Matinée des idées : Machine images and surveillance regimes: new digital material for what cinematographic stories?

As a time for collective reflection, this Matinée des idées is an opportunity to imagine together the films to be in light of these questions, and to see new projects emerge.The Covid-19 pandemic will not only have disturbed our relation to space and time, but also marked the transfer of surveillance and reconnaissance systems from battlegrounds into spaces of civil life. We have seen drones flying over our streets and thermal cameras installed in our public places, while our sociability has been confined to virtual online spaces. In future, we cannot overlook the fact that the frontiers of the visible and invisible have been irremediably re-defined, that images do not necessarily reflect reality but can be generated by artificial intelligence programmes. Algorithms have invaded our existence to the point of influencing our mobility, our consumption patterns, and more recently our political choices. The acceleration of the new technologies produced in our mass societies are constantly creating images and new uses for them: the Internet has thus become the world’s largest collection of audiovisual archives, mixing vernacular images and industrial productions, and even AI-generated images. How is the world of film dealing with these new materials, which are challenging the methods used in filmmaking? What narratives about our epoch can they contribute? What documentary writing is questioning the conditions for the visibility of these images? Moderated by:  Alice Leroy  (researcher-professor in film studies at Gustave Eiffel University)Speakers: Alain Damasio, Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis (artist, filmmaker, film editor), Jean-Marc Chapoulie (filmmaker, video maker), Eléonore Weber (author, theatre and film director), Pascal Goblot (video maker, documentarist), Pierre Cassou-Noguès (i)