These terms might first appear in contradiction, as ecology deals with the organisation of living matter while technologies of the image are by definition inorganic - especially electronic and digital technologies. Yet today, boundaries between the biological and the non-biological are blurred. Territories of Nature and technology overlap.

If the purpose of ecology is the conservation of natural environment, then a media ecology could search to protect the diversity of our technological environment, an equilibrium between the variety of media currently used in the art world - mechanical, chemical, electronic, digital, hand-crafted or sophisticated. The very vitality of creation constantly falls under the threat of the over-evaluation of a few technologies and of the homogenisation of artistic tools.

For the third time, the RENCONTRES INTERNATIONALES ART CINEMA / VIDEO / ORDINATEUR propose to scan the art of the moving image at large and to abolish the frontiers between techniques. This year's edition offers to embrace a larger field, including CD-Rom, Internet, interactive machines, virtual reality and projection apparatus, but also light-music instruments and the ether-like Theremin, a precursor to interactivity. 

Overall perspective. Acknowledgement: at the dawn of the Third Millennium, technological arts form a complex landscape, where various processes not only co-exist but interpenetrate each other. Techniques from the "past", the "present" and the "future" are there, interwoven, sometimes within a single artwork. In the middle of the technological era, one witnesses growing interest in the archaeology of the media and in the hand-crafted techniques. At the same time, Internet gains the flexibility of a "light medium" while both the arts of film and video, long-declared dead or in decline, are in full swing. 

Thus, art contradicts the idea of linear "evolution" brought forward with every single new technical invention.

Since we created RENCONTRES INTERNATIONALES ART CINEMA / VIDEO / ORDINATEUR in 1990, we have always maintained a double concern: on technological media and on the body, regarding them as two main sources of language to be found in this Century's art. Here, critical reflection on media meets body politics. Art takes possession of technologies - tools for the military, the economicc and the political powers - in order to redefine reality, reinvent the imaginary, renegotiate the status of the image.  As for the body, it marks a refusal: against the constraints of a sociality hijacking its freedom with repressions regarding gender, race, class, difference.  An abundance of works cover these issues - from the re-reading of the female orr the Black body to the claimings of rebellious sexualities and the question of AIDS.

If subversive discourses surrounding the body are numerous in film or video productions, they are, on the contrary, quite absent from the field of high-technologies. However, interactive apparatus tend to reformulate the question of the body in another way: through sensory experience, the viewer becomes part of the work.

In the post-biological era, increasing hybridisation between body and machine radically put into question the "naturality" of the body. Similarly, the frontier between sexes is destabilised. The socially defined gender can no longer claim a supposed naturality. Nature is being re-thought.

Towards a media ecology - For a media ecology -Rencontres - Encounters.