The Les Immatériaux Research project (LIR) pursues the documentation of the exhibition Les Immatériaux (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1985). Its main goal is to make it easier to study and research the exhibition. The LIR project seeks to collect both published and unpublished materials about the exhibition, its preparation and its reception, and to make these materials available online, as well as in a print publication which runs under the working title of “The Atlas of Les Immatériaux” and which will provide a comprehensive overview of the exhibition, its preparation, realisation, and afterlife.

The exhibition Les Immatériaux was presented at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in the spring of 1985. It marks a highly significant moment in the confluent developments of media, art, theory and technology in the late 20th century. In preparation of this exhibition, the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, the design theorist Thierry Chaput, and the team of the Centre Pompidou’s Centre de Création Industrielle (CCI), cooperated with a large number of partners, artists, scientists, research agencies and companies in order to articulate in a multi-disciplinary “manifestation” what Lyotard had described, a few years earlier, as “the postmodern condition” (1979).

Contact: Dr. Andreas Broeckmann, Berlin