Vincent PUIG

The question of the “creative media” Master’s degree that you asked, raises first of all the question of creativity. This is not a simple question because first of all, one should make a distinction between creation and creativity. If you want in everything, there is always some. And you will see in my remarks, it is always very pharmacological, that is to say in the sense of the pharmakon, that is to say there is always a toxic way or on the contrary, positive, curative, to consider things. Creativity, unfortunately, has very often been a form of standardization and abusive normalization of creation. Many schools of creativity have been created, creativity has been used a lot in management and the “creative media” are still threatened by this ambiguity. How can we ensure that the “creative media” Master’s degree is not a formatting school for standardized creativity, but on the contrary, is open to creation? It’s right there. For me, the challenge of this master “creative media”.

We could also take it under the social angle if you want, creativity has been very widely denounced, but also somewhere, a little placed as a form of new age of the man of the XXth century and even of the XXIst century, I refer to the work of Richard Florida on the creative class. We are typically in this ambiguity there, the creative class being very often a social class according to Florida, which is a little cut of its history, of its origins. It’s also a will to break, but it can give a lot of abuse and social exclusion, gentrification, creation of these environments that are called creative in different forms, the form of the Lab, if you want Living Lab, Creative Labs, Fab Lab. So let’s be careful not to disconnect the creative option you claim. Not to disconnect it from its origins and not to fall into a normalization which, unfortunately, as well in the social field, in the sociology as in the artistic field, made much damage.

Well, I can’t do the program for you, but I would say that you basically have to pay attention. Again, I’m repeating a little bit of what I said earlier. But we have to be aware that creativity is a process and it is even a process that I will call transductive. I refer to Gilbert Simondon, a transductive process between the imagination and the understanding. And this is where creativity is interesting, it is when it does not oppose imagination to calculation, if you like, but where the possibilities of calculation, and in particular the algorithmic possibilities of today, can be put at the service of imagination and the development of creation.

So, to answer your question about this course. If you want with Gilbert Simondon, if we stay with him, who is an author I study particularly, I know well and especially, of course, his recovery by Bernard Stiegler.
One thing that is always important in teaching is historical depth. We can consider a technical activity only if we study it in its historical logic. Simondon always said that one must first learn to draw, then to write, then to count, then to calculate. It was not by coquetry, it is because there is an anthropological logic which is anchored, in our minds, a logic of accumulation, one would say a logic of very deep retention, of very long retention, since it is all the history of the thought which is found in the process of learning and thus in the process of learning, the historical depth is very important. So what I can recommend to you in the first place is to have a dimension on media history that is particularly important and I would say even more so, but here I’m pulling the rug out a little bit towards the IRI research topics. A history of artifacts, a history of retentions, a history of tertiary retentions, as we call them here, that is, artificial retentions, the primary and secondary retentions being the memorial retentions, if you will. This history of “writing”, this history of writing tools is very important to imagine and create new media of the future. Because first of all, we have a lot to learn from the different forms of writing that man has invented. And then, because there is a logic. With Leroi-Gourhan, for example, there is a logic of evolution of the tools and the evolution of the writing tools until the audiovisual writing tools. There is a logic. In the work of the IRI, we call it an organo-logic, a logic of organs and the evolution of these organs, what we call organogenesis.

What does that mean? It is essentially to consider the media, and in particular the “creative media”, under the functional angle. What are the functions we want to develop in a media? Do we want to promote learning? Do we want to capture attention and advertise? Yes, there is always an ambiguity… “Creative media” can be in the service of advertising and marketing. But “creative media” can be at the service of art and creation.

It is pharmacological. Do we want to? Do we have social goals? Do we have sharing purposes? Annotations? Categorization? You see all this? These are functions that are very important, to try to distinguish, to categorize precisely. And that too is a second part that could be very interesting in teaching, in the course that you could offer.

The third element is more of a methodological element. It’s the idea that students engage in what we at IRI call contributory research.

So what does that mean? Well, that basically means that the student enters a field where he is going to be an actor. You are going to tell me this is not very new. It’s called action research. Yes, but there is an additional dimension to action research in contributory research. Certainly, the researcher engages in a field, in his own field of research and he becomes an actor in his own research. But in contributory research, it is associated with contributors who can be residents, companies, territorial actors. And that is extremely interesting and it is even, in my opinion, completely necessary for young people who want to work on “creative media” today. Why? Because it’s not just about producing individually. We must learn to produce collectively and to produce knowledge collectively. So this method of contributive research, or action research, which is a bit like the ancestor of contributive research, seems to me a very interesting method for a master’s degree.

And fourth dimension which seems to me quite necessary. It is the ability to produce. Of course, I imagine that you considered that part. Producing media, of course, but also more directly linked to the question of design, managing to work on media design in the sense that a media is never alone. It is always part of a socio-technical continuity. And so, this socio-technical continuum. You need the designer. So, we say experience design. It’s a bit simplistic and I don’t really subscribe to the expression design of experience. I would prefer system design or functional design or organo-logical design, to put it in IRI terms. But it is clear that it is necessary to show design to work on contributory media, media in the sense that the contribution will be the vector for the production of knowledge.
Here are 4 tracks for your training course on “creative media”.

And first, let me make an important distinction between knowledge, skills and know-how, since you use these words in your question. Knowledge is not really transmitted. Knowledge is transmitted, but knowledge is practiced and cultivated using knowledge, of course, and knowledge that may have been transmitted. As for competencies, it is rather the registration, if you will, of knowledge in a completely stable manner, which is therefore formalized and standardized. If we are not careful, these skills become sclerotic, stratified and fossilized. Precisely they are no longer metastable, to say it with, once again, the philosopher Gilbert Simondon. Now, if we want knowledge to be alive, it must be unstable, if you like, or sometimes metastable, that is to say, in a temporary stability. This is why your question is a very interesting reflection, to distinguish these different phases, by different phases I mean different regimes, a regime of interaction, because competence in itself is interesting.
Knowledge is also interesting. But knowledge is even more interesting because knowledge, finally, is a kind of combination of these questions. And knowledge is always inscribed in an experience, or we could even say it with the philosophers of action, with (James J.) Gibson, for example. “Knowledge is inscribed in action” and in collective action, necessarily, because action is rarely purely individual, which means that if you really want your master’s degree to develop knowledge, you have to envisage that this individual knowledge can be exchanged, confronted and criticized. And that therefore, collectively, knowledge can be produced. And that is the first answer to your question about what knowledge and skills are essential to transmit. Then, to answer the question directly, I think that the knowledge today, which seems to me to be absolutely essential, is of two kinds. The first knowledge that seems to me to be essential is scientific knowledge and particularly scientific and historical knowledge. I come back a little to the questions I addressed earlier on the teaching of history in all academic courses. But this scientific knowledge, I believe, must be considered today in the light of what we call the Anthropocene crisis, that is to say, the fact that we can no longer think about the media without imagining all the implications of these media systems. So, are you thinking about the energy implication as I am too? We talk more and more about the Internet or the sober Web. To find a form of digital sobriety, but what does that mean in “creative media”? I don’t know, by the way. It would certainly be a very interesting subject to explore with your students, and I am sure that you will do so, because we cannot avoid this question today. This is the first answer that I will give to the scientific, historical and, I would say, related knowledge to the very particular situation in which we find ourselves and that of the Anthropocene. The second type of knowledge that seems to me absolutely essential in your master’s degree is writing skills. So, you know that there has been a debate for ages. Not from all times, but since the birth of computer science. About should you learn to code or not? I believe that we can no longer do without learning to code. So, what does that mean? It means, on the one hand, that you have to include it in your teaching, but also that you have to work on tools that will allow you to code the media in a much simpler way than what is today the lot of what are called computer developers. We are very late on this front, I think that in media coding, there is a lot of resourcefulness and Frédéric knows it. Like me, he has had a lot of experience, coding on the job, if I may say so, whether in music or in audiovisual, without necessarily being coders or computer developers. But I think it’s essential. As long as we have the means to work with tools that are accessible, that don’t require 5 years of computer science studies. And there are still many things to be invented in this area, but I believe that we cannot avoid the question of coding, that is, the question of writing. If we really want to think seriously about the media of the future, and in particular about the “creative media” of the future. “Creative media” that I would like to call “contributive media”, in the English way. “Contributive media” is a counterweight to the creative proposal, “creative media” should always be “contributive media”.

Well, I have already given an element of answer on the evolution of “creative media” towards “contributive media”, but more broadly, I would like to suggest to you, to consider the evolution of media, under the angle of what we have called at IRI “Digital Studies” or digital studies if you like. For a long time, and this goes back to about thirty years now, we have been talking about digital humanities, which, moreover, very largely encompasses the question of the media, even if, at the beginning, it is a discipline that comes rather from the text of digital humanities, especially born in the field of literature or theology, moreover. But the audiovisual, media, new media dimension, let’s say, is very important in the “digital humanities”. But what is the difference between “digital humanities” and “digital studies”? Or between digital humanities and digital studies? Digital studies are not limited to humanities first. They envisage a complete revival of all the sciences. And then they pose the organo-logical question, that is to say the question linked to writing, ultimately linked to an epistemological reflection before a disciplinary reflection, if you will. To put it more simply, with an example before making movies. Asking the question “What is cinema”? It could be a good comparison between “Digital Humanities” and “Digital Studies”. The “Digital Studies” will first think “what is cinema”?
The “Digital Humanities” will think “how can cinema develop in the digital field”? What is quite different is an important conceptual evolution of the sector that I think is important to keep in mind. This “digital studies” dimension is therefore very attached to the organs in function. But also, be aware that more and more, the question of the media will become an ethical question. Or us, IRI looks like a pharmacological question.

That is to say ? It doesn’t mean that there are media that are good or media that are bad. We are not in morality, but we are in an ethic, that is to say a procedural ethics, that is to say situations where indeed, certain media, certain media devices can cause the best as well as the worst. I will give you just one example, we work in Seine-Saint-Denis with parents, in particular mothers, who encounter serious problems of overexposure to screens for their young children, from 0 to 3 years old, which cause up to autism-like symptoms. In any case, severe loss of attention and concentration. You see, the more we are going to move towards an algorithmic governmentality, that is to say an immersion, the Covid has further reinforced this situation, the more we will have to ask ourselves these so-called ethical questions: pay attention to the word ethics because it has been picked up by marketing first. And ethics is not morality, nor is ethics the standardization of processes. Ethics is precisely situational and organo-logical, so it depends on the organs, the functions in which one finds oneself. On this I recommend the works of Susanna Lindberg, for example, to fully understand what ethics is in the field of technology. These are the directions that seem important to me for the development of the sector. You see that it takes you in directions that may seem very distant to you, but no, I don’t think so. Today, doing “creative media” also means asking these ethical questions.

The transformations are immense and are frequent. In general: I will try to put it in simple words, there are technical trends and social trends. And cycles of technical evolution. For example: we will go from a microphone with a wire to a wireless microphone. And in parallel with this technical evolution, there are social evolutions. For example, we are going to move from a TV set where everything has to be pre-wired to a mobile camera that will be able to go out and interview people in the street and that will necessarily change both the type of news, of media that we can produce and necessarily introduce perceptions of society, and social trends that are different. So in philosophy, here at IRI, we call this a “double epocal doubling”, I’ll pass on the term because it’s complicated. And that means that there is a doubling of a technical tendency by a social tendency. And this is, I think, very important in the field that you have undertaken to investigate with the master. So, I will give perhaps just one example of this technological and conceptual evolution that you are experiencing as I am at the moment, we are linked by videoconference. I think that videoconferencing is typically a bifurcation, that is to say a break in the technological cycles that will be redoubled by completely new social trends. We can already see it, we can see it both in the good sense and in the bad sense. It causes damage and it also causes great new practices. So, for us, videoconferencing is an interesting organization because it is a disruptive element and at the same time a threat and an opportunity, if you want to put it in marketing terms. So what does it mean? We have to reinvent everything from videoconferencing. So you’re going to tell me “reinvent everything”? No, we’re not going to reinvent everything. No, of course, we never reinvent everything. But in the videoconference, it’s very interesting to ask the questions of cinema and music again. For example, what does it mean to segment a medium? What are the units of meaning that we can distinguish in a media? Is it all the seconds of my speech recorded in the video you are producing? Is it every ten minutes on a theme that you have prepared in advance since you ask me questions in a very precise order? Does this chaptering have to be pre-formatted or should it be designed in a hyper-media way, that is to say that one of my comments could be linked to another moment of my video?

How are we going to be able to produce a hyper video from what I told you? How does indexing matters? A very old question in the history of libraries and in the history of the media, questions of indexing will arise for videoconferencing. I do not know. Nobody really does this job yet, to my knowledge anyway, the tools are not available. There are no standard indexing tools in Zoom or Google Meet.
I do not know them. In any case, it is obvious that at some point, it will arise.
We at IRI record a lot of videoconference footage. We do chaptering and indexing work, but with our own tools, in particular the “Timeline” tool. But, it is likely that there are other possibilities that will emerge and so indexing is again a subject. Annotation, therefore, “annotating” a medium, is something that occupied us for years at IRI with the “Timeline” project, but also with projects on the text or on the still picture. It is clear that this question of the annotation of a videoconference. What does it mean? Do I have to do my annotation myself? Is it something contributory? That is to say, are you the one listening to me, can you take notes or put tags on what I am saying? How are we going to “resynchronize” your note taking with my video recording?
Well, these are questions that we have been working on for many years at IRI and Frédéric knows it. But we have to consider them in a completely new way in the context of videoconferencing. How are we going to visualize the data that was produced during the recording of a media? Are we going to propose particular dataviz systems? Are we going to propose access to particular playback times or access to rushes and possibly sequences that you won’t keep in the editing, but which may be interesting for those who want to know more? You see, think also about customized forms of temporality, i.e. how much time do I have to play a video or review a videoconference? Do I have two minutes? Do I have 30 minutes? Do I have three hours? Do I have three days? You see. These questions of temporality, they are questions of rhythm too. And this is a subject that concerns us a lot because rhythms are the condition for the production of knowledge. Rhythms and breathing are the subject of our New Industrial World talks this year. Intermittent breaths, essential to produce knowledge. So how should we design these tools for video conferencing, for example? Otherwise, it will overwhelm us and stick us in endless real time. How can we move from synchronic to diachronic? That is, to take the time to listen again, to be able to listen to a videoconference recording differently. It’s the work that you’re going to do as well that will perhaps allow and help it. You see, I’m just taking this example of videoconferencing because for me, it is a disruption, a bifurcation, both technical and social, that will have an importance, in my opinion major, for the development of the media in the future.

I hope so, absolutely, provided that the students who graduate from your master’s degree fulfill the specifications that I have outlined with you today, but especially that they are at the same time a pharmacist, a physician and an engineer in the media. Let me explain. Physician in the sense that they will be able to say, look out, here we are producing a device that is consciously or unconsciously toxic? They will in many cases be paid to do so. The “Nudge” industry, “nudgetification” or “gamification” of the media is at work, including at the highest levels of government. So, you have to know that they will be confronted with this pharmacological issue and that therefore, to answer your question, yes, we are interested in hiring them if they have this awareness, a little medical, pharmacological and pharmacist if you like, in the sense that they will be able to propose solutions to solve this toxicity problem. So it’s not necessarily parental control or systems for limiting the consultation of certain sites, as has often been done, because that’s the easy and somewhat radical way of media operators or producers. No, it is of course much more complicated than that. And it means precisely to produce knowledge of use of these media and knowledge that is not limited to what we see on the screen. Of course, it is knowledge that is relative to everything that is behind the screen, that is to say the algorithmic that comes with it. This is a second condition for them to come and work at IRI, for example, but also skills in design and development. It doesn’t mean that everyone is a designer or everyone is a developer, but the people who work at IRI have a very high conception of design and development, that is to say that they try to understand in the deepest possible way, what is at stake in terms of systems and functional systems, without necessarily being a developer or a designer, again. But if they can have that extra skill, that’s a factor that will be knowledge-producing in a very obvious way, at least in the content.

So I had a proposal to make to you which is perhaps a little out of step with your question, since you are asking me the question of enriching your training. It is rather relative to the international dimension that you want to give to your master’s degree and in particular in connection with Mexico. It so happens that we have in Ecuador, exactly at the Artes University of the Arts in Guayaquil, Ecuador, a small team, these are two researchers who have been involved in this organological and pharmacological approach that I have been describing to you for five years now. Their names are Paolo Vignola and Sarah Baranzoni and I’m sure, I haven’t spoken to them yet, but I’m sure they would be very interested in collaborating with your master’s, your “creative media” cycle if it has this dimension in Mexico and South America.
Why ? Because the context of Latin America and South America is very interesting in terms of development. On the one hand, knowledge. Of course, since we are in a very different context from the one we know in Europe. We are in a context of very strong domination and hegemony, of American or Chinese technologies, sometimes elsewhere. We are also in a context where the locality, and here I am of course referring to the work that we developed with Bernard Stiegler, but more generally to everything that Edouard Glissant had sketched out in terms of the hybridization of localities.
We are in South America, in particular, confronted every day with this question of the interbreeding of hybridization and the production of new localities because of this hybridization. This can be a very interesting element to reconsider the question of creative media in the context of South America. It is a track that I propose to you which would be a complementary suggestion to your project.