The Poème électronique was a unique experience, originating from the request made by Philips to Le Corbusier to design the company pavilion at the Brussels 1958 World Fair. Louis Kalff, artistic director of Philips, wished to exhibit the technological achievements through an impressive installation. He asked the architect Le Corbusier "not a hall, but a platter on which to serve the products of contemporary technology to an international audience". LC conceived an electronic poem for a specific physical space ("... I will make an electronic poem and the bottle that contains it"), a synthesis of the arts (he also designed the visual narrative and effects) in collaboration with Iannis Xenakis (designer of the pavillon and compositor of the interlude music) and Edgar Varèse (composer of the organized sound).
Unfortunately, this visionary synthesis was ahead of its time: the Pavilion, after 2 million visitors, was demolished a few months after its inauguration, at the end of the Exposition and the Poème électronique became a lost masterpiece. The Virtual Electronic Poem (VEP) project has retrieved the available historical materials (archival photographs and sketches/models of the architecture, the projected video, the original tapes of Varèse’s and Xenakis’ recordings, the annotated design/engineering reports) and has developed a virtual reality (VR) environment that has regained the global experience of the Poème électronique after a philologically accurate reconstruction. The VR installation is hosted in various formats in exhibitions all over the world, it was best art paper prize at ACM Multimedia conference 2006, and the webdoc illustrating the project is included in the permanent collection of the US Library of Congress.
The lecture will illustrate the project development through research, reconstruction and experiential design to branch out towards a transdisciplinary vision of digital art and information technologies, where abstract mathematical structures and algorithms support the design of items in computational media, with autonomous behaviors and interactive programming. We address the relationship between art production and information sciences and technologies, to what degree the author must be aware of the computing abstractions and paradigms and how digital art can be a challenge for the development of computational facilities. Finally, we see some applications to the digital challenges of cultural heritage.

A workshop taught by Vincenzo will happen in the same location later the same day. More information can be found here.

Vincenzo Lombardo PhD, born 1964, is Full Professor of Informatics, at the Department of Informatics, University of Turin, Italy (www.di.unito.it/~vincenzo). He is the President of CIRMA (Centre for Research on Multimedia and Audiovisuals - www.cirma.unito.it) and Senior Research Associate to Institute of Geosciences and Georesources of National Research Council (CNR-IGG). He is co-founder and current vice-President of the School of Media and Arts of the University of Turin.

His research concerns methodologies, models and applications of informatics and artificial intelligence, for interdisciplinary challenges, such as multimedia design and interactive storytelling, knowledge encoding and semantic tagging for several domains (e.g., earth sciences, drama, archaeology),
natural language processing and cognitive modeling. His papers are published in international journals, books, conference proceedings. He is also active as a multimedia designer and producer. He has run the Art-Science Alliance Laboratory (ASA Lab) at public company Virtual Reality & Multi Media Park, from 2004 to 2012 (see videos at vimeo.com/vrmmp and vimeo.com/vlombard). He has been a coordinator and workpackage leader of European and national projects.