LAURENT COURAU

Extended Biography

Laurent Courau, a director, screenwriter, and freelance journalist, a nomadic illustrator, and editor of a web magazine, is a curious and passionate polymath. He traverses the technological, artistic, and cultural shifts of our time through collaborations with press and digital or audiovisual media such as Le Monde, Libération, Radio Nova, Chronic’art, Computer Arts, Technikart, Tracks TV show on Arte, the television channel Jimmy (CanalSat), and L’Observatoire de l’an 2000, a prospective study commissioned by the Eiffel Tower and conducted in partnership with the economic daily Les Échos.

Born in the Latin Quarter, Laurent had a nomadic childhood spanning France, Italy, Morocco, Libya, India, and Catalonia. He returned to Paris in his adolescence, immersing himself in the punk and alternative scene of the 1980s. He published fanzines, organized sound for concerts featuring bands like Bérurier Noir, La Mano Negra, Suprême NTM, or KRS-One, and managed the French scenes for bands like Fugazi, NoMeansNo, Godflesh, The Vandals, SNFU, The Accüsed, Gorilla Biscuits, or Youth of Today with the Elastic Crew Enterprize. He also managed the band G.I. Love, organizing tours, including one that coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

Returning from a stay in Athens, where he assisted director Dimitri Kollatos during the production of his seventh feature film Keadas, Laurent began working as an independent art director and director for the music industry, collaborating with labels like Geffen Records, MCA, Universal, EMI, Chrysalis, and Sony Music, as well as artists like Nirvana, Beck, Kool & The Gang, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Oneyed Jack, Aerosmith, and the soundtrack for Quentin Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction. He created numerous illustrations for the press and covers for publications such as Le Monde, Webmaster Magazine, Coda, Computer Arts, or .Netpro.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Laurent served as the editor-in-chief of Microsoft France’s business-to-business website for a year before joining Trimaran, a web agency, 3D creation studio, and special effects company from the era of French audiovisual and Internet pioneers. There, he led the artistic team as creative director. Under his guidance, the agency won prestigious bids, including projects for the Eiffel Tower, Mitsubishi Europe, Lesieur, the Paris-Dakar Rally, the Tour de France, and the Paris Court of Appeal.

From the summer of 2002, he worked from New York as a correspondent for Libération and Radio Nova, producing reports for the Track program on Arte. In 2004, he published Mutations pop & crash culture, the first anthology of La Spirale, one of the earliest cultural magazines on the French Internet, launched in 1995 and still active to this day. This was followed by the investigative book Vampyres, when fiction goes beyond reality by Flammarion in 2006, based on his documentary film of the same name (Avalanche Productions, 2007), which premiered a year later in Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and France.

Laurent joined the team at the Abode of Chaos in November 2009 at the invitation of Thierry Ehrmann, where he worked in audiovisual, editorial, and event production while writing the Survival Manual for a World on the Verge of Chaos. He then co-wrote, produced, and directed The Occult Sources, a web series in twelve episodes and a fantasy feature film, which premiered in Paris in September 2019 as part of the twenty-fifth anniversary of L’Étrange Festival. Alongside these activities, he continued various collaborations with the press, television, and writing The Tour – A Travelogue to Another Future, to be published by Inculte (Actes Sud).

In addition to his recent audiovisual, journalistic, and literary pursuits, including a publication with CNRS editions as part of the collective essay Un XXIème siècle irrationnel, which offers multidisciplinary analyses of « alternative » thoughts, Laurent contributes to research projects and artistic experiments in virtual and mixed reality. In September 2023, he launched Mutation, a new « survival media for the 21st century » on the Internet focusing on artistic, scientific, and technological solutions to the major challenges of our time, soon to be expanded into print with the first issue announced for September 2024.