Anne-Marie Morice

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Anne-Marie Morice, born in Paris, is Art Director, Essayist, Consultant. She is director of Transverse, the online repertory of today’s artworks. Prior to this she wrote about media arts in the cultural press, and founded and directed Synesthesie. She studied Litterature, Cinema and Hypermedia in Paris La Sorbonne and in Paris 8 Vincennes Universities.

Synesthésie was one of the first sites in the world to introduce, in 1995, the theoretical and artistic contemporary content on the “web canvas” in the form of an online journal, theoretical and artistic. Eighteen thematic issues were published until 2008, in a collaborative and transversal spirit. The site having been hacked in 2012 is in the way of being restored. The Synesthésie association is now based in Saint-Denis. For various and complementary missions, it is supported by the Ministry of Culture, the Department of Seine Saint-Denis, in the Ile-de-France and the City of Saint-Denis and is identified as one of artistic players of the Grand Paris Project.

Experimenting for innovating, giving to see, creating events, sharing it with all and enriching this discovery by such common thinking is the vocation of the project created. It is open to all practices, visual, but also audio, tactile, performative, collaborative betting on the idea that technologies, including those of digital, became an engine for irrigating contemporary art.

In a great complicity and a kind of « aesthetic empathy » with artists and theorists, A.-M. Morice organised 80 exhibitions for Synesthésie, she organised residencies including a pedagogical environment around the artistic projects. In the idea to expose in unexpected places, she produced and curated big installations in public spaces or in patrimonial places, with artists as well recognized as emergent like LAb[au], Marc Fornes, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Antoine Schmitt, Thierry Payet, Ryoichi Kurokawa, Pascal Bauer, Younes Rahmoun, Art Orienté Objet, Alain Bublex, Vincent Epplay, Catherine Poncin, Marion Baruch, Veit Stratmann, Brigitte Zieger, Nicolas Moulin, Vincent Ganivet, Baptist Coelho, Milene Guermont, Christine Melchiors, Andrée Philippot-Mathieu, Bruno Guiganti, etc. She created and curated also the CAV, Virtual Art Center an on line collection of thirty virtual projects of artists such as Miguel Chevalier, Djamel Kokene, Tsuneko Taniuchi, Olga Kisseleva, Pascal Lièvre, etc (www.synesthesie.com/cav ).She was in charge of the curating program “The Virtuals” for the triennal La Force de l’Art organized by the French Ministry of Culture at the Grand Palais in 2009.

The concept of « cross » has emerged early in her artistic and intellectual engagements. She conducted independant research programs around the « transensoriality », the « transimages », mobility, gender issues, urban changes, which was very innovative especially in France. In 2016, she founded Transverse, a collaborative website (www.transverse-art.com) about contemporary art, based on the principle “A work / A Text”. Each text is posted by an author and speaks of a single artwork describing it and reporting the main concepts and aesthetic experience. There can be an unlimited number of texts by artists. Each text being connected to others by browsing filters, carefully chosen, gradually will emerge a vocabulary and an understanding of today artistic processes. The site can be viewed as a work directory or be addressed transversely by building themes from the proposed keywords.

The “trans” prefix becomes very obvious in the era of global and diversity. It is also justified by the cross-site operation while making a reference to the transverse muscle which serves to stabilize the human body from the inside. We could also see the site Transverse as a techno-organic object that aims to “muscle” understanding of the artworks currently produced by the artists.

A.M. Morice was made Chevalier des arts et lettres by the French ministry of culture Catherine Trautmann. She is member of the Board UFR Arts and Sciences of Art of the University of Paris 1 – Sorbonne.