Carte Blanche - La Spirale - Thirtieth anniversary !

No doubt one of the first francophone electronic media outlets, La Spirale was founded by Laurent Courau in the early 90s, in the wake of Californian cyberculture. A movement that already associated cutting edge technologies with the most bizarre counter cultures. At first a VHS video fanzine, then a xeroxed info letter, it explored several formats before its final incarnation on the nascent internet in 1995.

The site has continued to grow to offer hundreds of articles, interviews and portfolios, dedicated to everything emerging on the dark side of contemporary pop culture. What if today’s eccentrics were the heralds of tomorrow? The most interesting cultural and artistic movements were born on the fringes and in the underground, far from the purring slumber of institutions and mass media.

Over the years, La Spirale has multiplied its collaborations—working with the “interactive” supplement of Le Monde newspaper, publishing its first anthology Mutations pop et crash culture with the Éditions du Rouergue in 2004, participating in the Borderline Biennales at the Demeure du Chaos (Lyon), and producing Vampyres, a film by Laurent Courau that premiered at L’Étrange Festival in 2009.

At the end of the 2010 years, La Spirale spawned a sibling, with the apparition of Mutation. A new entity dedicated to science, considered as a new field of exploration. A wink to the cyberculture of the origins that already announced today’s technological chaos. Beyond releasing large-format “posters to read” and a new digital magazine in 2023, the team has also moved into event production, notably with the Mirabilia Creaturae exhibition at the Cabinet des Curieux, as a L’Étrange Festival feature.

In March 2025, L’Étrange Mutation celebrated the magnificent wedding of these monstrous entities at the Gare Expérimentale (Paris), teleporting its audience into a parallel dimension of Forbidden Documents screenings, works of divination, erotic short films, conferences, performances, offbeat art exhibitions, walls of sound, hackings of reality, mental manipulations and other audiovisual installations.

Fall 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of La Spirale, making it choose this moment to be born again, in order to defend the imperative necessity of a re-enchantment of the world and to reclaim its role as an incubator of multiple futures, outside the spheres of consensual reality. Still free, independent, and off the beaten path. A legend.