Média Médiums

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 t

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

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 Le

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 inhe

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

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 ph

The Groupe de Recherche en Homéopathie Binaurale Empirique was created from a desire to open up a new area of research in binaural beats, a sonic phenomena produced within the brain. When two slightly different tonalities are experienced separately by each ear, the mind synthesizes the two tracks. For Média Médiums, we have invited different artists to experiment with our machines and prepared colored sounds (white noises, pink noise, etc.). During the exhibition a set up for group listening allows for both a comfortable and intense experience of these phenomena. The inaugural experience, April 11th, will be based on the color blue. Mathilde Chenin - Born in 1980, lives in Aubervilliers, France. Mathilde Chenin's work emphasizes versions over finished forms, and privileges collaboration as a important aspect of her research. The collective space of being and working together is explored through an idea of expanded writing practices navigating between bodies, techniques and language. Her work is an el

With the rise of radio technology in the 19th and 20th century, the global simultaneity of wireless becomes the paradigm of a new temporality. The time signal represents the first global “transmission” to everyone – long before the development of the radio. Here begins the ubiquity of “wireless” media pervading the public as well as the private sphere. The Eiffel Tour plays a central role in this development - it is from here that the first time signal as well as the first European-wide radio program was broadcast. At the same time, artists and writers (Delaunay, Apollinaire, Marinetti, Cendrars) celebrated the commencement of the wireless era in their images and poems relating to the Eiffel Tour. Today, we adopt the coordinates of space and time through mobile communications, GPS navigation and radio-controlled clock directly from global wireless networks. Ubiquity and simultaneity have thus become everyday experiences. With mobile communication technology the wireless has become almost a part of our bodies

A short ubiquitous lecture that will recount how the Crassula ubiquiste collection came into existence, will explain in what respect these plants are not individuals, will recall the idea of inter-plant communication, will evoke transmission in terms of quantum entanglement, and will end with the suggestion of a relationship free from communication. 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.

Over the course of the twentieth-century, the "schizophrenic" gradually displaced the medium as the primary target of media hauntings. This talk presents a brief overview of schizophrenia as a "disease of information" and considers the historical braiding of psychosis, electronics, and media. How did "the media" become the primary antagonist in paranoid delusions and what does the ongoing proliferation of information technologies portend for the collective "sanity" of the world? Jeffrey Sconce is Associate Professor of Screen Cultures at Northwestern University. He is the author of "Haunted Media - Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television" (Duke 2000) and the editor of "Sleaze Artists - Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Financing (Duke 2007)." His forthcoming book project examines the historical relationship between electronic media and delusional psychosis.

On occasion, Self-Sorting Documents is used as a performance tool, wherein a specific path is carved out of the mass. Voice acts as the interface, allowing interaction with the image archive, documents fleetingly moving in and out of view. Technically Speaking is one of those occasions. Jeff Guess is an artist and professor of digital media at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts Paris-Cergy. His work, be it in photography, expanded cinematic forms, or software-based installations and performances, is predominantly an investigation of the technical image and its multifarious entanglements with language and voice. Some of his most recent exhibitions include - Nouvelles acquisitions, (Les Abattoirs, Toulouse, 2014), Poetics of Light - Pinhole Photography (New Mexico History Museum, Santa Fe, 2014), Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (Young Projects, Los Angeles, 2013). His work will also be included in the upcoming exhibition (Mis)Understanding Photography - Works and Manifestos (Museum Fol

Using the whimsical short story, L'encéphaloscope published in 1900 by Kurd Lasswitz, one of the pioneers of science fiction in Germany, as a starting point, we will revisit one of the fantasms opened up by the discovery of X-Rays in 1895 – seeing, not only through the opacity of the body but directly into the cranium itself, in the absolute transparency of exchanges and the desire to free oneself from the obstacle that is mediation. Pascal Rousseau is professor of the History of Contemporary Art at the Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. He is a specialist of the historical avant-gardes and the origins of abstraction, as well as on the links between the imaginary, science and technology in contemporary culture (20th and 21st centuries). As a curator, he has organized Robert Delaunay. De l’impressionnisme à l’abstraction (Centre Pompidou, 1999) and Aux origines de l’abstraction. 1800-1914 (Musée d’Orsay, 2003) and more recently, Sous influence. Résurgences de l’hypnose dans l’art contemporain (Musé

The interest in the question of the occult for a certain fringe zone of the scientific community came to a head in 1848 following the accounts of the spirit phenomena of the Fox sisters. Table-turning and other paranormal experiences, which became wide-spread in the United States and Europe during the second half of the 19th century, pushed researchers to consider these unexplainable events as new objects for scientific experimentation. In parallel to the numerous inventions which came into view at the beginning of the 20th century, a certain number of researchers attempted to produce tools and machines to analyse these phenomena in their laboratories. From the spirit telegraph to parapsychological applications for smartphone, the inventory of these often forgotten or little known technical objects allows a glimse onto a possible technical history of parapsychology which we propose to retrace. \n Philippe Baudouin is broadcast director at France Culture and the author of features for Arte Radi

Média Médiums - Vendredi 4 april 2014

Média Médiums - Vendredi 4 april 2014

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

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.

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

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 b

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 r