This publication celebrates 10 years of
Poptronics, a French online media dedicated to
net-culture: net-art, video games,
music and
sound art, hacktivism, post-digital art… For its tenth anniversary,
Poptronics brought up a collective archive of its materials, revisited by the French digital art scene.
How does one put a flow of information on paper? Poptronics, the platform of hacktive cultures, is about to celebrate ten years of online information with a 272-page book.
Wrong-footing the mandatory evolution of the digitally-mutating press, Poptronics chose print to reinvent the archive. Founded by critical journalist Annick Rivoire and a team of authors, critics and artists, the online platform has been resisting the mantras of present time—social media, accelerationism, big data, selfie-zation—since 2007. They have defended autonomous practices online, observed and criticized the evolutions of culture and the information society, and de-compartmentalized and hybridized various practices (open source, circuit bending, sound art, indie video game, hacktivism, net art, noise…).
For its tenth anniversary, under the artistic direction of
Christophe Jacquet aka Toffe and the editorial direction of Annick Rivoire and Matthieu Recarte, Poptronics has imagined a collective archive drawing from the 2,500 articles published on poptronics.fr. This digital raw material has been entrusted to artists of the French digital scene. Agnès de Cayeux, Albertine Meunier, Christophe Jacquet aka Toffe, David Guez, Nicolas Frespech,
Optical Sound (
Pierre Beloüin & P. Nicolas Ledoux), Pierre Giner, Roberte la Rousse (Cécile Babiole and Anne Laforet), Systaime, Trafik and Vincent Elka (un)built the archive by recreating it.
The result: a mutant, transgender and resolutely contemporary object.
