<nettime> Les Immatériaux, working paper about Epreuves d'écriture (1985)

[Andreas Broeckmann <ab@mikro.in-berlin.de>]

Dear colleagues,

in the spirit of Nettime's "collaborative text filtering", I take the 
liberty to send this information regarding a text-in-progress about the 
writing experiment done in the framework of the exhibition Les 
Immatériaux, "Epreuves d'écriture" (1985). - You will find the 
introductory abstract below, as well as the link to the PDF of the full 
text.

http://les-immateriaux.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Broeckmann_On_Epreuves_d_ecriture_DRAFT_20210625.pdf

I would be curious to get feedback about this attempt to provide a 
detailed account of the conceptualisation and realisation of this 
important historical project.

Best regards,

Andreas

--

On Epreuves d'écriture, the collaborative writing project of Les Immatériaux

Andreas Broeckmann

When the exhibition Les Immatériaux opened at the Centre Georges 
Pompidou in Paris in March 1985, its three-part catalogue contained – 
beside the Inventaire and Album – a volume entitled Epreuves d'écriture. 
This 260-page book, whose title translates as "printing proofs", but 
also as "writing tests", or "the ordeals of writing", was the result of 
a collaborative writing project that the curatorial team of the 
exhibition, working at the Centre de Création Industrielle (CCI), had 
organised in the autumn of 1984. Between October and December 1984, 26 
authors – philosophers, scientists, artists, writers – were each 
equipped with an Olivetti M20 desktop computer, networked through a 
telephone modem to a central server housed at the CCI, and were invited 
to write short texts about a set of 50 pre-selected keywords. According 
to the "rules of the game" (règle du jeu) that they were given, the 
authors were asked first to propose definitions of the keywords, and 
then to expand on their own texts, or to comment on those of the other 
participants. This process resulted in over 500 mostly short texts, many 
less than ten lines long, which were, after the end of the writing 
phase, assembled into the first volume of the exhibition catalogue. 
During this editorial process, some of the texts were additionally 
adapted for presentation on the public Minitel network. In the 
exhibition, the project was presented as the central element in the 
large, final space called the Labyrinthe du langage which comprised a 
number of screen-based artistic and literary projects. Here the Epreuves 
d'écriture project could be consulted on five Minitel terminals, 
positioned in a semi-circle around the centrally displayed Olivetti M24 
server.

The Immatériaux exhibition as a whole was curated by the philosopher 
Jean-François Lyotard and by the design theoretician Thierry Chaput. The 
Epreuves d'écriture project was based on an idea by Chaput, and was 
organised by the CCI project manager Nicole Toutcheff, the editor 
Chantal Noël, and the editorial assistant Elisabeth Gad. Both Chaput and 
Lyotard took a keen interest in the project and participated in the 
realisation process.

These basic parameters of the Epreuves d'écriture project have been 
known and occasionally recounted ever since its first presentation in 
1985. Chaput and Lyotard describe the overall plan in their introduction 
to the catalogue publication, "La raison des épreuves", and in a 
"Post-scriptum" that Lyotard co-authored with Elisabeth Gad, Chantal 
Noël and Nicole Toutcheff, the editors offer insights into their 
experience supervising the writing process, as well as an analysis of 
the results. The main treatment of the project in the secondary 
literature can be found in the monographs about Les Immatériaux by 
Antonia Wunderlich and Francesca Gallo. Wunderlich provides a summary 
description of the overall project and an account of the evaluation by 
the editors in the "Post-scriptum". In contrast, Gallo takes a more 
topical approach and, after a general account of the project, offers a 
series of short text excerpts which reflect the impact that the new 
media technologies had on contemporary art and theory, here elucidated 
through quotations from different authors on the keywords interaction, 
image, immateriality, interface, and simulation.

The present text recounts for the first time the conceptualisation and 
the realisation of the Epreuves d'écriture project. It offers a detailed 
analysis of the contributions by the different authors, and of the 
interaction between them. The text aims to evaluate the specific 
significance of the Epreuves d'écriture by providing a contextualisation 
of the project with regard to other such early examples of network-based 
and collaborative writing experiments. The text describes the gradual 
elaboration of the concept which evolved in close conjunction with its 
technical realisation. The deployed technical network infrastructure and 
software, both of them specially developed to allow the reading and 
writing, uploading and downloading of texts by the authors, impacted the 
shape that the project eventually took. To a similar extent, the 
specificities and limitations of the Minitel system, its screen size and 
network conventions, determined the preparation of how visitors to the 
exhibition encountered the project in the Labyrinthe du langage, or on 
their Minitel terminals at home. Whereas the sparse secondary literature 
generally qualifies the Epreuves project as unsuccessful, a closer 
analysis shows that at least in the contributions of some of the authors 
we can see the emergence of a mentality of "being online", which makes 
the writing experiment of Les Immatériaux a "social medium" 'bien 
avant-la-lettre'.

Full text (PDF, 12 MB) at:

http://les-immateriaux.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Broeckmann_On_Epreuves_d_ecriture_DRAFT_20210625.pdf


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Leuphana Universität Lüneburg                 www.leuphana.de
Dr. habil. Andreas Broeckmann          broeckmann@leuphana.de
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