Hervé Fischer
Artist and sociologist
Conference : Posthumanism or Hyperhumanism?
Multimedia artist and philosopher Hervé Fischer initiated Sociological art in1971 and practices since 2011 tweet art and tweet philosophy. His work has been presented in numerous art museums and biennales. The Centre Pompidou has devoted to him a retrospective Hervé Fischer and sociological art in 2017. Pioneer of the digital revolution in Quebec, he cofounded the Cité des arts et des nouvelles technologies de Montréal in 1985, the first Cybercafé in Canada, the Télescience Festival, Science for All. His research focuses on art, sociology of colors, the digital revolution , social imagination, hyperhumanism. He created the Quebec Media lab Hexagram. He is the author many books including Théorie de l’art sociologique (1977), L’Histoire de l’art est terminée (1981), Digital Shock (2002), CyberProméthée, l’instinct de puissance (2003), La planète hyper, de la pensée linéaire à la pensée en arabesque (2004), The Decline of the Hollywood Empire (2005), La société sur le divan (2007), L’Avenir de l’art (2010), La divergence du futur (2014), La pensée imaginaire du Net (2014), Market Art (2016). He is the founder of the International Society of Mythanalysis.
Mythanalysis states that every reality is fabulation, every fabulation is reality, but we have to choose carefully our fabulations and avoid hallucinations. Time in the past stuck to existence as reality sticks to our eyes, creating our ordinary feeling of life. Nowadays time’s exponential acceleration cuts itself from daily life. It erases it as it would do with digital files, and launches us into an imaginary future, which seems by now to be at the very core of our human adventure. Those attached to the past expect with fatalism the apocalypse, whereas the fundamentalist prophets of the digital technology, who denounce the obsolescence of the carbon human being, predict our mutation into trans- and posthumanism thanks to silicon. These cyberPromothean promises of power replace the collapsed political utopia of the 19th century. Denying our vital instinct and the very fragility of nature, which is also ours, these utopias will not do better. We propose an alternative techno-humanism that we call hyperhumanism. Hyper for more humanism thanks to the multiplication of the digital hyperlinks, which create in real time an « augmented consciousness », and therefore the global ethics we need. The human progress, which may result of it, may be more uncertain than technological progress, but it will be more critical for our future.