L’âge des mass-médias au Monte Verità. René Berger et la théorie des médias (1980–1992)

This essay examines the lectures given by the Swiss theorist and curator René Berger at the colloquia of the VideoArt Festival Locarno between 1980 and 1992. Drawing on typescripts of the lectures held in the festival’s archives at MASI Lugano, it traces how Berger’s thinking moved from defining video art in relation to other arts and communication media towards a broader theory of media and ‘technoculture’ – a term he coined in La mutation des signes (1972). Over the decade, the festival’s focus widened from exhibiting video art to presenting ‘new media’ and electronic images, while Berger’s discourse shifted from art theory to the growing entanglement of humans and machines and the redefinition of categories such as nature, culture and knowledge by technological milieus, culminating in the debates on transdisciplinarity of the early 1990s.