Basic Info

Name: Nicolas Schöffer
Country of Origin: HU

Description

“Nicolas Schöffer (Hungarian: Schöffer Miklós; 6 September 1912 — 8 January 1992) was a Hungarian-born French cybernetic artist. Schöffer was born in Kalocsa, Hungary and resided in Paris from 1936 until his death in Montmartre in 1992.

He built his artworks on cybernetic theories of contol and feedback primarily based on the ideas of Norbert Wiener. Wiener’s work suggested to Schöffer an artistic process in terms of the circular causality of feedback loops that he used on a wide range of art genres. His career spans painting, sculpture, architecture, urbanism, film, theatre, television and music. The quest for dematerialisation of the artwork and the pursuit of movement and dynamics became the central themes of his work. He worked with the immaterial media space, time, light, sound and climate that he called the five topologies.

He liberated art genres from their spatial and temporal constraints by creating never-ending sound structures that can be heard all over the cybernetic city of the future and by designing SCAM1, an automobile sculpture.

Schöffer declared the socialization of art as an important goal. According to his ideas, art as a cultural asset should be available equally to everyone without any limitation. The playful and spectacular aspects of his works served the goal of gaining the attention of the audience and involving the viewer through participation in the creative processes. In order to make art universally available, he explored the possibilities of serial production.”
– Wikipedia