L’Air de rien at the Musée des Arts et Métiers - Nuit Blanche 2025, Paris.
For as long as humanity has existed, it has had a symbiotic relationship with the arts and sciences. Many mythologies make the mastery of technology what we are today. Our tools multiply our ability to act, to move, to interact with others and to understand the world. They multiply our ability to make the world visible, accessible, controllable and usable – in short, to make it available to us.
Over one night and the days that follow, L'Air de rien instils this ambiguity of the technology that binds us to nature through two walks, head in the air and feet on the ground: L'Air du pollen and Perturbatio. Between art and science, sky and earth, L'Air de rien scatters a few points of suspension through the volume and stones of the church of Saint-Martin-des-Champs at the Musée des Arts et Métiers.
L'Air de rien: the techniques of art and science make nature tangible. They can be the source of renewed wonder. Some thirty ceramic pollen grains are magnified, kneaded, sculpted, fired and suspended in balance in the air of the church. Through the five orders of magnitude of scanning electron microscopy, these grains capture the structural and functional richness still present in nature at this scale. They let us delight in the simple or complex beauty destined to produce life. With our heads in the air, L'Air du pollen invites us to discover the paths of sustainable evolution that these grains carry with them, raw and structured by day, textured and enriched by night. Each pollen grain tells a story. Its own, and ours.
L'Air de rien: the techniques of art and science also carry our alienation from the world. Reification, illegibility and disenchantment are embodied in a series of sensors that record our passage and our movements in Perturbatio. This digital installation plays with our imprint on the world. Our data alter the point clouds of threatened ecosystems. Our speed fields turn into a force field that disrupts the millions of points making up the successive images, moving from figurative to pointillist impressionism before ending in expressionist chaos. With its feet firmly on the ground, Perturbatio bears the imprint of our collective “affair”.
Le sas, the science-art-society group at Université Paris-Saclay, designs art-science experiments that use shifts in reality to test our relationship with the world and reach out to the public.
L'Air de rien was created at Le sas by: Béatrice Albert, Charles Ménard, Ikse Maître, Nadia de Bernardi, Tim Schneider, Vincent Hulot
The Musée des Arts et Métiers is one of the oldest technical and industrial museums in the world, and its history is closely linked to that of the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (Cnam), of which it is a part. It houses an exceptional collection of some 80,000 objects and has almost 2,500 exhibits on display, reflecting the most varied facets of the history of science and technology.
This installation is in dialogue with Empreinte Carbone, bringing the museum's season to a close, while inaugurating the third axis of the Résonances art-science project: Être à la nature, which will continue in September at the Université Paris-Saclay and its partner laboratories.
Information
Nuit Blanche: 7 June, 7 pm – 1 am - free entry The installation will then be open to visitors from 8 to 17 June, subject to the museum's normal opening hours and conditions of access.
Partners
Many thanks to the laboratories, partners and sponsors who are making this installation and Être à la nature possible: Musée des Arts et Métiers, Graduate School of Engineering and Systems Science - Université Paris-Saclay, Cervval, Fondation Daniel et Nina Carasso, La Diagonale Paris-Saclay, Le sas, IDEEV, ESE, EGCE, GQE, LSCE, LISN
Thanks to the City of Paris and Nuit Blanche 2025.
