In this interview with Charlotte Laubard, the French anthropologist and India and Hinduism specialist Emmanuel Grimaud revisits some of the fascinating experiments and cinematographic research in which he tackled the inter-subjective borders of communication and perception, using robots, objects of worship or idols. Distrustful of the rise of empathy as a key notion in the cognitive sciences – which reduce our relationship with the environment to neuronal functioning – Grimaud hints at ways of thinking that are more inventive, reversing away from the classical subject-object dualism and our natural tendency to anthropomorphic projection. He notably finds inspiration in shamanic experiences, charged objects and theories in experimental psychology from the 19th century. Laubard recontextualises these approaches in the art field, which is seen as a place for experiences and otherness.

With the participation of the researcher Manos Tsarikis, the interdisciplinary research project “Body & Image in Arts & Sciences” attempts to measure how images affect us. What would be the psychological and formal mechanisms at play were an existing link to be established between images and political behaviour? In conversation with the artist Lauren Huret, Tsarikis mentions how a press photograph can dehumanise groups of people in the way it is framed, or how people, depending on their age and Internet proficiency for instance, will react to images and evaluate their veracity.

In his Media Design Master’s Thesis, Simon Pinkas analysed the rise of outrage culture on social media, studying significant recent cases in which true or false information triggered important – and sometimes worldwide – waves of emotion. His work thoroughly explores how deregulated ad-driven companies have managed to become sounding boards for outrage. Pinkas thus shows the way in which any given person can gain a large audience by spreading fake news, just as in the case of a Christian conservative couple operating from their garage in Pennsylvania. In a second phase, Pinkas assesses how this outrage culture has already changed our relationship with politics by fostering the rise of far-right populism and threats against freedom of speech.

Since 2018, artist and Work.Master graduate Eva Zornio has been developing a series of participative projects under the label Affective Evaluation, where she asks the audience to consider the question of empathy. In this text, Sylvain Menétrey postulates that Zornio’s project is actually a cover-up which allows her to test the very motivations of the audience’s participation as well as its willingness to submit to authority.