Pierre Berger

Pierre Berger was born in Paris, 1938. He belongs to an old parisian family of printers-booksellers and image-makers, established centuries ago in the Saint-Sulpice District, today a fashion site in the heart of "Rive Gauche", yesterday more frequented by priests, nuns, with a significant num ber of catholic institutions and shops.

Very soon, he is fascinated by machines, and specially the ones he gooes along to with his father in printing shops : linotypes, presses, guillotines, binding devices. He is only five years old when he takes notice of punched card systems used for the incipient industrial statistics.

A little before his tenth birthday, he become a boarder in La-Pierre-Qui-Vire abbey (in Burgundy). Two years later, he paints his first watercolours under the direction of a monk, disciple of Maurice Denis. He meets also the painters artists of the Abbey.

After his baccalaureat, he studies some mathematics then christian philophy in Saint-Sulpice Seminary, where he discovers the powerful (but rather outmoded) logical machines of medieval scholastics. His professional life begins in an insurance company, where he finds again the punched cards, and prepares the coming of the electronic data processing.

But his passion for machines, and now in particular for computers, finds a better expression in computer journalism, where he begins as a professional in 1967, and still operates through his web-magazine Stic-Hebdo, targeting scientists and researchears in Stic (Sciences and technologies for information an communication).

Along the years, his philsopophical thinking gets wider. To share it and progress, he starts in 1991 the Club de l'Hypermonde. He takes part in the foundation of Asti (French federation of professionnal informatics societies), of which he is vice-chairman. He publishes in 1999 L'informatique libè,re l'humain. La relativité digitale (Computers makes human free. The digital relativity) (L'Harmattan), with that motto « The irresistible progress of machines forces us in a double liberty movement. First, for themselves, they get more and more autonomy along with complexity. Second, they expect from us humans a decision flow richer and richer, as well to pursue their own development as in order to develop a new World, the Hyperworld".

But publish and talk are not enough for this passionate and inquiring mind. He needs to make by himself machines that give concrete expression to his personal questions, to his empathy with the technological evolutions that impact so deeply on the future of human life if not of human nature itself.

After Max, an egotistic and humorous robot, he launches en 2001 a vaster project, Roxame. That's not an end, for such a project has no limits, other than those of the creativity of its author and, beyond him, of all interested participants.