René Berger. Esthétique et mass media – Sélection de cours et des actes du colloque «Art, technologie et communication», 1970-1972

The present volume focuses on the pedagogical activities of René Berger, who largely developed his ideas in the early 1970s through his teaching at the University of Lausanne and, to a lesser extent, through the organization of conferences at the Cantonal School of Fine Arts and Applied Arts in Lausanne. This work does not aim to trace the genealogy of his thought or his analytical models by identifying a hypothetical point of origin (in this case, his pedagogical practice). Instead, it offers fragments of a theory in progress, whose relevance and modernity are heightened by recent debates in media history and archaeology.

As an educator, Berger positions himself as a witness and analyst of ongoing technological upheavals, including television, video, computer networks, and the proliferation of travel and communication technologies. His courses, titled “Aesthetics and Mass Media,” taught in the Art History Department at the University of Lausanne from the winter semester of 1969 to the summer semester of 1980, reflect a desire to theorize these transformations and assess their impact on our modes of perception and aesthetic experience.

This book centers on the partial publication of René Berger’s teachings during his tenure as director of the Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts in Lausanne, where he also served as a lecturer and later an associate professor at the University of Lausanne. Despite their historical nature, the collected texts remain relevant today. Rooted in a specific time and context, René Berger serves as an attentive witness to the “origin of the future” (the title of one of his works) or, if you prefer, anticipates the approach of media archaeologists, who, for instance, link the typewriter to the computer and the phonograph and film to electronic files.