Luc COURCHESNE

This is training for the future. If by interactive media, we mean practices of creation and dissemination that rely on information and communication technologies, it is not only essential, but it is the idea of creating a master , that is to say a tray 3 to 5, so it’s really the minimum.

There are so many important aspects to master to begin with, to understand in depth all that it entails. This creative media, in my opinion, is for someone who is serious and who wants to make a career out of it. It is essential the master. Then not only is it essential to go through it, but it is essential to learn how to learn. It’s like creating on quicksand, everything moves, everything changes. So, you have to know how to learn, to simply stay up to date. I was born in the 20th century, in the middle of the 20th century, so I got to know computers quite late in my life, around 30 years old. But at some point, I said to myself that the medium of the 21st century would include all historical mediums, such as painting, sculpture, photography, which is a magnificent medium that dates from the 19ᵉ century. The panorama, the immersion given to us by the panorama and the cinema, the moving image. So all of that is still very relevant. All these trades remain valid. But if we add to that what we call digital arts, that is to say video games, interactive and immersive art, generative, procedural art, robotics. We arrive with a toolbox of artists, creators that is extremely rich, but also complex. And to be able to make art with all that or create, you have to learn how to use it so that the creations you want to make are not based on the technology you use, but rather on what you want. pass as a message, which we want to communicate as an experience. So mastering these tools is a process that takes time. We have to get on with it. But when you master them, you are in the right place to transform society as an artist, designer, creator, etc.

So that’s what a master’s in “creative media” is really about being on the front line, at the front of the social transformation that we need today.

We work with the human, but the human is no longer alone. The human is accompanied, augmented, empowered by his tools, his machines. In my opinion, you need a very good general knowledge to get into this. You have to be a humanist, but a humanist who understands technology, who develops a critical sense of technology too. Technology is not something we use without asking what it’s for, how it transforms us. It transforms us. There is no doubt about it, but how does it transform us? A specialist, a critical media must understand, have an opinion on it, therefore a very good general knowledge, a bit like what was called the “Honest man” of the 18th century, but also with a knowledge of the machine of computing.

You have to know what a computer is, how it works. We don’t need to be brilliant programmers, but we do need to understand a little bit about how an algorithm works. To be able to imagine projects, transmedia projects or video game projects or interactive projects, or projects that create engaging experiences, to imagine these projects knowing what a artist, designer.

There are many professions. I think you have already oriented the program so that there are more specializations on the content, images and experience side. Another track where we will train people who will be more “Handsome”, more capable of carrying out projects, of prototyping things that will code, who will be able to integrate. Technological integration is really essential. We’re not just talking about programming here, but about taking libraries, new technological tools, making it work together, integrating it all so that it works.

Because creation, ultimately, is the art of the prototype. We’re always making new prototypes of things that have never been done. But among these prototypes, there are certain things that will become archetypes, very important things that we will reproduce. But I think we’re still at the time when the people who are going to come out of a creative media program are people who have to invent their tools a bit, invent what we do with them too.

So it takes people who have this good general culture, both humanistic and technological. At the same time, like multidisciplinary teams, an ability to work as a team and also therefore to integrate new management methods, we talk a lot about agile management, that is to say how to create light structures that can adapt to challenges which can change quickly, which can, faced with a problem, find an alternative solution, always move the project forward in collaborative mode, in living lab mode. The work is not finished until it is in the hands of the public or the users. So the users, the players are part of the mechanics of creation. How to integrate these people earlier in the process? Great questions that are part of an ideal training, in “creative media”.

For a coherent and relevant training. What I said that it would be necessary, it is to know the data processing and its possibilities and its limits. Take an interest in people, their behaviors, their aspirations. Take an interest in the ethical and aesthetic issues of human/machine interaction. You have to develop a critical sense, develop a personal signature too. I think we don’t necessarily want to copy or reproduce things. We want to do it with a signature. We can always put that name at the bottom of the board, but at least it should be able to imply something very personal at work. Learn to collaborate because you always work as a team, then learn to learn because you never stop learning what it takes to do this job well.

For me, what I feel is that we are in a process where we are moving from 2D to 3D. For example, the Web is until now a 2D world, a world of graphic designers, of image people. And then, we gradually fly towards a 3D web where when we type an address, we will arrive somewhere. We will not arrive on a page with clickable links. We’re going to get somewhere. So we go from a graphic designer’s world to an architect’s world. There are people who build spaces in which we are invited to enter. We can say that we are moving towards a kind of concept like the metaverse, that is to say a kind of persistent universe, which everyone builds, and in which we are invited to live experiences. That is something that is happening here.

I started working, for example with Mozilla Hubs, with very little learning curve. We managed to make virtual exhibitions and I give appointments to my friends in there. I give them guided tours, a bit like visiting a museum or a gallery, but you do it with a helmet ideally, or with your computer screen using the arrows to move around. So, for me, it augurs a new creative space.
And then, we saw with the global pandemic, the travel ban. To the fact that we had to resort to these means. So “Zoom” is a sort of very functional way of meeting with others, of working. But it’s still very 2D video, a mosaic of videos. If we go towards 3D, we can create meeting spaces where we reproduce in a virtual space the same codes of specialization that we would have in normal physical spaces. So, we can make small groups, asides to someone who speaks, participate and contribute. Personally, I find this openness very, very exciting for creative people and I think it can be improved. The graphical and temporal resolution that we obtain with a Web browser is well below what we can do with real-time 3D engines like Unity or Unreal. But all of these genres, all of these worlds are basically varying degrees of granularity. We can say that a real-time 3D website will be very granular. But if we have a 5G network, for example, or a very high speed connection with good computers, we will gradually arrive at something resembling what we can see on Unity in video games or like Unreal.

Another thing that happens, I find, is that the video game people know this well. The works are no longer finished. We are more in front of a finished painting or a statue or a fixed linear installation that we look at in a linear way, without intervening. We are in participatory works, so for me it represents the idea of the participant. We have to make room for it. You have to invite him into the work. You have to offer him an interesting experience, allow him to transform the work, and so on. It’s not new, it’s old. It came with interactivity and video games are the first form, the most embryonic form of all that. But we will go beyond that. And I think that in the programs that we see, design, video games and interactive media, we already see beyond the game basically, in the idea that we enter worlds that are alive, that are transformed by our presence, etc.

The other thing that is also changing, in my opinion, very quickly, is the networks. So we have very high speed networks. We are now connected to fiber optics, to networks that offer us very, very high bidirectional bandwidth. So you can not only receive very high resolution content very quickly, but also transmit it. So we are in an interactive world too. These networks allow it.

Then we are told that 5G. I don’t know exactly what it will do yet, but 5G could allow that, but in a ubiquitous way, that is to say that we don’t need to be at home behind our workstation, we could traveling, mooving, to be on the move. It creates a world where we are everywhere and instantly. And the effect for me is that we will decentralize the centers of creation and the symbols of world culture. We can very well be where we want without being at the periphery of the system.
We can emit, receive, participate, no matter where we are. So it creates a new geography and above all the fact that we can translate many languages in real time now, with tools like Google Translate, we can take our well-written text in a language, and we can almost instantly translate it 126 languages, then. We also arrive in a much more open space, but also much more multicultural. We will perhaps get out of this kind of hegemony of English, which we have known until now as being the obligatory passage to shine internationally.

In my opinion, we will be able, with real-time translation, to work in one’s language, in one’s culture, but to be understood and intelligible basically for the whole population. Well, that’s kind of what I see as a change. All of these changes are already underway. It’s just that we think it will accelerate in the coming years. We must already be there, if we are 20 today, it is part of our immediate future.

I have experienced for 2 or 3 years, texts that I write in French. Then I validated the English version and vice versa. It’s really flawless. Obviously, it needs editing. But, it is very, very close not only in vocabulary and syntax, but also in intention between French and English. I don’t know if you switch from French to Japanese or Croats. I don’t know, but it’s a good measure of the quality of the translation.

There, it is encouraging. On the other hand, where I am concerned with artificial intelligence is when we entrust machines with the task of composing texts. So we basically had fun making engines that generate weather forecasts. It can be fine, but when you start generating pseudo scientific articles, that’s really worrying. Because there, there can be real tickets and real fake news that make us, that we will start to doubt everything.

But where I’m also the most worried, the automatic writers who basically simulate the way humans write scientific articles or whatever, is when we also manage to do the “DeepFake”. You can imitate someone’s voice, imitate someone’s image. And there, insofar as we are going to have more and more opportunities to see each other virtually in real-time 3D sites, all that, then, the idea that we are not absolutely certain that the person in front of us is the one we think, so it gets a little worrying.

So artificial intelligence is like an extremely powerful technology, deep machine learning. Deep machine learning can do great things, but it can also do such dangerous things. And that’s why we have to be (there, editor’s note). The person we train in creative media must be someone who has a highly developed critical sense of technology, precisely to use this very powerful technology, but wisely. That is to say? There are things that we will agree to do, others that we will not agree to do.

We must keep, we must remain humanists. Despite everything, we must accept that the human being is amplified by the machine, is helped, for example. We love it, typing in the Google search field, a question and then having an answer that makes sense quickly. But we still have to check our sources, ask ourselves about the use we make of technology to remain human in all this? Because the algorithms are very powerful. You may know Pierre Lévi, we speak in this human/machine couple, of collective intelligence increased by the power of machines, but it is human intelligence at the start, which is increased by machines. It shouldn’t be the opposite.

Absoutely. In all three cases, whether as a practicing artist or as a university teacher, who has a Metalab-Sat lab or as a research partner or even as a resident artist at the Sat, I have always needed additional expertise. So I’m often the one who will have the ideas where to set up the lab. But after that, you have to find other people to support you. Once we had the funding and the idea, the space and the machines. I’ve always looked first for good programmers, people who are capable of it. C++, C# programming, with JavaScript, can indeed be able to work with real-time 3D software like Unity or Unreal, but you need people like that. Otherwise, you may have a very, very good idea, but you are unable to prototype or develop it. These people, deep down, you shouldn’t see them as performers, you should see them as creative partners because we often have an idea. Then there, suddenly in development, the idea is transformed and then becomes unrecognizable. Because, we have to adjust basically, with what our devices can accomplish as a task, the computing power of computers. But also, there is a common language for people who are more on the conceptual side or the information architecture side. The common language that forms in team interaction, so after that, we look for people who are familiar with design. Me, I really like the idea of design and experiences, but the design of experience and interaction design, immersive design is learned. These people are good craftsmen or essential when doing things where there is a playable aspect to game design.

Video games are one thing, but there’s playability in a lot of things we do today. These are issues, ways to develop the experience. It is needed more and more because there are many, many games that are online or that involve remote participants. So technological integration, rise of servers, network architecture. These are things that have become essential in projects. We want to be able to send a lot of data, to receive data from sensors, to be able to encode, transmit, decode, so these are essential aspects.

Obviously, we need 3D modeling, 3D animation. Personally, I am very attached to photography. Basically, if we had to remove many, many layers, essentially in a photographer, I prefer to collect the light, what is around me. And then to make it something immersive and interactive rather than drawing it all from scratch. So photography is an art. This is, I believe, the 1837 daguerreotype. It continues to evolve. It’s great. How does it continue to evolve today?

We are talking about photogrammetry, therefore, from several shots, to constitute a 3D object or a space, or with a Lidar, we manage to make very, very precise readings of the space by cloud of points. There is also the “light field” technology which is talked about a lot in the cinema. It still seems very, very complicated and expensive, but it’s kind of like the new holography, if you will. You have to look at these things, how it can be incorporated into the creator’s toolbox.

Then, of course, we always think about the image, but we also have to think about the sound. Sound compositions, therefore musicians, people who are able to create soundscapes from created works or recordings. And then, all that must be specialized because often, we will move in worlds, so how can we reproduce the space not only visual, but also sound, to give credibility to the experience that ‘we live.

It is a little quickly the expertise that I will seek, but there is another expertise also appeared more recently. These are people who are able to evaluate the experience, the quality of the experience, because often, we will assume a lot of things when we design a game or immersive, interactive experiences. But after that, you have to observe how people interact in the experience. And then, make corrections, observation. It’s more of a discipline, almost of the human sciences. And then also, if we do critical observation, we will basically wonder how all this transforms society and leads us collectively to face the essential challenges of our civilization, climate change, social inequalities. And all that… Because I think that art, or creation, is an important factor in economic cultural development that must be stuck on the major social issues that are ours today.

For me, an academic training must necessarily be supplemented by internships, because the internship is a “Reality Check”, then good internships, in fact internships that complement the training and which are enriching for both parties, for the host company, learn about new trends, etc. People are 20 years old, they have new skills that will benefit the company and at the same time, these people see a bit of how to earn a living in this environment.

The other thing is to participate in international competitions. For me, it is important. We are in creative media, we are really in an international environment. You have to compete, you have to measure yourself against others. It is not enough to be satisfied with having regional success. We must aim to compete internationally. So all these opportunities we have to present our work or see the work of others are important.

Then I would also say, as the creative toolbox is constantly changing, you really have to find a way to train continuously. You have to constantly monitor technology, keep up to date. And then, trying to follow the debates is something you can learn, I believe, or even more learn that it’s important to do so in order to stay on positions that will quickly become outdated, obsolete.