ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Jeff Guess and Guillaume Chevillon (ESSEC Metalab)
For this second version of the ARC, Artificial Intelligence, we again propose to bring together students from the ENSAPC and from the ESSEC Business School to reflect together upon recent advances in Artificial Intelligence and to collectively create a video game. The press is full of promises and fears that new tools such as GPT-4, Bard, Dall.e and Midjourney have finally brought about some form of a general machine intelligence. Despite the wonder we sometimes feel before the ease with which these programs create texts, images, music and code, we can legitimately question this contemporary desire to consider massive statistical models as thinking machines. We plan to explore this situation critically by examining its various political, social, economic and environmental ramifications by creating a video game together.
This year we have the pleasure of inviting the artist Nicolas Gourault (https://nicolasgourault.fr) whose work is fully centered on these questions. And to help us with certain aspects of the project we have also invited the artist Elouan Lebars (https://elouan-lebars.fr) who participated in the project and the exhibition at the Centre d’Art Ygrec last year. No technical expertise is required but it is definitely useful. We will use Generative AI tools as much as possible to help us with the construction of the video game. We will collectively combine our various individual competencies, whether it be 3D modeling, programming, sound, video, writing, performance, etc. in order to make this ambitious group project. We hope to be able to present the game we develop, as we did last year, as an exhibition, a performance or an augmented talk.
BIAIS, POÉSIE VISUELLE, UNE APPROCHE PLASTIQUE DU TEXTE
Alejandra Riera – Carla Adra
“Where does it remain that which doesn’t fit into words?” What does the reality and future of the written text in an artwork mean for the text itself and for the person receiving it? How do you make this transition from text to its presentation? These questions are the starting point for this workshop, which invites to create a time to think about how the text could be shown in plastic arts, starting with our own writings or those that we quote in an artistic work. Three sessions will be led by Gabriela Kraviez, an artist whose research highlights the plurality of languages inside the language. Describing her practice of reading and re-reading, underlining and rewriting fragments of philosophical texts, visible in her collages, Gabriela evokes her interest for the materiality of words and language games. Together with her, we will study a series of artists who will help us to understand how these questions of appearance, erasure, diversion and presentation of the text have been thought through plastically.
CONVERSATION
Jean-Luc Verna
Conversation is a very special occasion where I will be present to discuss and exchange with you, listen and advise you- maybe even reassure you on your practice, your drawing as a priority but also, given the plurality of my own artistic practice: representation in general, performance, embodiment, voice positioning, eloquence and physicality.
KOLEKTIVA
Boris Achour, Charlotte Charbonnel, Judith Perron
The first graphic representations of space, terrestrial or stellar, go back to the beginning of humanity. Creating and using maps fulfil several wishes and needs: To understand and organise the world: maps are essential tools helping humans to define and explain their paths across the world, to move around, to navigate, to explore and discover. To communicate information: maps can be used to convey geographical, historical, sensory and cultural knowledge. To take decisions: maps are essential tools for land development, urban planning, navigation, natural resources management and military planning, but also for visualising and structuring thinking (mind-mapping). Cartography is far from being a simple objective representation of geographical reality however and is deeply influenced by the historical, cultural, political and social contexts within which it is produced.
As part of this third season of Kolektiva, we wish to invite you to collectively think and create the cartography of a chosen territory, be it physical, mental or sensory. Or all three at once…
L’IMAGE PHOTOGRAPHIQUE
Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil et Christian Genty
Furthering students’ personal research into photographic production, developing their originality and autonomy in relation to an existing body of visual work. Confrontation with personalities from the world of photography.
LES SPÉCIALISTES
Jeff Guess and Judith Perron
‘When it comes to their specialty, specialists can no longer be held back’.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Pilote de guerre, XXIII, 1942.
You have expertise outside the art world. You’re passionate about it and you have the skills to qualify as a specialist in a secret practice. This Arc is for you! We invite you to meet specialists in extraordinary professions in their workplaces. We will be speaking to people who have imagined new ways of doing things, developed skills and devised working methods to build new fields of experience. By discovering the enthusiasm of our guests, the accuracy and inventiveness of their tools, and the openness offered by this new knowledge, we hope to find a permeability with the field of art that would enable us to rethink our own ways of doing.
These meetings will be accompanied by a collective reflection on your expertise and the invention of transmission methods in line with your specialisation.
LES YEUX FERMÉS
Florent Caron Darras, Charlotte Charbonnel, Alejandra Riera
In collaboration with the sound workshop
It is perhaps the immateriality and invisibility of the sound wave that takes precedence over its properties in the concepts of the ecology of sound and listening. Sound provides information about the environment in a different way to sight, by giving us access to the off-screen, to what is furthest away from us as much as by significantly informing us about the world close to us. We are so used to seeing at the same time as we are hearing it- what if we closed our eyes to renew our attention to the world? What if we closed our eyes to displace attention to our other senses? What would be the equivalent to deep listening for the senses of touch, taste and smell? This ARC will be an invitation to experiment tasting, touching, feeling and listening to art. An immersion over three Wednesdays in the second semester with the help of a specialist to guide us.
LIEUX/PASSERELLES
Alejandra Riera, Laurence Vidil, Samuel Garland, Guillaume Breton (Ygrec), Nicolas Charbonnier.
‘LES AVANT-CHOSES, pré-histoire d’un lieu’ is the provisional title of the exhibition we are going to build together, and which will run from 1st February to 22nd March 2025 at the YGREC-ENSAPC Art Centre. The ARC lieux-passerelles, entours is looking back at the archives it has built up over these last four years, in dialogue with Guillaume Breton, Laurence Vidil, Samuel Garland and Nicolas Charbonnier. Following on from the experiment with the ARC, the idea is to share – from this archive of imprints, drawings, photographs, films, clay pieces, sound and text pieces, performance documents and a specific wooden piece (to come) – our experience of the plot of land allocated to the building of the future arts school in Cergy, before the specifications for the building site began with its own prerogatives.
During these four years of transition towards “the future school”, we have focused on what was not meant to be thought of nor observed, on the concrete reality of a space itself, its farming past, the land of a rural village buried under an administrative estate. We will attempt to reveal this existence in its singular glory, different and more complex than any geometer’s maps or other utilitarian spatial approaches. On the contrary, we will try to make room for the poetics of the relationship with this place, by encouraging a policy of attention.
MANIÈRES DE FAIRE – 2 : manières d’écrire, de dire, de voir
Alejandra Riera, Nicolas Feodoroff
Following on from the first session of Manières de faire in 2023-2024, this ARC proposes to deepen the experience previously conducted with students.
The two main strands of work – watching rare films together and supporting ongoing projects – have provided food for thought for everyone involved, and enriched our positioning, thinking, production and questioning. For this second session, art and film critic and programmer Nicolas Feodoroff will be taking part in 4 screening sessions. We will be analysing films by Harun Farocki, Maya Deren, Barbara Hammerou and Marguerite Duras, as well as emerging and established artists/filmmakers such as Marwa Arsanios, Minia Biabiani, Pierre Creton and Vincent Barré, Nurith Aviv, Kamal Aljafari, Phoenix Atala, Jean-Baptiste Alazard, Paul B. Preciado, Tabita Rezaire, Dounia Sichov, Léa Laoné, Liv Schulman, some of whom are part of the FIDMarseille (Festival International de Cinéma de Marseille) programme. Our focus will be on those who question and/or reinvent cinematographic forms by using tools and perspectives from the field of art. The aim is to view, analyse and collectively question the projects of students who have a practice of the image-movement and who wish to reflect on and deepen their ways of doing things.
ONDÆS – création intermédia France/Argentine
Laure Limongi, Nicolas Charbonnier, Vincent Gérard
In partnership with UNA (Buenos Aires), UNPAZ (Buenos Aires). Programme INNOVART.
Collaborative project between France and Argentina supported by INNOVART. Ondæs (a mix between the words “ondes” in French and “ondas” in Spanish) is an intermedia project of literary, sound and audiovisual creation, interested in the aquatic elements in specific territories (oceans, rivers, meteorological disruptions, etc.) and is inscribed within an eco-poetic, eco-musical and eco-cinematographic process; its aim is to create a unique and innovative listening and viewing experience that is respectful of the environment, as well as acquiring professional know-how. This project will last three years. Having introduced the themes and practices in the first year, we will now take a closer look at them and set up the first feedback sequences. A number of exchanges between UNA and UNPAZ teachers and students are programmed in.
POISSY TV – ATELIER VIDEO EN MILIEU CARCERAL ( VIDEO WORKSHOP IN CARCERAL ENVIRONMENT)
Gallien Déjean
A former convent of Ursuline nuns, the Maison Centrale de Poissy, located in the historic centre of the old town, houses people sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. In partnership with the Yvelines prison integration and probation service (SPIP 78), ENSAPC is offering to set up a self-managed audiovisual production workshop, bringing together detained people and students.
The aim of this project is to create an audiovisual self-training workshop, both technical and theoretical, at the Centrale de Poissy, enabling all participants to familiarise themselves with the various stages of production (writing, filming, editing, etc.) while resituating the implications of video as medium within a historical context. This project is centred on the collective identification and production of an evolutionary shooting process that is capable of producing short fiction films as well as documentaries, videos, feature stories, sketches and broadcasts.
To respect the control and security rules laid down by the prison administration, the workshop will have to use exclusively analogue equipment to enable the administration to control the output of images and sounds made inside the prison. This imposed vintage format is a technical characteristic which, among many other rules, reflects an issue – that of constraint – formally inscribed at the very heart of this collaborative creative process. This dialectic of constraint will be one of the areas of thinking that will feed into the practice of this workshop. For the year 2024-25, we are planning to set up the filming of a TV series as part of this workshop. This project has been conceived in collaboration with the Argentinian artist Liv Schulman, winner of the Prix Ricard in 2018 and Villa Médicis resident for 2022-2023. In our writing and directing, we will try to strike a tone that counters stereotypical representations of the custodial world (for example, by exploring concepts such as friendship, material transactions and the question of property, conflicts, masculinities, etc.).
TIRAGES PHOTOGRAPHIQUES
Christian Genty, Vincent Gérard
In partnership with the technical studios: Photo Studio et Cinema Studio
Speakers: 2 technicians/printers from the Cadre en Seine laboratory (Paris) ; Mark Lyon (photographer) ; Laura Brunellière (artist/photographer, writer and editor) ; Sonia Voss (writer, freelance curator)
Partners : shooting studio Cadre en Seine (Paris) – YGrec
« Tirages photographiques » invites you to reflect on, and then put into practice, three stages of photographic work:
1/ Choosing from the work of the various students to build a single portfolio – with a stage of discussion and selection of the work alongside the contributors and the partner laboratory.
2/ Printing the selected photographs in the professional laboratory under the supervision of the printers, a photographer/printer and the teaching team.
3/ Publishing the portfolio under the supervision of a guest artist/photographer and editor as well as a guest curator.
This ARC is aimed at students who practise photography. The preparatory sessions will consist of sharing individual approaches that have already started or are in the early stages of their development. The second stage will involve choosing from the sets of photographs produced. A meeting and presentation of the works will then take place with the printers from the Cadre en Seine laboratory, with a photographer and printer, an artist/photographer/editor and an exhibition curator, to identify the photographs that will be printed in the laboratory.
