Useful Fictions

For one week, twenty participants, supervised by five pairs of researchers and artists, will explore a contemporary issue in order to devise a temporary interactive installation which, for one weekend, will take over an exhibition and meeting space, with the aim of opening up and sharing this sensitive and creative debate with all audiences. The five pairs worked together for several months before the event to propose and begin exploring a theme and inventing collaborative working processes and platforms that would engage the twenty participants in a creative process. The five interdisciplinary thematic laboratories thus developed are renewed with each edition. During the week of joint research with the participants, they engage in a dialogue at the crossroads of arts and sciences that takes multiple forms: installations, robotics, interactive workshops, poetic writing, performances, etc

All the creations are presented in a spirit of Do It With Others, during a weekend of participatory workshops, conferences, performances and exhibitions. The public is invited to engage in perceptual experiments, interact with chimerical bodies, explore the boundary between humans and robots, participate in collective performances involving plants or machines, and witness the transformation of the small window onto the world that is our smartphone into a collective landscape, in order to forge new bonds of desired interdependence with the Earth and sustainable cooperative relationships by design.