A CONSTRUCTED WORLD
Speaking to eels
Thursday 1 December 2016, 15:00 - 18:00
Galerie Ygrec, Lelong building, Les Grands Voisins - 82, Avenue Denfert-Rochereau 75014 Paris

A Constructed World began Explaining contemporary art to live eels in 2003, inviting art experts from across the world to explain their research to eels temporarily inhabiting museums and art centres. The live eels (Anguilla anguilla) have now, due to their dastardly decline, been exchanged for a speaking, robotic eel. Did we at some point, decide the image has duly replaced the-thing-itself? Has the image replaced logic in the same way logic exceeded and displaced rhetoric before it, if so what use are intellectuals? What is to be examined when everyone knows how to read the image in a lively often disingenuous way? In this performance of absence, where is speech coming from. What difference does it make who is speaking? Who really spoke? Bruno Latour says something like there may be a space that we could deal with as empirical but we would first need to understand what part is human. ‘We put ourselves in a position to realize that it is ourselves and not reality that is responsible for what we know’. When talking to others, objects and other species are always near. Ready-to-hand. Richard Rorty opines that that getting authority over oneself means hearing ‘your own statements as part of shared practice.’

This part of the seminar will take place over two days the first will be a lecture about how speech aggregates and ACW’s work and experience talking to eels, the second will be a group workshop to consider, what that group proposes, the voice of the eel might be and how an actual voice might be produced.

A Constructed World work with actions and methodologies that bring attention to diverse modes of artistic practice. They are well known fortheir lengthy performances which include up to twenty performers presenting speech, conversation, philosophic al texts, music and singing, incorporating high levels of specialisation and not-knowing as a shared space. In their ongoing project, Explaining contemporary art to live eels, they invite art specialists to speak to live eels that are later released back into the water. These projects accumulate a research concerned with transmission and reception, satisfaction-without-delay.

Download mp3 file of A Constructed World's lecture (in English)

DOMINIQUE LESTEL
What is Zoo-futurism ?
Wednesday 23 November 2016, 14:00 - 17:00
ENSAD, 31 Rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris

Scientists of the China Research and Conservation Center for the Giant Panda approch a panda disguised as pandas, 7 october 2012, Wolong, China.

Organized with Vadim Bernard, Stéphane Degoutin and Gwenola Wagon.

Imagine a world in which one doesn't go on vacation to an exotic country but rather where one goes to explore the giraffe or visit crustaceans. A world in which one can be several species at once and where there are species-less animals. A world in which humans have finally been liberated from the last physical prison holding them back, the metabolic prison of the species. It is time to release the anarchy of the social and psychological space in which it is confined in order to usher it into the realm of the species. Welcome to Zoo-futurism which considers the future of the human being to be its re-animalisation. Positivists will label Zoofuturism as unrealistic without having understood that in the final analysis, the most realistic concepts are often the most useless.

Dominique Lestel is assistant professor in the philosophy department at the École normale supérieure, where he teaches contemporary philosophy. He was a founding member of the Département d’Etudes Cognitive at the ENS and for many years directed the Etho-ecology and Cognitive Ethology teams of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle. He was Visiting Professor in Chicago and Tokyo and occupied multiple research positions in diverse American, Australian and Asian universities. His work develops a "philosophical ethology" dealing with the ontological, ethical and political stakes of the shared life between humans and non humans (animals, vegetation, fungi, viruses, robots and ghosts). He has worked for several years with the group AOO, part of the AME (Art, Mondialité et Ecosystèmes) team at the ACTES Institute at the University of Paris 1.

NICOLAS GIRET
What songbirds teach us
Thursday 17 November 2016, 15:00 - 18:00
Galerie Ygrec, Lelong building, Les Grands Voisins - 82, Avenue Denfert-Rochereau 75014 Paris

Almost half of the bird species on Earth are songbirds. The diversity of songbird species implies a huge diversity of songs. The tit warbles, the sparrow chirps, the blackbird whistles. Common to gardens as well as rainforests, songbirds fill up the soundscape and have intrigued humans over the ages. Only since the mid-twentieth century, and its technical advances, have songbirds and their singing behavior been investigated. The songs of songbirds are socially learned by imitation. An individual, usually a juvenile, memorizes the song of a model, generally of an adult, before practicing its own song. Learning by songbirds is thus similar to speech and language acquisition in humans. It is a rarity within the animal kingdom, explaining why songbirds are now widely studied. The domains in which research is conducted on songbirds includes not merely thier behavioral aspects (such as function and use of songs, recognition amongst individuals) but also neurobiological aspects (what neuronal mechanisms are involved in song learning, its perception or its production?). During my presentation, we will discover various research projects and specific examples, with the aim of better understanding what and how information is exchanged not only between individuals while they are singing but also between neurons which ground the singing behavior.

Nicolas Giret is a researcher at the CNRS, based at the Neuroscience Paris Saclay Institute in Orsay. He first studied the cognitive abilities of parrots in the Laboratoire d’Ethologie et Cognition Comparées at the Paris Ouest University, mainly focusing on their vocal communication systems (2005-2009). He then moved to Zürich, to study systemic neuroscience at the Institute of Neuroinformatics, investigating the neuronal correlates of imitative vocal behavior (2010-2013). Studying songbirds, he demonstrated the existence of a population of neurons displaying mirror-like neuronal activity in a cortical-like brain area, i.e. similar patterns of activity when a bird sings or passively hears its own song (2014). Recently, together with his new collaborators at the Neuroscience Paris Saclay Institute, he has shown that the neuronal responses in auditory areas of songbirds are modulated by the presence and the sex of the surrounding individuals (2015-2016). Nicolas Giret is currently working on the mechanisms involved in the emergence of cerebral mirror neurons in songbirds.

Download mp3 file of Nicolas Giret's lecture (in French)

FABIEN GIRAUD
Thursday 27 October 2016, 15:00 - 18:00
Galerie Ygrec, Les Grands Voisins - 82, Avenue Denfert-Rochereau 75014 Paris

Ohlone Tule Hut, CyArk 3d Scan. Work Document Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni 2016

As Matteo Pasquinelli recently stated, artificial intelligence is "a form of animism for the rich". For the theoretician, it is the sign of the resurgence, at the heart of our hyper-industrialized societies, of a type of relationship with the world wherein non-entities are bearers of autonomous thought. Artificial intelligence weaves together two radically different ontologies; in the first, AI is the result of a conception of the world in which thought can be dissected into a series of inert and discrete elements (only to be recomposed within a cascade of logical operators), and in the second, it gives rise to a world in which both living and inert matter, thought and death become indistinguishable (and understood uniquely as a non-decomposable totality).

The project that I am currently working on with Raphaël Siboni takes this analysis as a departure point and attempts, at the scale of a film entirely filmed and edited by an intelligent machine, to produce a convergence between a contemporary conception of AI as developed in Silicon Valley and the animism of the Ohlone tribes which lived there before colonization. The film is situated in 1542, the moment when conquistadors landed in the San Francisco bay, and when the animal-gods which reigned there died, leaving behind them a certain logic. It is a film which figures the return of an artificial intelligence to its place of origin, in order to change its future. By using the abstract structure of Ohlone myths to redirect the computational ontology of neural networks, it attempts to operate a bifurcation in History and open up the possibility of a uniquely Ohlone artificial intelligence.

Fabien Giraud was born in 1980. He presently lives and works in Paris, France. Since 2007 he has collaborated extensively with the artist and filmmaker Raphael Siboni with whom he has exhibited internationally(Palais de Tokyo – 2008, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris – 2009, Santa Fe Biennial -2008, Moscow Biennial 2009, Sharjah Art Foundation – 2013, Biennale de Lyon 2015 ). Since 2014, their new and ongoing body of works entitled The Unmanned has been presented in a series of monographic shows in Luxembourg(Casino Luxembourg), Canada(Vox in Montreal) and France(Centre International d’Art et du Paysage de l’Ile de Vassiviere). In 2011 he co-founded the series of seminars and workshops entilted The Matter of Contradiction adressing questions regarding the geological concept of the Anthropocene and its consequences for the theory of art. In 2012, he co-initiated Glass Bead – a research platform and a journal – launched in 2014 through a series of events in New York and Paris.

MARIE LECHNER
Bots
Tuesday 3 November 2015, 9:30 - 15:00
Les Grands Voisins - 82, Avenue Denfert-Rochereau 75014 Paris

Bots are our old network friends, present in IRC chats, on-line games, and on the web. "The first indigenous species of cyberspace", according to Wired journalist Andrew Leonard. They proliferate, are more and more complex, and cause as many problems as they try to resolve. Whether they operate in the background or demand our attention, they have colonized an incredible variety of environments. They represent the armed wing of our data society, increasingly more efficient, to such a point that certain voices sound the alarm of the rise of a vast inhuman machine on auto-pilot.

We will retrace the history and try to outline a taxinomy of these "narrow artificial intelligences". From Eliza, the grandmother of all chatterbots to the silent bot army of Wikipedia, from bot wars in IRC networks to Twitterbots employed by the Mexican government to silence opposition, from seductive bimbots of online dating sites to high-frequency trading bots, from criminal botnets to artistic bot projects.

Marie Lechner is a french journalist, she writes extensively about digital art and culture. She has worked for the newspaper Libération and as free lancer for Arte Creative,Magazine des cultures digitales (MCD), Le Monde. She is also a researcher in media archeology at PAMAL (Preservation & Art - Media Archaelogy Lab), at the Ecole supérieure des arts in Avignon. She has been organising conferences on web folklore at the Gaîté Lyrique and created a "Supertalk" called "Le Wi-Fi - de l'Antiquité à nos jours". She co-curated the following shows - Speed Show number 5 (Open internet) in Paris (2011), the Cacophony Society section in the Evil Clowns exhibition at the center for media art Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund (2014), and collaborated in Welcome to the future, at the Centre for digital cultures and technology (IMAL) in Brussels (2015). She is currently working as the french curator for the european project Streaming Egos, on digital identities, launched by the Goethe Institut.

Download mp3 file of Marie Lechner's lecture (in French)

SUZANNE TREISTER
From Military Time Travel Research Projects to ‘HEXEN 2.0’
Friday 23 January 2015, 4:30pm - 6:30pm
GAÏTÉ LYRIQUE (mediatheque, room in the back on the left) - 3 bis Rue Papin 75003 Paris

In 1995 Suzanne Treister invented the alter-ego Rosalind Brodsky, a time traveller working for the Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality in the 21st century. Alongside personal historical data Brodsky also documented several military research projects carried out by the institute, culminating in HEXEN 2039 (2006), a project which developed new military-occult technologies for psychological warfare.

In 2011 Treister completed HEXEN 2.0 which looks into histories of scientific research behind government programmes of mass control, investigating parallel histories of countercultural and grass roots movements. HEXEN 2.0 charts, within a framework of post-WWII U.S. governmental and military imperatives, the coming together of scientific and social sciences through the development of cybernetics, the history of the internet, the rise of Web 2.0 and increased intelligence gathering, and implications for the future of new systems of societal manipulation towards a control society. Based on actual events, people, histories and scientific projections of the future, and consisting of alchemical diagrams, a Tarot deck, photo-text works, pencil drawings, a video and a website, HEXEN 2.0 offers a space where one may use the works as a tool to envision possible alternative futures.

Suzanne Treister is an artist working in London. Initially recognized in the 1980s as a painter, she became a pioneer in the digital/new media/web based field from the beginning of the 1990s, making work about emerging technologies, developing fictional worlds and international collaborative organisations. Utilising various media, including video, the internet, interactive technologies, photography, drawing and watercolour, Treister has evolved a large body of work which engages with eccentric narratives and unconventional bodies of research to reveal structures that bind power, identity and knowledge. Often spanning several years, her projects comprise fantastic reinterpretations of given taxonomies and histories that examine the existence of covert, unseen forces at work in the world, whether corporate, military or paranormal.

NICOLAS MAIGRET
The Experimenter Effect
Friday 19 December 2014, 4:30pm - 6:30pm
GAÏTÉ LYRIQUE (mediatheque, room in the back on the left) - 3 bis Rue Papin 75003 Paris

For his talk, Nicolas Maigret will present his current research which attemps to shed light on various invisible or discreet aspects of digital machines. Using a mediumistic or pseudo-scientific point of view, he will address a set of experiences, from the laying bare the inner workings of these machines to the invocation of a technical afterlife, which seems to emanate from all machinery that has reached a certain level of technical complexity.

During this dérive he will present – An attentiveness to binary code, revealing the structure of different encodings, languages and contents – Different ways of listening to the Internet's background noise, revealing the materiality and dynamics unique to the Internet – Recording the activity of the “global brain” using the model of seismic activity – Listening to topographic relief maps made by NASA – A set-up for intercepting exchanges on peer-to-peer networks. He will also talk about more recent projects convoking the specters of the military heritage inherent to the most ordinary technical systems.

Nicolas Maigret exposes the internal workings of media, through an exploration of their dysfunctions, limitations or failure thresholds which he develops sensory and immersive audio visual experiences. As a curator, he initiated the disnovation.net research, a critique of the innovation propaganda. After completing studies in intermedia art, Maigret joined the LocusSonus lab in Aix France, where he explored networks as a creative tool. He teaches at Parsons Paris and cofounded the Art of Failure collective in 2006.

Download mp3 file of Nicolas Maigret's lecture (in French)

EMMANUEL GUEZ
Immortality machines
Friday 10 December 2014, 3:30pm - 5:30pm
YGREC - 20 rue Louise Weiss 75013 Paris

In Friedrich Kittler’s book, Grammophon, Film, Typewriter (1986), he demonstrates how, during the 19th century, the imaginary of analogical (new) media (from literature to advertisements extolling the powers of machines) coalesced around the idea of communication with the afterlife and the netherworld. At the same time, the century also saw the birth of a number of sciences and practices, such as psychoanalysis, telepathy or parapsychology, which sought to attain the outer limits of human communication. Did the transformations of inscriptive technologies directly affect the way in which Western thought conceptualized the afterlife and immortality? Today, how are digital machines and their respective imaginaries reconfiguring these notions, and what transformations have they brought on the idea of the work of art and the the artist's signature?

Emmanuel Guez is an artist and philosopher. He directs the research laboratory PAMAL (Preservation – Archaeology – Media Art Lab) at l'Ecole Supérieure d'Art d'Avignon.

Download mp3 file of Emmanuel Guez's lecture (in French)

PIERRE CASSOU-NOGUÈS
Gödel, Wiener, Cybernetics and ghosts
Friday 28 November 2014, 3:30pm - 5:00pm
YGREC - 20 rue Louise Weiss 75013 Paris

Norbert Wiener, one of the greatest mathematiciens of the 20th century, is also the founder of Cybernetics, which investigated the social and human benefits and risks linked to the emergence of automation and computerisation. His archives, largely unpublished, revealed strange detective stories (among which A scientist reappears, a short story based on the murder of a scientist), in which Wiener develops his analyses and poses a fundamental question – How does one continues scientific research when it led to the atomic bomb ?

This approach positions Cybernetics in the interval between science and fiction, and explores the ways in which its now familiar and problematic creatures, robots and cyborgs, shed light on its social and political underpinnings.

Pierre Cassou-Noguès, philosopher and professor at the Université Paris 8, is the author of a number of essays which blend philosophy, literature and sciences including Les Démons de Gödel, logique et folie, Mon zombie et moi, la philosophie comme fiction, La Mélodie du tic-tac and Les Rêves cybernétiques de Norbert Wiener.

Download mp3 file of Pierre Cassou-Noguès's lecture (in French)

JEAN-LOUIS BOISSIER
Chappe's Telegraph and Conté's pencil, inventions of the Revolution
Friday 14 March 2014, 3:00pm - 5:30pm
ENSAD - 31 rue d’Ulm 75005 Paris - ensadlab salle 305

Beginning in 1791, the optical telegraph was implemented according to the technological and formal choices of Claude Chappe. In 1793, it is validated and adopted by the Convention for its political and military dimensions. In 1794, in order to oppose the English blockade depriving France of precious lead, the government commissioned Nicolas-Jacques Conté to perfect a writing instrument, the pencil, which had both military and civilian applications. However different these two inventions might seem at first glance, they both gave rise to revolutionary narratives and to the celebration of their inventors. It is interesting to analyse them together as transitional moments between 18th century Enlightenment and 19th century industrial culture.

Jean-Louis Boissier is emeritus professor of art and aesthetics and director of research at the University of Paris 8. He also teaches at the EnsadLab - École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs. Since the 1980s, he has been curator of new media exhibitions as well an artist working with interactive video programs and installations. His main articles on the question of interactivity in artistic practices were published in the book, La Relation comme forme, Mamco-Genève/Presses du réel, 2009.

Download mp3 file of Jean-Louis Boissier's lecture (in French)

ANNE ZEITZ
From MaxFeed to Radio Net – The radio projects of Max Neuhaus
Vendredi 13 December 2013, 3:00pm - 5:30pm
YGREC - 20 rue Louise Weiss 75013 Paris

Max Neuhaus, Sound Paths, Radio Net, 1978

Working as a percussionist, notably for John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, Max Neuhaus turned his attention, starting in 1966, to creating objects, walks, installations and sound exchange platforms. If his small electronic object Max-Feed (1966) is still involved with mechanically jamming radio-frequencies, Neuhaus soon turned to the exchange potential inherent in the medium of radio. From then on he produced projects for and with local and national radio stations, such as Public Supply (1966-1973) and Radio Net (1977), by linking their networks to telephone lines. These acoustical experiments which are both anonymous and collective, belong to Neuhaus' interest in the social dimension of both the radio and telephone. By bringing these two media together, Neuhaus worked hard to give "the impulse and the means to create an international sound exchange – a forum for verbal and acoustic exchange at a global level, a worldwide community of listeners"*. This lecture will explore this constellation of ideas.

* Max Neuhaus, « Audium. Projekt für eine Welt als Hör-Raum », in Edith Becker et Peter Weibel, ed. Vom Verschwinden der Ferne. Telekommunikation und Kunst, Köln, DuMont, 1990

Anne Zeitz is currently working on her PhD within the research group Esthétiques des Nouveaux Médias at the University of Paris 8. She organized the exhibition and film program Mouvement-observation-contrôle at the Goethe-Institut in 2007 and wrote a Master's thesis entitled, Le point aveugle de la surveillance. Her research is focused on the mechanics of observation and surveillance and the way in which these devices are redeployed in artistic, literary and cinematographic productions since the 1960s. Her current focus is on artists who devise "counter-observations" in regards to state surveillance and the behavior produced by this reversal in the observational relation.

Download mp3 file of Anne Zeitz's lecture (in French)

VISIT AND MINI-WORKSHOP AT THE ARCHIVES NATIONALES
Presentation by Charlotte Leblanc and Alice Marsal
Vendredi 20 December 2013, 3:00pm - 5:30pm
Les Archives Nationales, 59 rue Guynemer, 93380 Pierrefitte-sur-Seine (M°- Saint-Denis Université, ligne 13)

MARC-OLIVER WAHLER
Visit and presentation of the exhibition Jim Shaw's The Hidden World
Vendredi 13 December 2013, 3:00pm - 5:30pm
The Chalet Society, 14 boulevard Raspail 75007 Paris

The Hidden World

Secret societies, far-fetched orders and fraternities, evangelical and fundamentalist movements, New Age spiritualists or all kinds of conspirators, encyclopaedias for children, and even Dr. Netter’s famous medical illustrations – Jim Shaw's exhibition of his incredible collection of didactic art that recycles the myths and beliefs of America.

The Chalet Society's carte blanche to Jim Shaw enables him to play with the limiting categories that art sometimes gets put into and test its eclecticism, its versatility, and its ability to provide unexpected areas of expertise.

JEAN-PHILIPPE ANTOINE
Information, recording, memory
Vendredi 6 December 2013, 3:00pm - 5:30pm
YGREC - 20 rue Louise Weiss 75013 Paris

Samuel Morse is well-known today as the inventor of Morse code and of the electro-magnetic telegraph that revolutionized human communications in the mid-19th century. But this inventor was first a painter, art theorist, and one of the first American practitioners and proselytes of photography. Together these activities create a unique constellation, centered on problems of information, its nature and how it can be transmitted. Painting, telegraphy and photography all treat the inscription, recording and the conveyance of traces and signs differently. Their juxtaposition within the practice of Morse, as well as their sometimes contradictory relationships with one another, defined a new space that we continue to inhabit today.

Jean-Philippe Antoine teaches aesthetics and the theory of contemporary art at the University of Paris VIII. Recently he published La traversée du XXe siècle. Joseph Beuys, l’image et le souvenir at the Editions du MAMCO/Presses du Réel and participated on The Quilt and the Truck. Nancy Shaver (Publication Studio, 2011). An artist, he works in many formats and media – painting, constructions, installations, and sound-based performance works, notably in collaboration with Leif Elggren. He recently released The Worried Ones (Antoine-Elggren) Live at 64 (2013), Nouvelles musiques anciennes (CD, 2011) and Objet Métal Esprit (EP, 2010) on the Firework Edition Records label.

Download mp3 file of Jean-Philippe Antoine's lecture (in French)

PHILIPPE BAUDOUIN
Occult voices - Thomas Edison and the fabrication of ghost machines
Vendredi 29 November 2013, 3:00pm - 5:30pm
YGREC - 20 rue Louise Weiss 75013 Paris

If the name of Thomas Edison is usually associated with numerous inventions such as the incandescent light bulb, tha alkaline battery or the phonograph, the situation is quite different for his psychic research. While most of his biographers have explored the minutest details of his technical innovations, they remain utterly silent on the experiments Edison led during the final decade of his life, where he attempted to enter into communication with the dead. What exactly was his "spirit phonograph"? What did he manage to hear?

Edison's research into the domains of sound reproduction and psychic science are symptomatic, in the history of these two disciplines, of a common interest in voice phenomena and electric doubles. In what manner does the phonographic machine reveal with precision the occult dimensions of reproductive technologies? In light of the different spirit practices developped in the wake Edison's work and their popular culture representations in genre films, we will briefly attempt to retrace an "archeology" of talking machines and their implications in the field of pyschic phenomena, at the same time revisiting the history of these inventions and their ghostly avatars.

Philippe Baudouin is broadcast director at France Culture and the author of features for Arte Radio. He has a master's degree in the philosopy of art and is the author of Au microphone - Dr. Walter Benjamin (Inathèque Prize 2009), MSH editions (collection Philia). He is currently preparing a collection of unpublished radio pieces by Walter Benjamin, as well as a book on the archeology of the radio, which will be published by Allia and the Presses Universitaires de France respectively.

Download mp3 file of Philippe Baudouin's lecture (in French)

VISIT AND DEMONSTRATION AT THE MUSÉE DES ARTS ET MÉTIERS
Vendredi 15 November 2013, 3:00pm - 5:30pm
Musée des Arts et Métiers, 60 rue Réaumur, 75003 Paris

VANESSA DESCLAUX
Hypnotic Protocol
Vendredi 8 November 2013, 3:00pm - 5:30pm
YGREC - 20 rue Louise Weiss 75013 Paris

Matt Mullican, “Under Hypnosis,”still from performance, Tate Modern, London, 2007

I will introduce my current research on hypnosis, which came about through various readings and meetings with practitioners of hypnosis. I will attempt to situate the questions raised by this research, and the different types of situations elicited - control, influence, empathy, and emancipation. Secondly, I will present the specific case of the use of hypnosis in the artistic practice of Matt Mullican who has been experimenting with it since 1978. It was attending one of his performances that led me to reflect upon the role hypnosis played in Mullican's creative process and upon the nature of “That Person”, the figure that has emerged from his work with hypnotic transe states."

Vanessa Desclaux graduated from Sciences Po, Paris and has a Master's degree in exhibition curating from Goldsmiths College, University of London, where she is currently pursuing her PhD in Art. Her research is centered on artistic practices which developped at the end of the 1970s and which articulate complex relationships between visual phenomena on the one hand and language and discursive practices on the other. In particular, she has worked on the artists David Lamelas, Guy de Cointet and Matt Mullican, developping her critical project through exhibitions, programs and performances and the publication of texts. Her recent projects include monographic and group exhibitions including - In a sentimental mood at the Galerie des galeries and Anna Barham, Agnès Geoffray, Nathania Rubin at Jousse Entreprise, in the framework of the festival Nouvelles vagues at the Palais de Tokyo.

Download mp3 file of Vanessa Desclaux's lecture (in French)