ESPCI web site
Séminaire exceptionnel le 20 décembre à 14H AMphi Langevin
Alvaro Cassinelli, School of Creative Media, Hong Kong, invité par la chaire Total-ESPCI Paris
Human-Computer Interfaces, Augmented & Virtual Reality : tools for evading or enriching the world ?
This talk will discuss the good and bad of what I would call the black box model in research and the arts, and its consequences on a society heavily relying on technology. A “black box” is a pervasive tool whose working most people, if not all, would be incapable to describe - let alone understand. A smartphone is a good example and a hammer is a perfect counter-example. The motto of the Maker movement is “if you don’t break it, you don’t own it” ; the famous physicist Richard Feynman did not say anything different when he declared that “what I cannot create I don’t understand”.
I see this as a timely call to re-empower individuals (in particular researchers, scientist and artists). It is also a plea to rethink alternatives to the way we learn and teach about the complexities of the natural world. In a word, an opportunity to reminds us why we like to call ourselves Homo Faber.
As a researcher and practitioner in the field of the Media Arts, I know a bit about the inner workings and principles of today’s state-of-the art human-computing interfaces – their lenses, transistors, machine learning algorithms.... Breaking and looking inside is the essence of research, but breaking an iPhone is expensive and totally futile, because a chip is a chip is a chip. No pulleys or gears to be seen !
My goal, my pastime, my self-imposed responsibility is to expose the guts of our technological tools and ways of thinking about these “black boxes”. This talk will deal with these important and controversial topics by presenting my own idiosyncratic voyage, some of my inventions, creations and prototypes.