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The article discusses the Centre Pompidou Virtuel or Digital Centre Pompidou, a digital strategy developed by Centre Pompidou modern art museum in Paris, France, for the provision of access through a single entry point to the whole digital production of the organization and associated institutions. It discusses content as the focus of Centre Pompidou's online presence, its emphasis on diversity of cultural activity, and its adoption of Semantic Web technologies and Linked Data approach.

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The increasing pervasiveness of plastics in 1950s France was accompanied by a profoundly ambivalent critique of synthetic materials. Much postwar French culture tended to affirm traditional craft-based production, treating plastics with suspicion. Synthetic materials symbolised a 'bad' modernity, the emergence of a new consumer society of mechanised mass production and the death of an older artisanal way of life. More fundamentally, synthetics challenged the very notion of materials itself, questioning through their capacity for imitation and transformation the accepted identities and hierarchies of the material world. Works by Roland Barthes, Roger Vailland, Jacques Tati, Alain Resnais and Raymond Queneau engage with the implications of plastic, revealing a deep ambivalence about social and economic modernisation through their treatment of materials whose simultaneously polymorphous and homogeneous character both seduces and repels. Beginning as a project of demystification, the cultural critique of plastic ultimately reveals its complicity with what it ostensibly rejects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]