The Gaîté Lyrique is reborn from the ashes after having closed its doors twenty years ago. Parisians are invited to come discover the new space dedicated to digital culture through a series of inaugural events set to take place throughout its opening week. The digital revolution breaths new life into the old Italian style theater, whose doors first opened in 1862, just as French operetta was beginning to blossom. The prestigious venue lived through many happy metamorphoses and transformations over the years, but suffered a slow decline through the end of the 20th century, finally shutting its doors in 1989.The City of Paris made the decision to revive the historic site in the early 2000s in order to restore it to the city and its inhabitants. As our digital age asserts itself more and more on our daily life, and more importantly, on our artistic endeavors, there is little we can say to deny its growing influence. That’s why ten years and an architectural revamp later, the Gaîté Lyrique over 9 500 m² of exhibition space (spread between seven floors) are being dedicated to digital culture. The program for this new cultural melting pot will showcase visual and performing arts, music, cinema, design and video games, all side by side.The ambitious new line-up will be filled with thematic exhibitions, concerts, performances and guest curation from artists-in-residence and record labels.The Gaîté Lyrique will also play host to The Creators Project as a part of our series of international events planned for the upcoming year. Starting from June 1-5 at the Nuits Sonores, one of the finest French music festivals set in Lyon, we have an exclusive program that will draw together art installations, concerts, and film screenings, before relocating to the Gaîté Lyrique from June 8-11. More detailed information on these two exceptional events will soon be available on the blog.We recently met with Vincent Carry, the artistic advisor for the Gaîté Lyrique, and director of the Nuits Sonores, to find out more about the project.The Creator’s Project: The Gaîté Lyrique will soon be dedicating itself to the digital revolution, what are the various disciplines and formats that you consider to fall within this bracket?
Vincent Carry: The idea was not to jump into the project with biased opinions on any of the various fields that could fall under so broad a term. We had no intention of creating a museum of digital art, which would be incredibly uninteresting, nor one showcasing current music, which would be equally so. We wanted to transform the Gaîté Lyrique into a space where our current cultural innovation and its relationship to the digital world could be openly discussed. This ‘digital revolution’ has inspired huge transformation in the variety of ways people create and listen to music, see images, imagine works of art, and then proceed to bring them to life. Our creative realms are transforming, whether as an artist, spectator, listener, or in our interaction with the work. It’s this metamorphosis that we wanted to explore. In more practical terms, the notion brings together a much larger set of ideas that span a variety of forms, namely performance art, concerts, parties, and an array of staged and live multimedia presentations. The capacity for interaction between music and image is a key component in the program. The Rimini Protocol show, which has been scheduled to coincide with the opening, is entirely multidisciplinary and interactive. In addition to displays such as these, there will also be an area dedicated to video games. All spaces have been designed, more or less, in order to enable video to keep a stronghold throughout the various exhibits.So these new art forms and new practices should thus be highlighted with a new style of exhibition space? I would imagine the new Gaîté Lyrique site will be pivotal in achieving this.
There are a variety of issues at play. It’s a very well equipped tool box, uniting separate entities that have never before been in such close proximity. Our primary interest lies with what it enables us to produce with the artists on site, to then record, edit, and upload their work to the internet or otherwise. In addition, we would like to attempt to take into our own hands some of the radical changes that have taken place since 2000. It’s the first time that our youngest generation is being actively targeted by a cultural establishment. It will be up to them to broaden the horizons of our public, by bringing their parents, for example. The final, and what seems to be the most important element, has to do with our plans to organize a highly thematic and editorialized program, broaching subjects from all angles in a multi-disciplinarian manner. We’ve organized a week, for example, dedicated to Berlin’s emerging art scene, where the public will be able to meet authors, attend concerts, watch films, multimedia shows, audio visual creations, digital installations etc…. A second example is the skateboarding exhibit planned for summer 2011. We want to broach the subject from not only a practical angle with the skatepark we have planned to build in the square opposite [the theater], but also through a more traditional format with an international skateboarding culture-based exhibition.If we’re not mistaken, you also plan to hold conferences, seminars and meet-and-greets with researchers and representatives from the art world alongside these exhibitions. How important do you consider this forum for discussion?
For me, it’s a decisive factor. It will initially be up to the resource centers to complete and fill in the program designed by the organizers, giving them a greater meaning, broadening the ideas with additional content and linking them to other subjects. We have no desire to become an elitist center catering only to to digital culture experts or geeks that are already a part of the culture. Rather, the public we’re hoping to draw is one without prior involvement in the digital culture. We’re using a public space to relay the information and putting in place a number of events in order to draw in a more varied audience.Do you believe that the Gaîté Lyrique’s opening could have a domino effect in popularizing this new artistic scene in France?
Yes, this is already the case. The location will be very useful in building relationships between a variety of disciplines. Nowadays a lot of artists, especially in the world of electronic music, involve set design, installations and appropriate more and more elements from contemporary art. We organized a rendezvous for example, between Mondkopf and an art collective known as Trafik who are now collaborating on a new book. In the same vein, another electronic music artist known as Danger has joined forces with Raphael Siboni, who is from the world of contemporary art.Tell us a little about the schedule for the upcoming first few months.
To begin with, we are opening with a festival running from the 2nd through the 6th of March that will bring together roughly twenty musicians including Mondkopf and Danger, Para One and Tacteel‘s new live line-up, James Murphy, Battant and Pilooski, among others. The opening site, which happens to also be the largest, will be home to the UVA/ United Visual Artists collective’s installation, a huge interactive project that will be open from the start. To follow, we have Berlin Next!, a week dedicated to the new Berlin scene that I mentioned earlier. The next week will play host to the French record label Infiné, whose artists will take over every part of the Gaîté Lyrique with concerts, installations and screenings. Next, big things are to be expected from Matt Pyke‘s huge exhibition, we’ve already been granted a glimpse of a few of the truly impressive initial elements. From the 18th of June to the 7th of August we’ll host the huge skateboard exhibit that I mentioned earlier which is being curated by Morgan Bouvant and Pedro Winter. It will be a strong opening for the Gaîté Lyrique. We see it as an accurate representation of our organization’s direction while also making it clear that we have no intention to enforce a particular dogma on how digital art should be exhibited. What people are interested in, artists as much as the general public, has nothing to do with new technology nor with digital art as a subject unto itself. It is the art practice and the way in which innovation sees the light of day that is most interesting.You can visit the Gaîté Lyrique website here for more information.Photos courtesy of UVA – United Visual Artists ©, Matt Pyke ©, MANUELLE GAUTRAND ARCHITECTURE © PHILIPPE RUAULT ©
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Vincent Carry: The idea was not to jump into the project with biased opinions on any of the various fields that could fall under so broad a term. We had no intention of creating a museum of digital art, which would be incredibly uninteresting, nor one showcasing current music, which would be equally so. We wanted to transform the Gaîté Lyrique into a space where our current cultural innovation and its relationship to the digital world could be openly discussed. This ‘digital revolution’ has inspired huge transformation in the variety of ways people create and listen to music, see images, imagine works of art, and then proceed to bring them to life. Our creative realms are transforming, whether as an artist, spectator, listener, or in our interaction with the work. It’s this metamorphosis that we wanted to explore. In more practical terms, the notion brings together a much larger set of ideas that span a variety of forms, namely performance art, concerts, parties, and an array of staged and live multimedia presentations. The capacity for interaction between music and image is a key component in the program. The Rimini Protocol show, which has been scheduled to coincide with the opening, is entirely multidisciplinary and interactive. In addition to displays such as these, there will also be an area dedicated to video games. All spaces have been designed, more or less, in order to enable video to keep a stronghold throughout the various exhibits.
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There are a variety of issues at play. It’s a very well equipped tool box, uniting separate entities that have never before been in such close proximity. Our primary interest lies with what it enables us to produce with the artists on site, to then record, edit, and upload their work to the internet or otherwise. In addition, we would like to attempt to take into our own hands some of the radical changes that have taken place since 2000. It’s the first time that our youngest generation is being actively targeted by a cultural establishment. It will be up to them to broaden the horizons of our public, by bringing their parents, for example. The final, and what seems to be the most important element, has to do with our plans to organize a highly thematic and editorialized program, broaching subjects from all angles in a multi-disciplinarian manner. We’ve organized a week, for example, dedicated to Berlin’s emerging art scene, where the public will be able to meet authors, attend concerts, watch films, multimedia shows, audio visual creations, digital installations etc…. A second example is the skateboarding exhibit planned for summer 2011. We want to broach the subject from not only a practical angle with the skatepark we have planned to build in the square opposite [the theater], but also through a more traditional format with an international skateboarding culture-based exhibition.
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For me, it’s a decisive factor. It will initially be up to the resource centers to complete and fill in the program designed by the organizers, giving them a greater meaning, broadening the ideas with additional content and linking them to other subjects. We have no desire to become an elitist center catering only to to digital culture experts or geeks that are already a part of the culture. Rather, the public we’re hoping to draw is one without prior involvement in the digital culture. We’re using a public space to relay the information and putting in place a number of events in order to draw in a more varied audience.Do you believe that the Gaîté Lyrique’s opening could have a domino effect in popularizing this new artistic scene in France?
Yes, this is already the case. The location will be very useful in building relationships between a variety of disciplines. Nowadays a lot of artists, especially in the world of electronic music, involve set design, installations and appropriate more and more elements from contemporary art. We organized a rendezvous for example, between Mondkopf and an art collective known as Trafik who are now collaborating on a new book. In the same vein, another electronic music artist known as Danger has joined forces with Raphael Siboni, who is from the world of contemporary art.Tell us a little about the schedule for the upcoming first few months.
To begin with, we are opening with a festival running from the 2nd through the 6th of March that will bring together roughly twenty musicians including Mondkopf and Danger, Para One and Tacteel‘s new live line-up, James Murphy, Battant and Pilooski, among others. The opening site, which happens to also be the largest, will be home to the UVA/ United Visual Artists collective’s installation, a huge interactive project that will be open from the start. To follow, we have Berlin Next!, a week dedicated to the new Berlin scene that I mentioned earlier. The next week will play host to the French record label Infiné, whose artists will take over every part of the Gaîté Lyrique with concerts, installations and screenings. Next, big things are to be expected from Matt Pyke‘s huge exhibition, we’ve already been granted a glimpse of a few of the truly impressive initial elements. From the 18th of June to the 7th of August we’ll host the huge skateboard exhibit that I mentioned earlier which is being curated by Morgan Bouvant and Pedro Winter. It will be a strong opening for the Gaîté Lyrique. We see it as an accurate representation of our organization’s direction while also making it clear that we have no intention to enforce a particular dogma on how digital art should be exhibited. What people are interested in, artists as much as the general public, has nothing to do with new technology nor with digital art as a subject unto itself. It is the art practice and the way in which innovation sees the light of day that is most interesting.You can visit the Gaîté Lyrique website here for more information.Photos courtesy of UVA – United Visual Artists ©, Matt Pyke ©, MANUELLE GAUTRAND ARCHITECTURE © PHILIPPE RUAULT ©