Seminar organized by Pierre Cassou-Noguès, Baptiste Loreaux, Alban Leveau-Vallier

Monday evenings from 6:30 p.m. at La Générale, 39 rue Gassendi, 75014 Paris

By the expression “technologies of the mind”, we want to mark the point where techniques and minds coexist and reciprocally shape one another — a zone of indeterminacy into which each session will probe. We are living through the end of an era: the one in which it was still possible to orient oneself in the world by distinguishing subject from object. The theoretical wager we are taking is that from now on, everything happens in between. We live neither from (objective) determinations nor from (subjective) projections, but from dispositions and coexistences.

Program

First Semester 2025–2026

September 29 — Introductory session

October 13 — David W. Bates (UC Berkeley): “Creativity and Computation: Leaky Systems and Imperfect Machines / Créativité et calcul : systèmes fuyants et machines imparfaites.”

Since the origins of AI, the question of creative thought has been an important and vexing issue for researchers. Can creative thought be modeled and translated into machine forms of intelligence? With the advent of generative AI, these questions have only intensified. In this talk, I will show that the reductive approach to creative thought misses an important dimension of human cognition — namely, its capacity for self-interruption and disruption. I will argue that we can rethink the development of information theory and systems theory in this light, paying attention to the importance of noise in that context.

October 27 — Daniel Ross, writer, philosopher, filmmaker, and English translator of Bernard Stiegler. See his latest book.

28 octobre. Federico Luisetti (Univ. Saint-Gallen) speaking about his book Une écologie des êtres-Terre. Exceptionnally seminar on tuesday. 

November 17 — Eryk Salvaggio (Rochester Institute of Technology)
Website: https://www.cyberneticforests.com/about

December 15 — Damien Delorme (University of Lausanne) and Marcel O'Gorman (University of Waterloo)

Damien Delorme: Listening with the ecological self: ontological, ethical, and political stakes.

Ecological listening is a topic doubly neglected within the field of environmental philosophy: on the one hand, by philosophers of sound and listening who, until very recently, paid little attention to ecological questions; on the other hand, by environmental philosophers who rarely consider the issues of sound and listening. Challenging modern anthropocentric and visiocentric dualisms, ecological listening opens onto an experience of participation with nature that belongs to a relational ontology. But ecological listening is also an ethical and political matter. It reveals what, within the “sonic Anthropocene,” appears as ecoacoustic injustices. Responding to these injustices entails cultivating certain ecological virtues and opens the possibility of imagining political recognition of “sonic rights.”

Marcel O'Gorman: Title to be announced.

Program for 2024–2025

The sessions of the second semester can be listened to as podcasts [ici].

• November 18 — Elise Lamy-Rested (LLCP, Univ. Paris 8)

• December 2 — Susan Treister (independent artist), presented by Mathieu Garling (ENSAD, Univ. Paris 8). SESSION CANCELLED

• December 16 — Natalia Fedorova (Smolny Beyond Borders, LUMA Foundation, Arles) and Giovanni Menegalle (University of London Institute in Paris)

• January 20 — Cécile Malaspina (King's College London)

• February 17 — Gundolf S. Freyermuth (Game Lab, TH Köln) / Icare Bamba (LLCP, Paris 8)

• March 24 — Marcel O'Gorman (Univ. Waterloo)

• April 28 — Jan Söffner (Zeppelin Univ., Friedrichshafen)

• June 16 — Erich Hörl (Leuphana Univ., Lüneburg) / Baptiste Loreaux (LLCP, Paris 8)