Collection Société Générale

A translucent screen diffusing a series of 15 Luminos on rails. Electric system. © Adagp, Paris, 1976

In 1948, Nicolas Schöffer invented spatial-dynamic sculpture and built electrically charged metallic structures that projected lights. He applied art and architecture to everyday life and designed an ideal town: "the town of leisure". He imagined it to be a suspended city, “for the grasshopper system should replace the ant system”. He invented “conditioned shell” houses and tourist and sexual “leisure programs” managed by electronic brains. In 1956, he began making clocks, bricks, spatial-dynamic prisms, teleluminoscopes, luminorelaxes, and CYSP1 the robotic dancer. He built monumental cybernetic towers (one tower measured 52m high for the lumino-dynamic show in Liège of 1961). From the 70's, he installed dynamic sculptures around the world and wrote books and essays as a theorist of “Kinetic art, Sculpture that changes thirty times a second, and Spatial Urbanism”. In 1988 and 1989, he made drawings using a graphic palette and the computer (Choreographics and Computer-graphics).