'A technology is not an independent or alien object, it complements integrally our sensorial and cognitive system; as a medium, it conditions not only communication modes but also the way we perceive and conceive our environment. When these ratios change men change.' _ Marshall McLuhan, Interview Playboy, March 1969

The technological developments of the last decades are at the origin of the shift from an industrial to a post-industrial information society. The notions of body, matter, space and time are increasingly defined by the unit of information; its structures, processes and systems. They introduce new parameters of space and time, such as immersion (real/virtual) and interaction (real-time/entropy) as well as new parameters of materiality (nano-technologies and smart materials) or biological (gene technologies) ones in their definition. Information technologies influence organization models (modes of production, work and knowledge) and affect the communication process (code, symbol) and the social relations as well as their spatialisation (art and architecture). Confronted with these changes of our daily life the exploration of technology is the research of the sensual and sensible of our time.

‚... One purpose for art and artists is to be witnesses of their time, to expose the artistic result of new technologies applied to new materials carrying new ideas. ...' _ Eléonore de Lavandeyra Schöffer about LAb[au], ‚Zones Urbaines Partagées', 2008, pg. 84.

Triggered by technological progress, new codes (semantics) and methods (practice) appear in the arts. They are often revealed by the term that is used to qualify them, as for example the word 'industrial design' came up in the beginning of the last century according to the shift of pre-industrial to industrial society. The emergence of the concept of 'industrial design' around the Bauhaus had the intended purpose of qualifying artistic concerns in relation to the technological and social changes in order to reintroduce them in the concept of art itself.

The invention of the machine not only lead to new styles and forms in art, but to a fundamental rethinking of artistic practice and aesthetics. But the term of design itself has evolved, as technology did, from industrial design to visual communication, from process design to cybernetics. Technology continuously extended our 'senses' which also transform our understanding of the arts, its forms, methods and purposes.

This transformation of our perceptive and cognitive apparatus can be described as a relation ' from sense (esthésis) to sense (sémiosis). The work around technology is thus founded in the research of new artistic forms and experiences as a quest in the signs of our times.

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