Norbert Hillaire's 'L'expérience esthétique des lieux' Published by L'Harmattan

Norbert Hillaire's book 'L'expérience esthétique des lieux' explores the paradoxical fusion of art and new technologies through the lens of place. Published by Éditions l'Harmattan, the work traces how 19th-century modern inventions reshaped the spatio-temporal configuration of cities, replacing Romantic idealism with a passion for reality. Industrial society shifted technical objects into art and literature, with a genealogy from Flaubert to Duchamp embracing the everyday. Public lighting revolutionized the night, altering the flâneur's relationship to urban space and influencing literature. Functionalism and rationality from technical progress applied to both architecture and fashion. Hillaire questions the Internet, public art, and muralism. Information sciences and cybernetics spawn works using 'impure supports' of cultural industry and telecommunications. Paradoxically, in a 'regime of absolute seeing' and unreserved exposure, 'the screen ends up switching to wall.' Art becomes ephemeral, evolving, delocalized. Hillaire shows that moving from open work to expanded interactivity echoes Balzac's 'Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu': an artwork as a process acknowledging its impossibility of being fully closed.