This article sets out a basis for analysing the Capitaine futur and Supernature exhibition as an “experience”, as defined by John Dewey, and more specifically a multisensory experience.

The sensitivity of animate objects

The objects in our daily environment are animate. The simple telephone, now a ‘smartphone’, is a connected object, or rather one that connects. It stays a step ahead of us, automatically pulling up a message, date or address, by combing through our calendar and maps and suggesting a schedule as would a human companion. It enjoins us to pick up a loved one at the airport, to leave on time, to watch out for congestion. This proactive assistant seems to bend us to its own will – It doesn’t care about our mood. Smart speakers entered into our lives only recently and are now a hub of household activity, activating control systems for shutters, clocks, thermostats, video programs and food orders. Artificial intelligence is stealthily slipping into our behaviour patterns, which we are discovering to be highly routine, predictable and standardised. An advertisement in cinemas shows a series of situations with which young humans have difficulty: grabbing an object when one’s hands are full, wanting to jot down an idea without having a notebook handy. Each scene concludes with a suggestion: “Google it”. Natural or artificial? Natural is what happens unprompted, like a new shoot growing from a plant. Artificial is what is manufactured. What is a child meant to do, one who will grow up surrounded by these prostheses that now interact with each other, surrounded by these ‘things’ that come to their own conclusions?
For these slave and spy devices do not only relay actions. They activate intuitions and alleviate uncertainty, like a pet cat or dog. They optimise time and space calculations for humans. They do away with the need for effort and attention. This poses an educational challenge: these active objects blend into our environment and enhance it, in that they increase the functional capacity of an environment to become an actor in its own right, whereas it used to only be activated by intentional actions (open a shutter, switch something on or off). This shift is implicit and is taking place seamlessly as intention merges with action, bringing new relevance to ‘magical thinking’. What ensues is a sort of thaumaturgy, which, without explanation, could reinforce our passive reaction to the small wonders of domestic robots, leading to sensory asthenia. The more objects work for us, the fewer questions we will ask and the less we will feel. The Capitaine futur and Supernature exhibition seems to suggest that we need to reverse this trend by pushing the limits of this magic to the point that the young visitors come to question it. This functionalism is imbued with an animality present in innumerable robotic forms found in the history of artefacts. Capitaine futur and Supernature is underpinned by an oxymoron: animal-like robots that create a sensory atmosphere which blurs the line between natural and artificial. Is robotics transforming ordinary life? The exhibition amplifies the forces at play by imagining a form of nature that encompasses digital interactivity and organising a phenomenological experience wherein robots are hidden in artificial nature – do smart speakers simulate animality by reacting to our presence? Artificial nature envelops the connected world. It’s supernature!
The exhibition offers visitors the opportunity to ‘decode’ objects through patterns of emotions (beauty) and reactions (surprise) that are experienced in nature. It broadens one’s palette of sensoriality and wonderment. It’s a gateway, a play on real and fake, natural and artificial, the ‘already there’ and the ‘never seen’.
Why? To surprise, provoke and illuminate. In its own subtle way, the exhibition invites children to form little arenas for debate within their tour group to discuss their impressions and interpretations. This original approach to digital education, which is central to the Les Voyages de Capitaine futur cooperation project, relies on multi-sensory exploration and verbalisation. The in situ observations set out below attempt to describe these aspects.

An interactive, multi-sensory approach

The presented works and installations can be described a priori as interactive in the sense that they are all designed to elicit actions from visitors. We may say, then, that they interact, in the sense that their programmed behaviour provokes unpredictable actions or modifies predictable actions. There is nothing magical about the works’ sensitivity to visitors’ presence, of course. Movement and sound sensors are responsible for that. Yet the exhibition’s poetic atmosphere inspires awe in the minds of the young audience. Unsurprisingly, questions such as “How does it do that?” and “How does it work?” were observed.
The hypothesis put forward in the lines below is that the combination of moving about and multi-sensory stimulation creates a state of excitement and well-being capable of freeing children from sensory asthenia. All these experiences are rooted in what the hand feels, the eyes follow and the hears hear. In line with Richard Sennett’s description of the wisdom of the hands, current research into cognition places multi-sensoriality in a field that includes the arts, education, and educational psychology.

Engagement in the exhibition

The exhibition entrance is a ritual passage into supernature. The initial sensation is darkness, which is interrupted by the blanket of light emanating from the works. Several digital exhibition conventions are present:

• The darkness contrasts with the light systems (flashing lights, colour changes, and moving signals), creating a mysterious atmosphere in which visitors are careful to watch their step and can barely see each other.
• Areas with very bright lighting make certain works stand out. Edge of Chaos is like a lighthouse when fully activated. The Timid Wilderness offers more subdued lighting, accentuated by the bright colours of the flowers, which draw our attention to the back of the exhibition.
• There are few explanations and no labels or instructions. The installations are simply presented with their name and that of the artists, agencies or collectives. The works demonstrate themselves.

The entrance is sober. At the end of a staircase bathed in orange light, the children plunge into the darkness. They are confronted with two imposing works: Sonic Jungle, a forest of vines that produce sounds gentle to the ears, and, slightly further to the right, Edge of Chaos, a large tree that bears ‘fruit’ in the form of geometric shapes that activate as one passes under the large branches. These two enigmatic installations are only active when crossed through. They remain quiet and still or burst into a flurry of sounds and lights.
Visitors activate the works simply by moving, becoming part of the display, which is readily apparent. The exhibition is living; it draws its breath from human presence, gestures, movement, fine motor skills, sometimes our respiration and often our voice. We are the joysticks for the works! Our motor skills and gestures are the levers that activate them. The children discover this even more quickly when in a group, spurring each other on in exploration.

The exhibition experience

Moving one work to another following a set path is an implicit agreement founded upon one’s presence in an exhibition. The layout is designed as to create an experience, as defined by Dewey (1906-1930): experience is the perception of reality when one becomes engaged in a learning process, i.e. a transformation through an interaction between the “living creature” and its environment. A key component of pragmatism as it relates to Darwinism, subjects’ experience forms the basis of knowledge. In this way, one can consider a visit to an exhibition as a curated reality designed to bring about an experience, in other words, an action or event whose consequences are taken into account and represent a source of knowledge. In the case of an exhibition, curation forms the basis for the conditions of the experience and the premise that it will engender consequences – these factors are conveyed in the space and time established by the curatorial design. But the consequences, as per Dewey here again – the marks left behind by the transformation – are unique to each subject. Under what conditions do they become knowledge? That is one of the issues inherent to teaching art and the didactic impact of an exhibition – shared experience, as Dewey states, is a basis for learning and democratic experience: “Democracy as compared with other ways of life is the sole way of living which believes wholeheartedly in the process of experience as end and as means; as that which is capable of generating the science which is the sole dependable authority for the direction of further experience and which releases emotions, needs and desires so as to call into being the things that have not existed in the past. For every way of life that fails in its democracy limits the contacts, the exchanges, the communications, the interactions by which experience is steadied while it is also enlarged and enriched.”

Doing and talking about it

If one considers the exhibition as an experience, then it is useful to look at the way in which individuals and groups organise this experience. Visitors feel provoked by the massive installations, which they expect to put on a show. They try everything to make something happen. They are aided by the affordance of the works – the clever, intuitive system of signs that gives visitors the urge to dance, jump, yell… to try everything, really! Observing visitors’ movements reveals patterns in their behaviour as well as variations.
Near The Timid Wilderness, everyone understands that the idea is to make the flowers react, by moving near them, jumping, clapping, blowing and yelling. Near another installation, Fluid Structures, everyone understands that they should use their whole body to dive, swim and stretch out. It’s striking to watch. When a group of six- to eight-year-olds run into the huge room that houses the work, they quickly grow silent amidst the sound of the waves, and starting rolling on the ground, playing with the water and being played with by the water!
There are two categories of patterns: little gestures and movement of the entire body. One key factor in the variations is the social setting of the visit. When with their grandparents, the children are reprimanded (“watch out”, “don’t touch”, “be quiet, you’re going to hurt the plant”), instantly curtailing their exploration, or heightening their transgression. It’s also entertaining to watch how the adults sometimes have the urge to try and show what actions are effective and have trouble letting the children go first. When the children are in a group, the educational staff provide rational explanations and attempt to organise a dense, methodical visit that also tends to rein in experimentation.
One dreams of seeing the children truly left alone with supernature, or the opposite: to see them teaching the adults. It would also be interesting to see the project take this relational aesthetic a step further: a conversation about supernature. Is it natural, functional, activated, spontaneous, secret, and delivered? The children discuss these questions and try to figure out how it works. What was missing was a small debate circle where the children could verbalise their theories about the works’ meaning amongst themselves. It’s a scene that could play out at home, at school or at a community centre. It could cap off the experience while also being an integral part of it, to fully explore the question posted by the exhibition: How does interacting with an artificial reality affect how we interact with other visitors? How should we approach the enigmas of the technical and sensory worlds to create a basis for experience and knowledge?

Sophie Pène, Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity (CRI), Paris Descartes, and Dicen IdF, Cham.

References

• Exhibition held at La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris from April to July 2018, featuring 15 artworks, including three produced as part of the Les Voyages de Capitaine futur European cooperation project.
• CAVE, Stephen Cave, and DIHAL, Kanta, « Ancient dreams of intelligent machines : 3,000 years of robots », Nature, Nature 559, 473-475 (2018).
• SENNETT, Richard, The Craftsman, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
• HATWELL, Yvette, STRERI, Arlette, and GENTAZ, Edouard (ed.). Toucher pour connaître : Psychologie cognitive de la perception tactile manuelle, Presses Universitaires de France, 2000.
• JAMES, Karin H., VINCI-BOOHER, Sophia, and MUNOZ-RUBKE, Felipe. The impact of multimodal-multisensory learning on human performance and brain activation patterns, The Handbook of Multimodal-Multisensor Interfaces: Foundations, User Modeling, and Common Modality Combinations, 2017, vol. 1.
• DEWEY, John, « La réalité comme expérience », traduction par Pierre Saint-Germier et Gérôme Truc, Revue Tracés, Open edition. Texte original : « Reality as Experience ». From: The collected works of John Dewey, Middle Works: volume III, 1930-1906. © 1977 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University, translated by permission.
• DEWEY, John, « Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us », 1939. John Dewey and the Promise of America, Progressive Education Booklet No. 14, Columbus, Ohio: American Education Press.
• Fluid Structures 360° is an immersive work by Vincent Houzé that invites visitors inside an endlessly flowing waterfall reminiscent of the fluid world of information.