Documents found
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An agonistic relationship to image and technology marks the works of the artist Samuel Bianchini. The singularity of his approach lies in the repeated and ritualistic staging of a confrontation with seeing. This text analyzes the experience of Discontrol Party (2009-2018), an interactive and festive counter-device developed in the framework of a research on collective interaction (Large Group Interaction) at EnsadLab/DRii, a laboratory of the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (Paris). The artwork stages "vision machines", an empire of surveillance that is also a "theater of operations" for the public, confronted with the proliferation of composite images: diagrams, graphs, units of measurement, clouds of points, tables of data. What is the meaning of these images, which are also data? Can we see in them the will of a totalitarian representation and the promise of a total transparency of the human experience? Should we be happy about it? Should we be alarmed? Is it possible to bug these digital detection systems? There is no doubt that this is a question of power relations, and we have the right to ask ourselves which of the human or the machine is the master or the slave.
Keywords: Machines de vision, Images composites, Surveillance, Reconnaissance faciale, Art numérique, Interactivité et interaction collectives, Dispositifs agonistiques, Médias tactiques, Design critique, Vision machines, Composite images, Surveillance, Facial recognition, Digital art, Collective interactivity and interaction, Agonistic devices, Tactical media, Critical design
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Long before the age of screens, the writer and the machine already met around objects like the typewriter, or, later, the mimeograph and the photocopier. In this article, we try to go back in time to explore the way in which the writers aspiring to editorial independence, throughout the 20th century, used officework equipment in order to publish and distribute their own works themselves. We focus in particular on the case of the fanzine, an essential form of self-publishing, to analyze the ways in which authors have seized machines to trick the traditional operators of literary authority and legitimization. In the last part of this reflection, we question the complex links between these “paper” practices and the digital renewals of self-publishing.
Keywords: autoédition, fanzine, plateforme d’autoédition, photocopieuse, machine à écrire, ronéotypeuse, miméographe, autopublication, détournement, self-publishing, fanzine, self-publishing platform, photocopier, typewriter, Roneo machine, mimeograph, self-editing, subversion
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86.More information
For the past ten years, writers have been taking advantage of the video format and publication on YouTube to propose new forms of writing. This “LiteraTube”, both multimedia and “platformized”, reinterprets both the figure of the author and established socioliterary practices. Drawing on the current state of the Literatube corpus (which is by its very nature evolving), while taking on an empirical approach specific to participant observation, this article looks at how the YouTube platform, as a content host and social network, encourages writers to re-elaborate their mode of existence and legitimization through the prism of collectivity. Between the logics of community and the myth of horizontality, it intends to probe the imaginary of the digital world that writers are helping to shape.
Keywords: écrivain, écrivaine, vidéo, littérature numérique, littérature vidéo, YouTube, plateforme, multimédia, auteur, pratique d’écriture, numérique, réseau social, communauté, collectivité, création littéraire, writer, video, digital literature, video literature, YouTube, platform, multimedia, author, writing practice, digital, social media, community, collectivity, creative writing
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87.More information
The deployment of automated semantic models, such as Google's BERT or OpenAI's GPT-3, poses a serious challenge to hermeneutics and its centrality to the social sciences. Artificial intelligence is indeed conquering language. The technological advances associated with deep learning and the modi operandi of interpreting machines force us to seriously consider the possibilities and power of such models. More understanding is needed about the type of automated “comprehension” advanced by these models and how their calculations of probability, variation and threshold, for example, can vector language and render it as a form of “parroting.” In this paper and to this end, we examine Google's dismissal of the researcher Timnit Gebru following the publication of “On the Danger of Stochastic Parrots,” to demonstrate how the value of automated language processing stems as much from the world it puts forward as from its reference to a specific context. Finally, this should allow us to circumscribe the economic, political and ethical aporias around these models, including the fact that the platforms developing them fail to consider the way in which they proceed by extracting and instrumentalizing meaning. In essence, it is the intimate relationship between meaning and the displacement of centres of power that is fundamental to Critical AI Studies and their evolution.
Keywords: traitement automatique du langage naturel, GPT-3, BERT, Timnit Gebru, économie politique la signification, Critical AI Studies, automatic natural language processing, GPT-3, BERT, Timnit Gebru, political economy of meaning, procesamiento automático del lenguaje natural, GPT-3, BERT, Timnit Gebru, economía política del significado
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This article intends to grasp the evolution of Cultural Studies in the context of the structural transformations that affect advanced capitalist societies in the framework of the transition from modernity to postmodernity. We will see that the initial intention of Cultural Studies was to lay the foundations of a sociological theory which found its political expression in democratic socialism. Opposing the economicism, positivism and utilitarianism that were shared as much by vulgar Marxism as by liberalism, the cultural materialism of Cultural Studies founders sought in popular culture a set of traditions that opposed the abstract universalist logic of industrial capitalism and which could establish the normative foundations for a future socialist society. Subsequently, by connecting Althusserian structuralist Marxism to French Theory, Cultural Studies theorists would become the main protagonists of the politics of identities and of the cultural war that raged in the United States as of the 1980s. We argue that postmodern cultural studies are part of a general crisis in the modes of reproduction of advanced capitalist societies that can be described as a crisis of reality. This crisis manifests itself in the conflict which opposes a post-modern right, the Alt-Right, to the Fake Left, a left of the simulation, which expresses itself in social media and on university campuses.
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