International Symposium on Digital Humanities IV
Artificial intelligence and the dess(e)in of the body
Technological mutations have, while profoundly transforming our everyday environment, paved the way for new configurations of the human figure. Marked by the emergence of a paradigm corporeal unpublished, they surrect a growing disturbance in modes of representing the living. Digital installations, robots, humanoids and, more recently, artificial intelligence question the mutations in our uses and perceptions, while redefining the boundaries between life and death. Artistic practices, like research devoted to digital technologies, have thus contributed to the emergence of new forms and of new regimes of the scene digital.
Tour always in the making. Contemporary technologies esquire de new forms of figuration, putting to mal the idea of a stable corporeal and immutable state. At the difference of traditional devices of capture of real - photography, cinema, etc. -, which propose a representation secular, sometimes reflexive or diffracted, the environments digital, and now artificial intelligence, generate an infinite proliferation of virtual doubles and twins. This dynamic accentuates the " reproducibility " of forms human (Walter Benjamin) and inscribes simulation at the very heart of processes of figuration. Such a displacement modifies in depth our perception of the human and opens the way to a new drawing of being, with contours both unstable and fascinating. Embodiment is then apprehended only through traces, clues or metaphors, valuing a virtuality thought at times completion, at times dissemination of the signs of presence.
These transformations lead to the emergence of a sense of obsolescence of the biological body, now perceived as too natural, vulnerable or limited. The figures of the avatar and cyborg thus appear as attempts to exceed the classical models of representation. The becoming of the body is inscribed in a process of. dépouillement and dans l'instauration d'un nouveau rapport au sensible. It's about conceiving a modulable corporeality, open to multiple transformations, capable of abolishing the "ontological boundaries" between the living and the artificial, while affirming a form of evanescence of so-called "natural" flesh.
Long relegated to the realm of utopia, these configurations, defended in particular by transhumanist currents, are now emerging as concrete realities through the growing use of artificial intelligence. They now constitute a major object of reflection for the artistic, anthropological and ethical fields.
This symposium aims to examine the ways in which artificial intelligence configures the body, as well as the perspectives it opens up for thinking about a new drawing - or even design - of the human. The analysis will focus on the devices and tools mobilized to capture, simulate and reconfigure corporeal presence, in order to interrogate the way in which AI participates to the emergence of new forms of fabrication and of representation. It will in particular explore the biological limits in redefining the boundaries between organism and artifact, between matter living and environment digital, on the contemporary stage . Howdo these technological devices foreshadow a transformation in the status of the actor, do they play with the idea of obsolescence and contribute.they to rethink our anthropological perimeter and our. relation to the corporality in space dramatic ? In why does the use of AI, as a field of research and creation, foster the emergence of new scenic and scenographic writing? The symposium will also look at forms of dramaturgy and processes of fictionalization of the creation scenic arising from these technologies.
intelligence opens the possibility of partial substitution or symbolic erasure of the living performer. These devices are bearers of dramaturgical and aesthetic unprecedented experiences, but also of questioning ethics about the becoming of the human. They participate in the development of new forms sensitive and sensory stage creation, while inaugurating profoundly renewed modalities of production and reception. In this perspective, we will be able to ask about the data sciences mobilized to draw - and conceive - the human figure, as well as about the observation in situ of a biomechanics at work, in interaction or in tension with technological systems.