With its title echoing to Gilles Deleuze works The Movement Image and The Time Image, The Image-Matter, between philosophy, contemporary art and science, offers tools to create new mental images to understand this new vision of the world shaped by nanotechnologies and help us to do the necessary metamorphosis of our imaginary.
It is now possible for scientists to control the structure of matter at a scale so minute that previously unimaginable properties emerge. Organic matter may even be hybridized with nonorganic matter, as the border between the inert and the living increasingly blurs. Consequently, we need to rethink our relation to, and apprehension of, the world. With the advance of materials science, the artist need not sculpt the external form but the internal sub-structures of matter, not the object but its properties. In The Image-Matter, scientist and artist Dominique Peysson offers tools to help us comprehend the new vision of the world proposed by materials science, and encourages us to perform the necessary transformation of our imaginations.
Dominique Peysson (lives and works in Paris) is a researcher and a visual artist. She holds two PhDs, the first one obtained in 1994 in materials physics and the second in 2014 in arts and sciences of art. She is now working on emerging materials for contemporary art at l'École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD). Her theoretical work is accompanied by a practice in visual art that she feeds by experiments in laboratories. She also works for a think tank on Arts & Sciences research.
