoulders with the new, and are thereby transformed.
What is distinctive about the digital age is that, beyond its own output, it does not merely coexist with pre-existing forms: it alters them, recomposes them, and sometimes elevates them. In the world of the visual arts in particular — from drawing to photography, from sculpture to installation — hybridisation is rapid, unpredictable and innovative. It thus opens up the field of creation to new worlds, to be explored rather than feared.
Gabriel Soucheyre has directed VIDEOFORMES, the international digital arts festival in Clermont-Ferrand (France), since 1986, together with the VIDEOFORMES digital archive. He is the editor of Turbulences Vidéo, a quarterly magazine on video art and digital culture, and curator of the Galerie de l’art du temps, devoted to time-based arts. He takes part in many events in France and abroad as a curator or jury member, and is also a producer and videomaker.
