Sculpture and New Material

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After a university training in science (fundamental physics, external geophysics, astronomy), Jean-Marc Philippe devoted himself to painting. Questioning, as his experience grew, his practice as a painter in contemporary society, he gradually abandoned the classical tools of artistic creation — brush, canvas, pigment, easel… — in favour of new technologies, which he took up as tools of a new kind, placing them at the service of his sensibility and his aspirations.

A pioneer of hitherto unknown art forms, he is today pushing back the classical definitions of the work of art and contributing actively to the creative emancipation of his era, of which he is becoming a privileged witness and an active revealer.

Jean-Marc Philippe is a corresponding member of the Académie européenne des sciences, des arts et des lettres.

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One cannot hope to speak well of sculpture and new material without referring to the past as a substratum, allowing a better reading of the present situation so as better to appreciate the continuity or discontinuity of what will be discussed.

In the first quarter of this article, we shall therefore recall what History teaches us, and how the emergence of a new material, representative of the most sophisticated technological know-how of our post-industrial societies, can take its place within tradition, even if it makes sculpture accomplish a radical qualitative leap, overturns its age-old practice and re-enchants its imaginary and the works that will result from it.

A first look at past and present, or the slow elaboration of human tools

The human being, as evolution shows us, is in essence an insatiable explorer as well as a curious and creative experimenter. An explorer as much of his geographical landscape as of his inner horizon, an experimenter as much with the concrete tool as with the conceptual tool. Invention is, in fact, his measure.

In this sense, each original exploration or each new experiment carried out by a few here and there can be understood as a new path liable to be taken up, tested and duplicated, improved where appropriate by others so that, over time — “if it did the job” or truly met real needs, or even created them — it is finally adopted by all and becomes part of the local culture, provided that the means of its economy can be found there. What was true yesterday remains so today, and the global heritage of humanity indeed proceeds from this dynamic.

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Now, from the humblest to the most complex, concrete tools are like conceptual tools: some will be intangible, fully accomplished, immutable one might say, corresponding to an indispensable function insofar as the need they answer remains present on a certain timescale, in a certain place here or elsewhere, such as the wheel, dogma…; others will never cease to be improved, such as printing, the means of disseminating information…; others will never stop transforming, enriching or broadening themselves, as with culinary recipes, law, mathematics…

But it also happens that some of these tools — always in the broadest sense — may no longer correspond to a latent demand, or may have lost their effectiveness in the face of a new, better-suited tool. If it is a concrete tool giving way to another, the one that disappears will take its place and settle in the memory of history, like the knapped flint, the polished stone, the bow, the musket, the slide rule…; or, if it is a complex conceptual tool (religious, political) that turns out to lose its hold, becoming totally ineffective and no longer binding people together, it will disappear of its own accord, dragging an entire civilisation into a slow and inexorable agony, as history has shown us many times, and very recently still.

Each of us is part of this strategy: the hunter long ago, the farmer, the warrior, the shaman, the thinker, the scholar, the scientist, the entrepreneur, the passer-by that we all are… and our contemporary societies too proceed from this same inescapable dynamic. Art and the artist are no exception to the rule.

The artist, that eternal experimenter

The artist is the very prototype of this logic of the explorer-experimenter since, being first of all the producer of his own works, he would for a long time also remain, upstream, the producer of his own tools of execution (brush, treated pigment

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…). And indeed, ever since art made its appearance twenty-five thousand years ago or more, the great gallery of artists’ supplies has never ceased to grow, very slowly until the Renaissance, at an accelerated pace since the industrial era, and exponentially today.

For a long time, it may be granted, the artist was indeed the indispensable master builder of his own tools of creation, making them himself, defining the precise requirement, supervising their production by the apprentices in his workshops. Through accumulated experiments, borrowings and transfers, he could thus identify and decide what seemed to him to correspond to the tool, or tools, most appropriate for expressing his sensibility and the spirit of the era too, bequeathing to posterity, where appropriate, the fruit of his labour in a twofold form: his work on the one hand, and his possible new tools of artistic production on the other.

Inescapably, it does appear that empiricism has been — and still remains — decisive in the appearance and elaboration of tools of creation. Trial and error, attempts and mistakes being the watchwords that made it possible to arrive at those recipes or those accomplished forms taken by the concrete or conceptual tool. As an example of accomplished forms, one may take those reached by the violin over centuries of experimentation; of accomplished recipes, one may think of that for the varnish of the soundboards of the same instrument; and of accomplished conceptual tools, one may think of theoretical works such as the Art of Fugue, treatises on musical harmony or, again, treatises on perspective. (These treatises being to art in general what our computer software is today to computer-generated images, for example.)

A radical break in the gestation of the tool was nevertheless to appear shortly after the years 1800–1850, which may be accepted as the dates of the birth of the industrial era. Indeed, a new state of affairs would take hold whereby tools of creation could be manufactured elsewhere than in the artist’s studio, industrially, which would no doubt lower their cost price and relieve the artist in managing his time, but which would also distance him from their definition.

Caption of the three photographs: “Winter. T = — 05 °C.” (top left); “Spring. T = + 15 °C.” (top right); “Summer. T = + 35 °C.” (bottom left).

Three states of Jean-Marc Philippe’s “Totem of the Future”. © ADAGP.

A refined, sparkling form soars In a fervour in league with Space and with the instant it IS - is MADE - is UNMADE BREATHES perfect inclination, in all its states in all its moments.

And through the play of interactive forms it embodies - time engenders - memory Joined unity of the artist and the scientist in an ultimate, metallic quivering It sculpts a new Consciousness in the garden of the gods

Jacqueline Brenot, October 1989.

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Furthermore, but still as a consequence of the advent of the industrial era, technical progress would make it possible to bring its know-how to bear on artists’ expectations, provided that the latter were able to formulate an explicit demand and that fruitful conditions for dialogue could be established between art and industry.

From the second half of the 19^th century onwards, again, history shows us that the tools of artistic production would owe many essential improvements, or important innovations, to the nascent Art/Industry synergy. Such was the case with the perfecting, in their definitive form, of wind instruments such as the “brass”, which from that time on, thanks to instrument makers incorporating the advances made in physical acoustics, would — at last — play “in tune”, and therefore henceforth also be able to play together, at the same time. Something Richard Wagner would take advantage of straight away.

Among such examples, one cannot fail to recall either that the tremendous progress of the chemical industry, deployed to create the coloured dye baths demanded by the Lyon silk manufacturers in the 1850s, would offer painters new hues by the dozen, original and stable, hues without precedent, in the form of coloured pigments corresponding to isolated chemical compounds… So many new hues that would literally make the painters’ palette burst open, thanks to which Impressionism could come into being and enjoy the success and renown we know.

And this, of course, without counting the appearance of entirely new tools of creation such as photosensitive media, the film camera, video, the cathode-ray image later on…, to which entire new areas of art would be owed.

And it would be easy to demonstrate — as can be glimpsed here — that in every era and in every place, ultimately, artists have always seized upon the technical innovations their society offered them; the pyramids and the cathedrals, bridges, architecture in general could bear witness to this, as could all the other arts taken one by one.

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Today

The exponential explosion of scientific knowledge and technological know-how specific to our industrial societies could not leave individual sensibilities and artistic creation indifferent. If science can be a source of models or a source of inspiration on the level of ideas and concepts, technology can offer “new” tools of artistic creation, tools of creation that will no longer go in the direction of a mere improvement of what already exists, but in the direction of a genuine revelation, amounting to a metamorphosis — as with computer-generated imagery, music samplers or, again, shape-memory alloys.

In this “tool of artistic production/technology” register, two major trends have thus been asserting themselves in recent years:

— either the artist appropriates existing technologies and integrates them into his creation;

— or the artist demands more of technologies in order to adapt them to his creative needs.

It is precisely within this latter dynamic that the relationship between art and memory alloys belongs — a singular relationship which, for several years now, has heralded an unprecedented relationship between art, research laboratory, industry and new material, and which was to make an essential contribution to the sequence of materials used by sculpture: clay, wood, stone, marble, bronze, steel, plastic and, today, memory alloy, the material of mutation, the only one to embody a technological leap that enriches the creative act in the field of sculpture significantly, because qualitatively, as we shall see.

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Shape-memory alloys

After the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, today comes the age of shape-memory alloys, as people are wont to say, so unprecedented is their contribution and so not merely multiple but mutant are the possibilities offered by this new metallurgy.

In factual terms, a shape-memory alloy is an alloy that can be taught different shapes at different temperatures, shapes which it will memorise and subsequently be able to recover each time it encounters those same temperatures again.

The property thus described corresponds to the phenomenon known in fundamental physics as reversible martensitic transformation, a phenomenon first identified (by chance) in 1932 by L. C. Chang and T. A. Read in gold–cadmium alloys, then confirmed again in 1938 by J. Perkins in copper–zinc–aluminium alloys.

From 1950 onwards, Thomas A. Read and his colleagues at the University of Illinois embarked on extensive research into these materials, and it was not until 1962 that W. J. Buehler and his associates (Naval Ordonance Laboratory) showed that this memory property was also present in nickel–titanium. Since then, a large number of metal alloys displaying these properties have been identified. The two most interesting families in terms of industrial application remain, to date, the Cu-Zn-Al family on the one hand and the Ni-Ti family on the other.

The memory properties specific to these alloys therefore lie in the capacity they offer to remember shapes: if only one shape is involved — this is then called the “one-way effect” — metal alloys displaying such properties can be deformed by every physical stress imaginable (stretched, bent, twisted…) below a particular temperature, and will recover the memorised shape as soon as they reach that particular temperature again. Thus these alloys, which remain perfectly stable below a certain temperature, instantly regain their shape as soon as they are heated.

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But some memory alloys also offer what is known as the “two-way effect”, namely that these even more particular alloys can memorise a first shape “A”, then a second shape “B”, at two different temperatures. To these two extreme shapes are added all the intermediate shapes that make it possible to pass from shape “A” to shape “B” through a progressive series of transformations. The alloys displaying this so-called “two-way effect” include nickel–titanium, copper–zinc–aluminium, copper–aluminium–nickel, gold–cadmium and indium–thallium.

Generally speaking, these alloys exhibit the memory phenomenon within temperature ranges lying broadly between — 196 °C and + 150 °C, and fundamental research currently pursues two main goals: to widen this temperature range still further, and to produce these alloys at the lowest possible cost.

Since 1969, industrial applications have existed that are used in the construction of nuclear power stations, in critical hydraulic systems for combat aircraft, in electrical circuits for military and civilian aircraft, in surgical instruments and in various fire-safety systems.

Although the phenomenon of memory in matter is today well known experimentally and widely studied, no truly satisfactory theoretical explanation has yet been put forward, and the international scientific community acknowledges that the first researcher to find one will truly be “Nobel material”, so important is the phenomenon in itself. All that is known at present is that the phenomenon involves the structure of the alloy at the atomic scale, and that the shapes are memorised through the sliding, under certain conditions, of atomic planes against one another, along a path destined to be repeated once it has been “properly” initiated.

The major difficulty encountered in using these alloys remains, today, bound up with their production — the move from small confidential laboratory castings to large-scale, reproducible industrial castings — and with their process of education, still kept secret, just as craftsmen or journeymen once guarded their tricks of the trade. If, today, these tricks of the trade are jealously

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guarded, they cannot remain so for much longer, since some have already been patented. But while the potential applications of these alloys seem vast indeed, working with them proves particularly delicate, as does their industrial development, which makes their potential applications far more limited.

What, then, could art expect from them?

A reinvention of sculpture

Emotion is never innocent of artistic creation, and for anyone who has seen small samples of these alloys react to the flame of a lighter, for instance, struggling to resume the shape they had previously been taught, there is an awakening, like an initiation into a disturbing phenomenon without equivalent, to which each of us reacts with our own cultural references… “Inanimate objects, have you then a soul…”

If we look more closely at the phenomenon of memory in these alloys, we discover that it is not present in metal alloys alone, but is also found in materials such as industrial ceramics, certain plastic molecules, hair and even viruses, or indeed the flagella of spermatozoa… This inclines some scientists to think that the phenomenon may not be innocent of life in its earliest beginnings. And images then resurface from the Bible, when Moses himself spoke of the rod that turned into a serpent, that turned back into a rod, that turned back into a serpent…

Quite obviously, the way we may look at these alloys changes in nature: from purely scientific it can become sensory, and from sensory it can take on a philosophical dimension. And the imagination feeds on it… It was precisely from this shift in perception, from the rational to the sensory, that my determination to carry this art/new-technology relationship through to completion was to be born, in the twofold form, first, of developing the material (so that it would meet the requirements of an application to sculpture), and, in the

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form, next, of the first prototypes and the first works of art made from this memory material.

Indeed, imagine… Imagine the idea taking shape in your mind of an evolving memory sculpture that the Sun would prompt to unfold towards the azure, and that the winds of winter would force to curl up, just as it is in itself too…, imagine your mind ceaselessly striving to tame the atomic planes… Imagine…

Clearly, these alloys offered the artistic imagination a new degree of freedom, without precedent, like a treasure of which one could claim to have had a premonition, as it were, even before experiencing it.

For by mastering a creative tool such as these materials, the evolving memory sculptures that would result from them would hold within them:

— the dimension of memory, of course (reproduction of the shapes learnt);

— the dimension of time (in one of its forms, that of rhythms and cycles);

— the dimension of metamorphosis (that of the shapes passed through);

— the dimension of chance too (the unpredictability of temperature conditions);

— the dimension of complicity with the infinitely small (linked to the behaviour of atomic planes — the seat of the memory phenomenon);

— the dimension of the infinitely large (owing to the rotation of the Earth on its axis and around the Sun, and to the variations in temperature associated with days and nights and with the seasons, and of course to the effect of these temperature variations on the shapes taken by the sculptures).

Then this new degree of freedom offered to the artist — provided he manages to master his new creative material — would here open the doors to his most alchemical fancies, and push back the limits of his imagination and of his human vocation always to glimpse further than present limits.

Would he attempt to make his sculptures “breathe” in time with the

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rotations of the Earth, and so of days and nights, and with the passing of the seasons as well?

Would he give these metallic materials the illusion of brushing against the first stirrings of life, through movements of transformation of shape that they would perform in relation to their environment?

Would he not take up the challenge of conceiving a sculpture in which all the shapes would have to love one another, like all the notes of a single score? Or the reverse!

The field of possibilities was immense, verging on the prodigious: sculpture and new material, art and memory alloy… In the block of marble, where the child sees only the block, the artist knew there was the horse and its rider, and Michelangelo his Pietà. In the casting of shape-memory alloy, where the child saw only a slab of metal, the artist saw memory offering itself to his gouges.

The technological challenge

The technical constraints specific to the specifications for applying these alloys to sculpture were to reveal the need for a research and development budget exceeding 1.5 million dollars…! (transfers/contributions of ideas/commercial strategies were agreed with the industrial firm concerned, which was to enable me to have this sum at my disposal and to carry the programme through to completion).

Indeed, the specific constraints involved in realising such a concept of sculpture were very soon to raise technical problems quite unlike those posed by earlier industrial applications. Such sculptures — and therefore the nickel–titanium materials of which they would be made — would have to react within the range of ambient temperatures, as opposed to low temperatures of the order of — 60 or — 100 °C, as was the case for military applications, or high temperatures of the order of 150 °C and above, as was the case for nuclear applications.

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Moreover, the development of the memory materials studied for the sculpture programme was to pose serious problems for fundamental research… Indeed, changes of shape in memory materials follow one path as the temperature rises and another path as it falls again; for there is a certain waiting threshold once the transformation has been completed in one direction, before it resumes in the other. This phenomenon, well known to physicists, is called hysteresis. Here, therefore, it was imperative to reduce this hysteresis and bring it down from a gap of generally 50 °C to a far lower value, of the order of just a few degrees.

This condition, a sine qua non, was resolved in 1989 by the most prestigious research laboratory specialising in these shape-memory materials, in California, at the end of a study which, on this precise point alone, nonetheless lasted more than two years!

Another major difficulty was also to machine large-scale parts, larger than anything industry had ever required until then.

Yet another difficulty was to consist in adjusting the gap between the phase-transition points between which the memory phenomenon would manifest itself.

The last of the main difficulties to be overcome, finally, was to ask the research laboratory to help industry find the technical procedures for producing large castings, of the order of a tonne or more, perfectly homogeneous, given that a variation of the order of 1/2,000 in its residual composition would shift the memory points by 30 °C.

Five years of labour, a team devoted to the work¹ and a research and development budget, as already mentioned, of over $1,500,000 would make it possible to develop grades of memory nickel–titanium suited to the specific needs of sculpture, reacting within the range of ambient temperatures, and also to produce the first large-scale prototypes of these sculptures.

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When dreams come in through the window: three concepts of evolving memory sculpture

The “Hermaphrodite” bust (1987)

The first sculptural concept I was to tackle was meant as a play of the mind, and its ambition was to raise a smile and to raise questions. I had wanted a concept in which one might find something of the “always”, of the “eternal”, and of the “radically different” too. And so the first prototype sculpture made in these materials was to refer to the human species, and more precisely to the body. This took the form of a “Hermaphrodite” torso which, between 20 °C and 65 °C, would gradually transform from the torso of a Greek man into the torso of a Greek woman — modelled on the torso of the Venus de Milo — and turn back into a man’s torso when its temperature fell back to 20 °C, in an endless round from “HE” to “SHE”, depending on whether it was moved from shade into sun or from sun into shade.

This copper–zinc–aluminium prototype was produced thanks to a French partnership² around 1987, after a year of collaboration, but it was never marketed because of technical difficulties that had not been fully overcome, chiefly concerning these alloys’ low tolerance to deformation, which caused the material to crack after a certain number of transformation cycles, added to which was the fear of the material’s long-term amnesia.

“The Totem of the Future” (1989)

The second memory sculpture concept that I was to realise was to be called The Totem of the Future. Three years were needed

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to carry out the study and to produce the first prototypes on different scales ranging from 1.5 to 9 m.

My aim now was to conceive a work that could build a bridge between tradition, the ancients and ourselves today, those artisans producing technological know-how without equivalent in the history of human societies. I had wished that the various shapes this sculpture would be called upon to take should refer precisely to ancient societies, and that the movements animating it should express the idea of cycles and of time.

And so, the fruit of this obsession and this resolve, a sequence of evolving shapes was to appear to my intuition that would answer these desires without exceeding the mechanical tolerance of these alloys: seen from the front, in winter, the low shape of The Totem of the Future would recall the Greek letter “psi”, which evokes the notion of the soul. Still seen from the front, but in summer, the shape taken by The Totem of the Future would recall the hieroglyph that signified “life” in ancient Egypt. This last configuration would be reached only in the greatest heat of summer, in full sun, just as the previous low shape would be reached only in the harshest cold of winter.

The intermediate formal configurations, for their part, were derived from cycloids, that family of mathematical curves which expresses the notions of cycle and rhythm, like our days and our nights, and like our seasons too.

Depending on the time of year, The Totem of the Future would thus present average winter, spring and summer shapes, around which it would oscillate, breathing through the hours, the days and the nights, and imperceptibly, like our seasons, gliding from one to the next, ultimately describing cycles analogous to those of our years.

The studies, research and development for this sculpture were carried out by the Raychem group (California), the world leader in this technology, and its large-scale realisation was completed at the beginning of 1989, in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was to win the “New Horizon Award”, presented by the International Society for the Art, the Science and the Technology of Berkeley (see illustrations n^os 1, 2, 3).

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The new imaginary: the “Gate of the Two Infinities”

In the course of a lifetime, an artist cannot hope to have many intuitions — strong, premonitory ones, each giving birth to a concept that deliberately opens people’s eyes, stands apart from what already exists and calls for deep and manifold ramifications in its decoding, like a metaphor in which everything would be connected and nothing would any longer be foreign to anything else.

The Gate of the Two Infinities nonetheless corresponds to one of these intuitions. Its concept relies specifically and inescapably on the phenomenon of memory in matter, without which it could never have been envisaged: all the metal parts of which it is composed are “educated” to respond to the transformations of shape and movement expected of them.

The active principle of the concept of the Gate of the Two Infinities consists of a MONUMENTAL GATE WITH TWO LEAVES which:

— every morning OPEN, as the SUN RISES above the horizon;

— then every evening CLOSE again, shortly after the sun has disappeared and NIGHT has covered the day with its shadow.

A frame — highly refined — in the shape of a POINTED ARCH surrounds these two leaves.

One cannot guess whether the Gate of the Two Infinities belongs to a vestige of the past or, on the contrary, to a building yet to come.

A keystone asserts itself unmistakably to the eye.

The anchoring of the frame’s base conveys strength and permanence.

The BASE — imposing — on which these gates stand is slightly raised, like a vast plinth, open and bare.

Its precise shape is that of a TRUNCATED PYRAMID of very low height, made of slabs of CLOSE-FITTING STONES.

It measures around 20 m by 20 m, with a height of about one metre.

Its perimeter is girded along its whole length by NINE STEPS.

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At the foot of the junction of the two leaves — when closed — a CRYSTAL PRISM rests, fixed. Where the locks would be on each of the leaves, two further crystal prisms appear, set into them.

Every morning, when the sun emerges above the horizon and before the gates have yet begun to open, the decomposition of light in each prism produces a diffraction of light, incomplete at first, owing to the still very low angle of incidence of the rays.

However, as the sun climbs above the horizon by just a few degrees, the spectrum of light thus diffracted will grow richer, until little by little it takes on all the colours of the RAINBOW. And only once the rainbow is complete, linked to this COSMIC KEY, will the two leaves then begin their slow opening movement.

At some distance from the Gate of the Two Infinities and its base, completing the concept, are placed beneath a glass enclosure: a video camera, a monitor and a transmitter, operating continuously, powered by a solar panel.

The camera’s field of view is aimed at and covers the entire concept: the image of the Gate of the Two Infinities and its base remains permanently displayed on its control screen.

An imperturbable witness, a privileged spectator, an impassive electronic eye henceforth reports on the faithfulness of these Gates in their opening and closing movement before the immutable and the immense.

Linked to the rest of the world by an alert beacon associated with an Argos-type satellite, a message signal stands permanently ready to leave this electronic eye and appear on the various teleprinters of the world, should the Gate of the Two Infinities ever fail to open or to close. For if one day, like the chariot of Apollo whose failure to reappear was feared each morning, the leaves of the Gate of the Two Infinities were to fail to open or close, it would mean that, on that day, the sun had “forgotten” to rise, the Earth to turn or memory in matter to manifest itself — when we know that the laws of physics, here or elsewhere, never cheat.

As for where it would be sited, a desert location,

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lying between the two tropics and as close as possible to the Earth’s equator, would be the most suitable to host the concept. In any case, the pointed arch of the Gate of the Two Infinities would always be perpendicular to the east–west direction.

A few questions and answers about this concept

• Why this title, the Gate of the Two Infinities?… “First, because the title is concise and corresponds to a factual summary of the arrangement, of which this symbolic and monumental Gate is indeed the heart. An active heart that beats, opens and closes to the rhythms corresponding to the alternation of our days and our nights — rhythms linked to the dimensions, masses, distances and velocities of a planet, the Earth, and of its star, the Sun, whose measurements express the infinitely large. Next, because the driving element, in the sense of that which performs work, is due to the phenomenon of memory in matter, which, as has been recalled, takes place at the level of atomic planes, whose measurements express the infinitely small. And then also, it must be recalled, because the input of energy that enables these memory alloys to perform their movement, and therefore their work, comes from the Sun, whose distance from the Earth — eight light-minutes — once again involves the infinitely large…”

• Why such a site, far from any region frequented by human beings — the desert?… “Because of the silence. To make of that initiatory silence peculiar to the desert a setting capable of exalting all the better the concept of the Gate of the Two Infinities in its ability to link the cosmos and the instant in a grain of consciousness and questioning.”

• Why, too, this Gate in an almost inaccessible place?… “…So that its measure may be weighed on the same scale, or orders of magnitude, as those we grant to myths… like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China…, those myths which are nonetheless realities, as we ‘know’ them and carry them within us without necessarily ever having truly seen them…”

• Why, again, this Gate of the Two Infinities so definitively far from human beings and their activities? “…So that it may remain

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inescapably beyond the reach of crowds, their greasy wrappers and their transistor radios. So that it may be visited only by a few ‘explorers’ aboard their off-road vehicles, or by other travelling photographers… and that to these be entrusted, once they have seen it, the task of bearing witness. And that thus, little by little, through hearsay, television reports, articles and posters, this Gate of the Two Infinities, slowly, may become inscribed like a watermark in people’s minds, so that it is known of even by those who have never approached it, and that the questioning it raises remains present, irreversibly present in our minds…”

• Why, finally, these Gates, which open and close — onto what void, onto what expectation or onto what axis? “…Therein lies the mystery of the concept, its secret. Part of the answer may perhaps lie in the belonging of these Gates’ movement to those ‘two infinities’ and those ‘cosmic rhythms’ on which they depend, expressing the local alliance of the infinitely large and the infinitely small — since we too, as human beings, intrinsically proceed from those same dimensions, rhythms and infinities, and since we, as human beings, moreover bring consciousness to those same dimensions… For, on reflection, these Gates are no doubt indeed speaking to us of ourselves and of our quest for that ‘something else’ which might be said to belong to the sacred. No doubt, too, they send us back to questions before which we remain attentive and silent: to what project beyond our grasp might we then belong… where would Meaning lie, if meaning there were… where would our demands on ourselves and our responsibility towards ourselves lie… and in what writing should we answer them now?…”

Assessment and outlook for the junction of art and memory alloy

In the course of reading these pages, we have witnessed the birth of a new material without precedent and literally unheard-of in the proper sense of the term. A material bringing to the artistic creative act an unsuspected degree of openness, of the order of a

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fourth dimension, whereas sculpture since its origins had worked only in its sole and inalienable three dimensions.

While, over recent decades and even recent centuries, we had seen sculpture appropriate new materials — bronze, iron, Cor-ten steel, resin, plastic… — these materials, apart from their novel textures or the improvements in mechanical performance they brought, certainly enriched the existing shelves of the great gallery of artists’ supplies and created new uses, but in no way transformed the mental practice of sculpture; whereas here, as we have just seen, through the integration of memory into matter, a qualitative leap unique in History has been accomplished.

We may rightly consider that the coming to maturity of these memory materials adapted to sculpture is a manifest illustration of our achievements, born of our know-how, of our ways of thinking and of our capacity to integrate the scientific data specific to the contemporary societies that were able to produce them. And here we have, were it needed, an obvious demonstration proving that it is above all through the breaking down of barriers between professional practices that invention takes place.

In this sense, the development of these new grades of shape-memory alloys owes nothing to chance, but truly expresses a capacity specific to our techno-cultural societies to foster and even to sublimate a long tradition according to which the human being, the artist included, is and always will be that experimenter and explorer of the possibilities present in his environment, a fortiori when he is offered — as here — the most unexpected and sumptuous technological means.

We should not, however, abandon a spirit of critical observation, nor forget to make a couple of remarks, as two reminders:

— the “treasure” will never lie in know-how as such, however sophisticated or complex it may be, but in knowing how to use it, and in what demanding purpose to place it at the service of;

— since art proceeds not from the better but from difference, it is not because new technologies are used that the resulting work will in principle be “better” or more accomplished,

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even if it is most likely that it is among such works that we shall have to look — the heritage of tomorrow — for those that bore the signature of our time.

In this range of observations, one may further point out that the artist in rich post-industrial societies is a priori among the most favoured and pampered, enjoying all around him a profusion of new creative tools, so many potential extensions of his creative gesture in keeping with his sensibility. But on further reflection one may also ask whether it is a genuine advantage for an artist to have such a plethora of novel tools at his disposal, each more enticing than the last, when the society, and therefore the culture, that produced them perhaps no longer had anything for them to say, empty as it was of everything that might conventionally be designated by the words “spirituality”, “value”, “exigency”, as opposed to “technological progress”, “economic growth factor”, “increase in GNP”… and, if so, the question then arises whether the real advantage for an artist and for a society did not lie in living in a culture poorer in tools of artistic production, but richer in value.

The importance of this last remark lies not so much in its answer as in its implications, for the question at present is indeed whether our societies, producers of these dazzling technological achievements and of all the associated know-how, by dint of having committed their vital energies to this production of technological tools — often imposed by the stakes of economic competition — have not fallen into such an imbalance that it becomes most urgent, indeed essential, to reintroduce conditions and places favourable to the production of thought, if only to release all the possibilities that, for example, our scientifically derived knowledge carries within it.

In this sense, one of the further benefits of the junction of art and technology, besides the works produced, would be to show these technologies, to make them visible, in a different way, through a new sensibility capable of drawing values from them and of compelling reflection by reintroducing it into our fields of practice and expectation.

To return specifically to the junction of art and memory alloy,

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one can imagine, looking ahead, that in the coming years various laboratories and industrial firms here and there around the world will be able to benefit from the new know-how developed in the course of creating these first evolving memory sculptures and of the research work carried out with my team in San Francisco. In the near future, artists who so wish will in turn be able to confront their imagination and inventiveness with these new materials and the possibilities they hold. Because of the still very high cost of producing, working and educating these alloys, one may reasonably think that this emancipation — barring a new technological leap, which cannot be ruled out — could stretch over the next ten or twenty years before reaching cruising speed and contributing substantially to the enrichment of our artistic heritage.

It will then become interesting — leaving aside the inevitable hasty productions that will amount to no more than recreational physics or a mere demonstration of know-how — to follow and observe what each culture will engender, and what new kinds of concepts will be realised from these shape-memory materials, expressing local specificities in their aptness for invention through the personality of each artist.

“… On the edge of eternity, in a time stood still, sculpture had always shown itself: immutable and fixed.

“And time, save for its torments and its patina or its scars, ignored it.

“The artist, since ‘forever’ of course, had been content with this, never imagining that memory might one day nevertheless be stored in matter, and that this memory too, just like matter itself, might offer itself to his own sculptor’s knives, gouges or chisels.

“Sculptor of memory and of matter? alchemy of the mind? no, a sign of the times, the sign of a civilisation of technology and science, of research and development, offering us passers-by so many new means of creation, so many potential extensions of our gestures and our thought, and of our inventiveness too…”