Jean-Paul Fourmentraux, born in Fez, Morocco, in 1970, lives and works in Paris (France) and in Montreal (Canada). Jean-Paul Fourmentraux is a sociologist (PHD) at the National Center of the Scientific Research (France: CNRS) and in the School of the High Studies in Social Sciences (Paris: EHESS). Co-author of two research reports for the Plastic Arts Delegation to the french Ministry of Culture: Visual Culture and group art on the web (1999), Between the artist and the computer scientist: a space of arbitration, translation, negotiation, (2001). Author of various articles on digital art for the publications Solaris (2000), Sociology of Art (2002), Archée (2003-04), Ligeia and Leonardo (2003), Reseaux (2004). The process of technological innovation heralds the reconfiguration of the organization of research in the media arts. The imperatives of innovation and creativity have become the driving force for industry-transferable research and creation. Fourmentraux's research combines an analysis of these concepts, which are at once social utopias and hypotheses on the transformation of industrial societies, with an empirical examination of this sector of activity in Europe and Canada (Montreal). The analysis is based on a survey of entrepreneurs, researchers and artists moving between arts organizations, institutional research labs and the business world.