CORES: Interactions of artistic and scientific perspectives

CORES: Interactions of artistic and scientific perspectives

Bernard GUELTON, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, ANR CORES

 

Artistic context

The research team Fictions & Interactions of the University Paris 1 and the media company ORBE have developed since 2013 collective artistic experiments between distant cities (Paris, Shanghai, Montreal, Rio de Janeiro). Using specially designed interactive applications and creative scenarios, the goal was to connect remote walkers between one or the other of these cities. The project was to hybridize urban spaces of different conformities through physical, virtual and fictional interactions between participants.

The artistic practices of space and especially the interactions between distant walkers do not simply provide a context for study here, but form a kind of anticipation of the post-representational paradigm of cartography with examples such as the psycho-geography of the situationists in the late 1950s. As early as 1994, an artist like Fujihata used GPS technology in his project Impressing Velocity. The data collected by Fujihata models the itinerary by producing a contraction of the form during a rapid movement, or an expansion of the form during a slow movement. However, it is from the 2000s that groups of artists from participatory theater such as Blast Theory use GPS technologies, visual and verbal interactions to connect walkers in tasks of exploration or playful interaction.

Scientific implications

After several years of experimentation on collective walks using instrumental and shared CTs, a central scientific question has clearly emerged: to what extent are instrumental and shared maps likely to modify our behaviours and spatial representations?

To answer the question of the impact of mapping tools and collective interactions on collective representations, the CORES project associates and crosses geography, geomatics, cognitive psychology, computer science, artistic practices of walking, design and data visualization. Each of these disciplines contributes to the proposed methodology. Spatial cognition from cognitive psychology is now extended and transformed by the neurophysiology of brain areas dedicated to spatial behaviors. If the study of representations in space has long associated cognitive psychology and geographical sciences, the CORES project renews this association in an original way by closely linking representations of space to behaviours with an approach that is no longer only static, but above all dynamic. Thus, a dynamic approach to the trackings of walkers in relation to a dynamic approach to drawn representations forms an important stake at the level of the proposed methodology.