OUROBOROS TREE is a visual application for exploring relations between human nutrition and living organisms. I have built it because many contemporary issues can be addressed through a prism of our relationship with “non-humans” (according to Bruno Latour’s terminology). The project is evolving and welcomes feedback from the public. OurobosTree harmonizes, for the first time, […]
Category Archives: Spaces
The exponential line of technological progress… really?
A couple of days ago, I stumbled on LinkedIn on this image showing a long-term timeline of technological development by Max Roser, founder of Our World in Data. The graphic is impressively synthetic, and deals beautifully with exponential time scales, both prior and after the modern epoch. But I am not convinced that the evolution […]
Winding Paths in the Space of Conflicts
I rarely travel by plane but, when I do, I can’t help checking that little screen of bad LEDs at least five times an hour, to see the map of locations miles below. Many of them I’ve never heard of, and most of them I’ll never see. Their names appear on the screen like as […]
Division by Zero – Sometimes Usefull
“Zeroworld“, a recent episode of the WNYC podcast Radiolab, examined the possibility of division by zero. The discussion turned mostly metaphysical and got many listeners so angry that they went on to rant on Reddit. I understood this episode more as a fun thought experiment than as a formal proposal. But it also reminded me […]
Figures and Maps of Concepts
This blog entry is work in progress… Please be patient, more content is comming soon. Meanwhile, you can read other posts. Concepts are encoded in most artworks, at least in all that make it to the museum and visiotors bother to see and acedmics to write about. I focus here on major examples. Psyche and […]
Railway Track Gauge: a Material Substrate of Nostalgia and Defiance
A look at the global map of rail track gauges immediately reminds you of the current invasion of Ukraine. There is a material substrate of the putinist nostalgia of the Muscovite Empire. Far more than a purported linguistic or cultural proximity of the ex-Soviet states, this substrate of steel paves the way for geopolitical ambitions. […]
The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann – a Foreword
I’ve had the pleasure to write a foreword of the French translation of Ananyo Bhattacharya‘s biography of John von Neumann, translated by Anatole Muchnik and now published by Quanto. You can read the French introduction and have a peek at the book’s first chapter (PDF). In agreement with Ananyo, here is the English translation. As […]
Hypertopia: from Utopia to Omniscience
English translation transcript of my conference given in French at the CERN Globe on September 22nd, 2022, and based on the eponymous book from 2019. Tonight, I propose to talk about two ideas, two concepts. The first one you already know: the concept of utopia. The other concept, which I propose to introduce, is the […]
The impossible territory and the maps of the boyar Kraiensky
Figure 1 Overlapping territories of First Nations in the perception of their members. Screenshot from the geomatics site https://native-land.ca/ . Unstable borders are a cartographer’s nightmare. The simple task of reporting on demographic changes quickly becomes a headache in a country whose municipalities merge, divide, and even change their spatial contours according to the projects […]
The Bifurcation as a View of the Mind
Let us assume the existence of A and B, two points connected by a straight line which, if it extends beyond B, lets us imagine C, a point located anywhere on this imaginary line. C, then, can be said “in the continuity” of A and B. We’ll arrive at point C if we do not […]