Tag: Paris

• Against the totalising imaginary

  April 28, 2026

  

  My sabbatical in France has continued apace, with plenty of fruitful meetings and discussions, and not a little writing (deadlines sadly declined a similar holiday).

  On 24 April, I had the opportunity to present some of my research at Université Paris 8-Vincennes-Saint Denis — a university founded by figures including Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, and Roland Barthes in the aftermath of May ’68.

  I presented a talk titled “Against the Totalising Imaginary: Weird AI and the Ecology of the Possible”, in which I discussed my glitch-based experiments and methodologies, which I refer to as ‘ritual-technics’. For the first time, I also proposed worldbuilding and storytelling as productive frameworks for engaging with technologies like generative AI.

  I began with the Slopocene. This has been bandied about as a pejorative term for our current overload of synthetic content and governance by algorithm, with the resulting crises of authenticity, ‘reality’, and authorship. As in other work, I’m working to reclaim the Slopocene as a productive and playful term, but also as a speculative near-future or alt-present, where recursive training collapse turns the web into a haunted archive of confused bots, discarded memes, and broken truths.

  How to navigate the Slopocene? I co-opted the work of my co-presenters for the seminar: Boris Eldagsen, Rosa Cinelli, and Philippe Boisnard, alongside Chris Chesher and Cesar Albarran-Torres, Eryk Salvaggio, and Ian Haig. These are diverse approaches, but they have a few common clusters: material/semiotic, i.e. we can read AI outputs diagnostically as results of training data; relationality/phemomenology, in terms of what kind of encounter or interaction we have with AI technology; and then an aesthetic/resistant thread, which finds value in the visual breakdown and visceral sensation of encountering AI media.

  These are methods, approaches, attitudes that resist zealous techno-utopia or simplistic and naive dystopic rejection, preferring instead to pay close attention to generative AI’s computational and cultural mechanisms. Essentially these are all ways to ‘stay with’ the machine.

  My own approach weaves a thread through the material/semiotic, the relational/phenomenological, and the aesthetic/resistant — an approach I refer to formally as critical-creative AI, or informally: gonzo AI. The approach is the practical/experimental arm of my broader media-materialist approach, where I position myself as a tinkerer-theorist, which translates beautifully in French to bricoleur-théoricien.

  I went through a few of my experiments with genAI, including semantic collapse, music generation, before introducing The Drift, my worldbuilding project where all my weird AI creations live. The Drift is “a space to think and to play and to build, and an alternative imaginary to the totalising mythology that Big Technology would love us to believe, where AI is everything and everything has to be AI”:

  “It’s a world where messiness is the point, where you can be a critical observer but also someone who lives in the space as an inhabitant. There are lovely tensions between delight and disturbance, being critical and being caught-up-in-it — living in these tensions is the only honest position you can have. Games and world-building and storytelling are forms where you can hold the contradiction, you can live with the tension. And it’s a feature of these media rather than a bug or an error.”

  

  This HERMES Seminaire, titled “Imaginaires artificiels : créativité et recherche à l’ère de l’image générative”, featured co-presenters Boris Eldagsen, Rosa Cinelli, and philippe boisnard, who shared their innovative approaches to exploring and deconstructing large language models and media generators.

  Université Paris 8 has been my host throughout this research trip, and it already feels like home. The institution embraces a diversity of experience among students and faculty, with interdisciplinary research and creative methods as the norm. Special thanks to Everardo Reyes of Laboratoire Paragraphe, who has been a generous friend and co-conspirator over the past couple of years.

• Like No One Is Watching

  April 8, 2026

  

  I’ve kicked off a month’s research sabbatical in France, hitting the ground running…

  My first invited presentation was today at Université Paris I: Panthéon-Sorbonne, as part of the journée d’étude “L’intelligence et l’éthique de la télévision à l’ère des algorithms”. Today’s talks looked at de-ageing as a quest for immortality and fracturing of the present, televisuality and intelligence, and teaching LLMs about humans by making them watch a lot of TV; the seminar concludes tomorrow.

  My own piece, “Like No One Is Watching: The Form of Television in the Algorithmic Moment”, examined how episodic storytelling navigates the constraints of the platform and attention economies. I looked at the chaotic inconsistency of The Bear and the aggressive tedium of The Pitt as shows pushing formal boundaries to reassert a direct relationship with their audience.

  The talk had three key moves.

  Firstly, I re-establish television as the ‘miscreant medium’, drawing from John Fiske and John Hartley’s seminal work. On the one hand, television has always served as a scapegoat or delivery channel for whatever moral panic is current at the time; alongside this, it is a medium perennially torn between the strictures of institutions and technology, and the creativity of its artists.

  Secondly, I argue that platform logic holds two contradictory assumptions about audiences. On one hand, there is an assumption that audiences are passive and distracted. This assumption leads to baked-in redundancies, including explicit exposition and constant re-explanation (a phenomenon that Will Tavlin explores in his piece ‘Casual Viewing’). On the other hand, platform capitalism is contingent on metrics of retention; active, engaged viewing, then, is assumed.

  In the third section, I spoke to sample clips from The Bear and The Pitt, both shows that embody and embrace this presumptive schizophrenia. From The Bear I played part of the seventh episode of the first season, which includes a 17-minute unbroken take. I also shared a couple of mundane conversation scenes from the premiere episode of The Pitt. I used formal analysis here as a diagnostic tool, to observe how creatives push against (or acquiesce to) the algorithmic frame of their distribution. In the case of both shows, I offered that formal experimentation — whether at a dialogue, scene, episode, or series level — demonstrates friction as an exercise in meaning-making: a conversation and negotiation between creator and audience quite apart from questions of data, platform, capital.

  What close formal analysis reveals is that television is not a medium in decline, but one still jovially misbehaving; always exceeding what the discourse says it’s capable of, and still worth watching.

  This talk was a return to formal analysis for me, and it felt great to be home. I’ve been very lucky to be taught by or to work with a bunch of academics who really value close textual analysis, and I think it’s such an incisive and enjoyable means of understanding texts and their contexts.

  It’s highly likely an edited collection will result from this gathering, so fingers crossed that this work will be in print soon!

  

  I now have a little breathing room before my second presentation, so I’ll be using this time to actually get out and wander around Paris a little, but also to feed and tend to a few items moving through the publication pipeline.