Introduction 
& Contributions (International publications & symposiums)

Alexandre Castant is a French essayist on contemporary arts, and in his books he explores the aesthetic and poetic relationships between the arts, notably the connections between sound arts and visual arts.
Holder of a PhD in aesthetics from the University of Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne).
He teaches Aesthetics and the History of the Contemporary Arts at the National School of Art (ENSA) in Bourges (France).
In addition to his teaching, he runs a sound creation workshop : L’Atelier sonore d’esthétique which can be translated as The Sound Workshop of Aesthetics. 
More information about this workshop at : http://ateliersonoredesthetique.ensa-bourges.fr 
He is also an art critic and a member of the International Association of Art Critics. 

He has published the following books :

Aesthetics of the Images, André Pieyre de Mandiargues’ Novels, 2001. 
This first book, which was the publication of his thesis, was published by the Sorbonne. The subject matter approaches the work of the French surrealist writer and poet André Pieyre de Mandiargues — who was deeply concerned by the question of visual arts and images — and how the writer could explore images in words. Therefore, Aesthetics of the Images, André Pieyre de Mandiargues’ Novels is an essay on aesthetics, rhetorical and symbolic images in literary texts by this author. From the beginning, Alexandre Castant’s field of research has always been Comparative Aesthetics. 

Black and White by Man Ray, 2003. 
He then wrote a book about Man Ray, the photographer who was also a painter and an experimental film-maker. 

The Photography in the Eye of Translations, 2004. 
In 2004, he published an essay on the aesthetics of photography and its links with other arts such as literature, cinema, and contemporary music… 

Planets of Sound, 2007 & 2010. 
In 2007, he published Planètes sonores, radiophonie, arts, cinema which can be translated as Planets of Sound : Radiophonics, Arts, Cinema an essay on the aesthetics and the history of sound in visual arts. Since its publication, Planets of Sound : Radiophonics, Arts, Cinema has been well-received by readers and has continued on to earn positive reviews in the press. 
Sound is now recognised as a vital creative component in art and this book offers a fragmentary yet precise transhistorical analysis of its role in three fields : radiophonics, the visual arts and cinema. 
Firstly radiophonics, a very present yet very discreet form, makes our relationship with the world of sound something at once both collective and private, as well as highly imaginative. An initial spatiotemporal approach is presented via Pierre Schaeffer’s adaptations of literary works and Abraham Moles’ speculations on acoustics. 
Next comes the visual arts and the role of sound therein. From dialogue between the arts to the utopian machines of the eighteenth century, from Symbolism to the historic avant-gardes of the interwar years, from Futurism to Fluxus, from the audiovisual domain to the connections between rock and the visual arts, from the politics of sound to the question of the inaudible ; not to mention noise, listening, silence, the voice, music, the musical imaginative realm and how to convey it : all these things traverse the history of modern and contemporary art – but most importantly they summarise it. The book updates this summary, not so much with any pretensions to exhaustiveness – a tricky task given the immediacy of the subject – but with the aim of highlighting its underlying ideas and concepts and demonstrating their interrelationship. 
Thirdly, a sound-based aesthetics of the cinema offers a new reading of modernism and cinema modernity. From Eisenstein to Welles, from Bresson to Bergman and Antonioni, and, in monographic chapters, from Alain Robbe-Grillet to Jean-Luc Godard : here the sound experience is interpreted as a series of crises, of conflicts with the image which, in the final analysis, have opened the cinema up to the fresh horizons of video and Contemporary art. 
There are three domains, then – radiophonics, art, cinema – and an exploratory trip to the planets of creativity in sound which they reveal. This research offers food for thought and perception, but also for testing out the business of coming to grips with sound in writing and the cross-disciplinary issues this inevitably raises : how, then, to write (about) sound ? From the symbolic point of view, films by Jean Cocteau ( Orpheus, 1950) and David Lynch ( Lost Highway, 1997) look like mirrors (of each other, in some respects) : firstly for developing the notion of “necrophonics” – the noise of the beyond, the beyond of noise – which the book delves into ; and secondly and more generally, for singing the praises of the cross-disciplinarity in art. Transitions between sound, image and text, and the transition from one world to another are analysed.
Tami Amit’s cover photo for Planets of Sound can be seen as a discreet tribute to these films ; or better still, as echoing them. 
After selling out its first printing (2007), Planets of Sound has been reissued in a new, revised edition, (2010) with an epilogue devoted in part to composer/musician John Zorn. 

ImagoDrome, Mental Images in Contemporary Art, 2010. 
In 2010, he published a collective book about mental images in contemporary art. This research attempts to forge pathways from the arts to cognitive sciences. 

Logic of the Globe, notes on Mediterranean Landscape, 2012. 
The subject of this brief essay is the mediterranean landscape conceived as a “ platform ” for trans-aesthetics studies… It also includes images by Florence Chevallier, Jean-Luc Godard, Bernard Guillot, François Méchain, Corinne Mercadier, Jean-Daniel Pollet, Bernard Plossu. 

Snow Screens, 2014. 
« Alexander Castant, essayist and art critic, brings in Snow Screens articles, interviews and columns on photography. These art critics, published in journals or related exhibits were seized in the movement of a specific evolution, the past twenty years (1992-2013), that is to say in the passage film to digital, or, to put it another way, these texts accompanying the photograph to the era of dematerialization of its supports. Furthermore, these texts were mostly published in the specialized press, Snow Screens opens a reflection on the status of art journalism today, the latter being also engaged with the mutations, contemporary inherent to digital. Accompanied its evolution – as in a mirror – the historical movement of photography. 
Snow Screens introduces the challenges of contemporary photographic image developing in three parts : image and political, relations between photography and the arts, and, finally, the image and the digital world, transparent, infinity… The second part of the book – which therefore concerns the relationship between photography and the arts – explores the subject matter of one of his previous books (The Photography in the Eye of Translations) where Alexander Castant studied the relationship between literature, art and sound design visuals. » 
in The Eye of Photography – The Daily Magazine of Photography, april 2014.

Audio Diary, Radiophonics, Arts, Cinema , 2016 & Sound Arts – Sound and Contemporary Art, 2017.
Audio Diary, Radiophonics, Arts, Cinema , and then Sound Arts – Sound and Contemporary Art are respectively published in 2016 and 2017. They compose a History of Art and complete the research proposed by Planets of Sound (2007). These three essays can be treated as a trilogy about the experience of sound in contemporary art, a field of research in which the author has been working since
the nineties :
« Between introduction and panorama of sound practices in contemporary art, Alexandre Castant (French art critic, essayist, teacher, author of Planètes Sonores published by Monografik in 2007 & 2010 and Journal audiobiographique published by Scala in 2016) proposes with Les Arts sonores (in French only), an inventory of sound issues in contemporary art. A field of artistic experimentation extremely fertile, inventive and stimulating since the 2000’s, and which also has a genealogy in the history of art that this book also relates, is at the same time presented in Les Arts sonores point historical, thematic, conceptual and aesthetic. Image-sound relations, correspondences and photo-phonography, the representation of musical instruments and post-rock plasticity, radio (device, fiction), body and voice, space and sonic sculptures, soundscapes and field recording, but also sound and visual machines, vinyl records and audio cassettes, or a sound society (critical, media, political) or intangible listening (the four elements, necrophony, silence, emptiness, immateriality…) are so many notions of sound in contemporary art that, finally, approach, irrigate and respond in this book-manifest, to the question : “ What is sound art ? ” » (translated by Transcultures, Charleroi, Belgium, 2017).

Death of Athanase Shurail, 2019.
In 2019, he published his first novel (Death of Athanase Shurail, Tarabuste Editions), composed of short stories, written in an experimental baroque style and thought as poems in prose.

Visions of Mandiargues – Modernity, avant-garde, experiences, 2020.
« In Visions of Mandiargues, an essay on André Pieyre de Mandiargues (1909-1991), writer, poet, art critic, surrealist of the second generation and author passionate about the image with which he constantly irrigated his writing, are first of all invited the works or testimonies of his contemporaries : writers (André Breton, Alejandra Pizarnik, William Burroughs), artists and visual artists (Leonor Fini, René Magritte, Wifredo Lam), photographers (Hans Bellmer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray) or filmmakers (Michelangelo Antonioni, Walerian Borowczyk, Nelly Kaplan). But also, over the course of brief imagined connections and against all expectations, will appear quotes from works by contemporary artists whose universe, in many aspects, offers a reflection of his aesthetic in the field of painting and plastic artists (Claude Lévêque, David Reed, Philip Taaffe), photography (Martine Aballéa, Denis Roche, Hiroshi Sugimoto), video (Kenneth Anger, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Bill Viola), theater (Jan Fabre, Jacques Vincey, Krzysztof Warlikowski) or cinema (David Lynch, Raoul Ruiz, Apichatpong Weerasethakul). Therefore, strong in this new light, themes such as the work of Marcel Duchamp or the baroque, the art of gardens or semiology, eroticism or the plasticity of mental images, the notion of genre or that of the artist’s book compose Visions of Mandiargues to approach the incandescent modernity of his writing : his experience in the twenty-first century. Finally, photographs, respectively by Bernard Plossu, Bona Pieyre de Mandiargues, Florence Chevallier, Érik Bullot, Gérard Macé, Nicolas Comment, Sara Imloul, Kourtney Roy, Muriel Pic and Françoise Nuñez, open each chapter of Visions of Mandiargues as an invitation from the image in writing which could be the echo of it. »
(Translated by Filigranes, 2020).

                                                                                       *

He has taken part in the following international publications & symposiums :

2023

QUÉBEC CANADA
Article : « Dominique Vermeesch, Listening to The Never Seen »
Inter, art actuel, n° 142

BRUSSELS BELGIUM
Operatic libretto : Micromegas
Next Opera Days (ARS MUSICA International Contemporary Music Bienalle)

2022

BRUSSELS BELGIUM
Articles & Interviews for the online catalogue of the Biennial « BIG SCIENCE »
ARS MUSICA International Contemporary Music Festival

QUÉBEC CANADA
Article : « Paradise Now, Soundtracks for JFO »
Inter, art actuel, n° 140

BRUSSELS BELGIUM
Article : « New Voices, New Ways ? The Voice as a Bridge – Interview with Bruno Letort »
L’Art même, n° 86

2021

BRUSSELS BELGIUM
Article : « Radio in Art »
L’Art même, n° 85

BRUSSELS BELGIUM
Press release : Marie-Jo Lafontaine « Every angel is terrifying »
Belgian Gallery, Brussels

BRUSSELS & KÖLN BELGIUM & GERMANY
Foreword : Marie-Jo Lafontaine & Véronique Bergen « Every angel is terrifying »
La Lettre volée, Brussels
Lembertz, Brussels & Hanstein Verlag, Köln

2020

LUXEMBOURG
Article : « Written by Water by Marco Godinho »
Arts et Lettres, n° 6

BRUSSELS BELGIUM 
Exhibition : « The Sound Workshop of Aesthetics » 
Festival City Sonic – Royal Academy of Fine Arts

2019 

LUXEMBOURG 
Lecture : « The Meaning of Photography » 
University of Luxembourg 

BRUSSELS BELGIUM 
Lecture : « Sound and Contemporary Art » 
Royal Academy of Fine Arts

2018 

SHANGHAI CHINA 
Lecture : « Audio Diary, Radiophonics, Arts, Cinema » 
XiYiTang/École offshore 

JINAN CHINA 
Workshop : « How to make pictures out of sounds, voices, music and noise ? » 
Shandong University of Arts 

JINAN CHINA 
Lecture : « The Crossing : Photography, Cinema, Sound Art » 
Shandong University of Arts

SAINT PETERSBURG RUSSIA 
Lecture : « Aesthetics of Speakers in Contemporary Art » 
Alexandrinsky Theatre

SAINT PETERSBURG RUSSIA 
Lecture : « Sound Arts » 
State Russian Museum

2017 

CHARLEROI BELGIUM 
Lecture : « Audio Art, Radio and Archives » 
Library PointCulture

2016 

ATHENS GREECE 
Article : « Demesthene Agrafiotis (poet, photographer, philosopher) » 
VAKXIKON.GR 

MONS BELGIUM 
Lecture : « A History of Sound Art » 
Academy of Arts

2015

HEIDELBERG-BERLIN GERMANY 
Preface : « Mirages by Tami Amit » in Tami Amit, Insomnia, Kehrer Verlag 

MONS BELGIUM 
Exhibition : « The Sound Workshop of Aesthetics » 
Festival City Sonic 

HONG KONG CHINA 
Exhibition : « The Sound Workshop of Aesthetics » 
The French May – Hong Kong Arts Center 

BRUSSELS BELGIUM
Article : « In the Mons Maze… City Sonic, A Sound History of the 21st Century » 
in City Sonic, Sound Arts in the City, Edited by Philippe Franck, 
La Lettre Volée 

2014 

SHANGHAI CHINA 
Workshop : « Sound Map of a City » 
SIVA/Shanghai Institute of Visual Art 

SHANGHAI CHINA 
Lecture : « A History of Sound Art » 
ECNU/East China Normal University 

SHANGHAI CHINA 
Lecture & Workshop : « Sound Map of a City » 
XiYiTang/École offshore 

2013 

MONS BELGIUM 
Exhibition : « The Sound Workshop of Aesthetics » 
Festival City Sonic 

2012

MONTREAL CANADA 
Lecture : « The Story of Sounds of the Wind » 
UQÀM – UNIVERSITY OF QUEBEC IN MONTREAL 

MONTREAL CANADA 
Lecture : « Passages (images, texts, sounds), the Migrations of Listening » 
UQÀM – UNIVERSITY OF QUEBEC IN MONTREAL 

MONS BELGIUM 
Exhibition : « The Sound Workshop of Aesthetics » 
Festival City Sonic 

BASEL SWITZERLAND 
Lecture : « Icons of Art. Artist Talk with Marie-Jo Lafontaine » 
Art-Basel, Rolls-Royce Artist Talks 

ÜBERLINGEN GERMANY 
Preface : « The Happy Melancholy of the Future – Flowers, Images, Fictions »
in Marie-Jo Lafontaine, Alice in Wonderland, Villa Larix 

2011 

MONS BELGIUM 
Exhibition : « The Sound Workshop of Aesthetics » 
Festival City Sonic 

BRUGES BELGIUM 
Preface : « Marie-Jo Lafontaine, Dance The World ! »,
J. P. De-Paepe Publisher 

LONDON ENGLAND 
Article : « The Openness of Possibilities : Visual Freedom and Radio Listening »,
Radiauteur, Goldsmiths University, n° 1 

BRUSSELS BELGIUM 
Preface : « Marie-Jo Lafontaine », Forum, n° 186 

2010 

LUXEMBOURG 
Lecture : « Planets of sounds, new languages ? »
Museum of Modern Art Grand-Duc Jean – MUDAM 

POZNAN POLAND 
Article : « Marie-Jo Lafontaine : Sound space and fictional space in The World Starts Every Minute »,
Mediations Biennial Poznan 

BRUSSELS BELGIUM 
Article : « Interview with Anne-Laure Chamboissier and Philippe Franck : The Sound Poetry and its Exhibition»,
L’Art même, n° 48 

GENEVA SWITZERLAND 
Article : « Christian Marclay : sound, music and visual arts (about Up and Out) »,
Retour d’y Voir, n° 3/4, MAMCO Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art 

PORTO PORTUGAL 
Article : « Cornelius Cardew and the Freedom of Listening : An Interview with L. Gablier,
D. Inkster and J.-J. Palix»,
Galeria da Culturgest – Fundaçao Caixa Geral de Depositos 

2009

LE LOCLE SWITZERLAND 
Lecture : « Planets of Sounds » 
Museum of Fine Arts 

LE LOCLE SWITZERLAND 
Preface : « Alexandre Joly’s Soundscapes » 
Museum of Fine Arts Press 

BRUSSELS BELGIUM 
Preface : « Thinking the World » 
French Ambassade/Monografik Publisher 

2008 

TAIPEI TAIWAN 
Lecture : « Contemporary Art in France», 
National University of the Arts – School of Fine Arts 

MONS BELGIUM 
Exhibition : « The Sound Workshop of Aesthetics » 
Festival City Sonic

2007

PUZIH TAIWAN 
Exhibition : « The Sound Workshop of Aesthetics » 
Toko University 

WARSAW POLAND 
Article : « The Question of Photography » 
Camera Obscura, n° 1 

AARHUS DENMARK 
Text : « The utopia of images in André Pieyre de Mandiargues’s Works » 
Aarhus University Press 

2006

MONTREAL CANADA 
Editorial Team : « Gilles Deleuze’s cinema » 
CINéMAS — University of Montréal, vol. 16/n° 2-3 

BERLIN GERMANY 
Article : « Images, sounds, texts : Translation of signs » 
http://www.transversale.org 

BRUSSELS BELGIUM 
Article : « Interview with Philippe Franck : The Sounds of Cities » 
L’Art même, n° 31 

2004

AARHUS DENMARK 
Lecture : « André Pieyre de Mandiargues, the utopia of images as a challenge to literature »
Language, Literature and Cultural Institute — Department of Classical and Roman Studies

2003 
LECCO ITALY 
Article : « New Medias : Words, Bodies and Digital Images » :
Karenina.it Experimental

2002 

LUXEMBOURG 
Lecture : « The Idea of Photography » 
The University of Luxembourg 

WARSAW POLAND 
Article : « The Question of Photography » 
Fotografia, n° 9 

1999

THESSALONIKI GREECE 
Preface : « Mirror, Process, Medias, Photography as a Critical Art » 
Museum of Contemporary Art Press 

1998

VILNIUS LITHUANIA 
Lecture : « Contemporary Photography in France » 
School of Fine Arts 

BERLIN GERMANY 
Text : « Mandiargues as a Critical Art » 
Lendemains — The Technical University of Berlin, n° 91-92 

NAMUR BELGIUM 
Preface : « Correspondences : Jean-Noël Laszlo and Michel Butor »,
Lecture Hall

THESSALONIKI GREECE 
Article : « Bernard Guillot : Back to New York » 
Camera obscura, Summer, n° 38 

GENEVA SWITZERLAND 
Article : « Jacques Bélat : Backward Images »,
Sepia

1997 

LUXEMBOURG 
Lecture : « Aesthetics of Sounds » 
The University of Luxembourg 

LUXEMBOURG 
Preface : « Immaterial Images, Sounds, Worlds… Or What We Have Lost (text written with Christian Gattinoni) » 
Casino — Forum for Contemporary Art Press 

TALLINN ESTONIA 
Preface : « The Power of Images : The Mutation of War ? » 
Biennial of Saaremaa Press 

VIENNA-ATHENS, AUSTRIA-GREECE 
Article : « What is a Citizenship ? » 
Odyssee Today Press 

1996 

VEVEY SWITZERLAND 
Member of the Jury of the Diploma 
High School of Photography 

THESSALONIKI GREECE 
Exhibition & Preface : « Motionless Variety » 
French Institut 

1995 

THESSALONIKI GREECE 
Lecture : « Olga Kaloussi’s Polaroïd Photographs between Photographs and Fine Arts » 
Galery Zita Mi 

THESSALONIKI GREECE 
Preface : « Olga Kaloussi : The Image in flight » 
Schema & Chroma Publisher 

BERLIN GERMANY 
Text : « André Pieyre de Mandiargues’s view and The Photography » 
Lendemains — The Technical University of Berlin, Spring, n° 77 

MADRID SPAIN 
Article : « Emptiness in Translation »,
Fotografias, n° 10 

1993 

ALMERIA SPAIN 
Lecture : « André Pieyre de Mandiargues’s Photographic Vision » 
The Complutense University of Madrid 

THESSALONIKI GREECE 
Preface : « Contract of a Broken Picture » 
EnTOMO Publisher 

TURIN ITALY 
Preface : « Bernard Plossu : Visions of the South with Children » 
Fifth International Biennial of Photography 

1992 

THESSALONIKI GREECE 
Lecture : « Barcelona in La Marge by André Pieyre de Mandiargues and Photographs of Manel Esclusa and Joan Fontcuberta » 
The Aristotle University