JURY MEMBERS

Patrick Gyger / Anaïs Rollez

Patrick Gyger is a Swiss historian, writer and curator. From 1999 to 2010, he was the director of Maison d’Ailleurs in Switzerland, a museum housing one of the world’s largest collections of Utopia and Science Fiction. As such, he has organised dozens of exhibitions and events on the main topics or artists of the field and published extensively. One of his recent researches has resulted in a book on flyings cars in fact and fiction (Haynes, 2011).

Since January 2011, he serves as director of the lieu unique, national center for contemporary arts in Nantes (www.lelieuunique.com), a leading pluridisciplinary venue for theater, dance, visuals arts, music and literature. As well as featuring major artists in the field of contemporary practices (Arvo Pärt, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Robert Lepage, Thomas Ostermeier, Ryoji Ikeda, Boris Charmatz…), his programme gives an important place to outsider practices, media artists and interdisciplinary approaches. In recent years le lieu unique created for instance festivals like locus solus (rare instruments and machinic music), Assis Debout Couché (Sit, Stand, Lie Down; a three-day music event), Un weekend singulier (The Odd Weekend; music and art in the margins),  eLU(ten days of contemporary art from Estonia), a conference on geopolitics and a literary event (Atlantide, curated by Alberto Manguel).

Anaïs Rollez

Holds a PhD in History of Contemporary Art, She has taught at Nantes University and currently teaches History of Media Art and Performance at the Nantes School of Art. Her research topics currently include the question of machinic gestures and contradiction as a generating process. She also serves as theorist for several artistic projects in which networks, on-board computing, electronics and autonomy play a major part.