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Research & innovation

Benoît Labourdette production agency integrates an applied research center in a variety of related fields: artistic creation, cultural and therapeutic mediation, cultural policy, digital tools, cooperative methods and educational innovation.

A large proportion of our cultural and social actions are part of a research-action approach. We use an ethnomethodological method, informed by the cultural rights approach, to document our actions and draw out more general reflexive resources. Our aim is to build tools for philosophical and practical thinking that are openly multidisciplinary.

The aim of this research is to advance professional practice in the field of culture. We strive to deepen the social and humanistic meaning of cultural and artistic actions, and to illuminate professional practices with innovative analytical tools rooted in social science epistemology.

Benoît Labourdette shares this operational research in seminars and professional training courses, university teaching, collaborations and co-productions, and in the form of summaries published on the www.benoitlabourdette.com website or in partner media.

For example, technical tools, when they appear, are most often the product of industrial and commercial projects. They need to be questioned by artists and researchers in the human sciences, because they change our representations of the world, our ways of living, and it’s essential to build our critical distance. Benoît Labourdette uses technical innovations to question and divert them, within the framework of his own artistic projects and collective projects, research projects, and creative and playful public cultural events, festivals in particular.

This section contains summaries and analyses of innovative experiments, as well as methodological and theoretical food for thought. Other research texts can also be found in the « Resources » section.

The Golem and the Safeguards
Artificial intelligence, creativity and critical thinking

Artificial intelligence has emancipated itself from research laboratories and works of science fiction thanks to the public launch in November 2022 of the conversational robot ChatGPT, which was very quickly appropriated by an immense number of (…)

Will Heritage Still Be Part of Our Lives in 2045?
Cultural rights

The “cultural rights”, which derive from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are a concept developed and defended by researchers, sociologists, philosophers, political leaders and actors of the cultural world. Present in a certain number (…)

Creativity as a political weapon against the society of the spectacle
Media and Information Education (MIE)

Media and Information Education (MIE) is a dynamic that enjoys consensus regarding its necessity in the contemporary world, in the same way as the critical education to language proposed by the structuralists of the 1960s, with Roland Barthes at (…)

Photos of the construction site
Virtual Reality

Thinking about virtual reality...Virtual Reality, this project of total immersion in an imaginary world, linear or interactive, which has been in the state of successive prototypes for more than 40 years, seemed to start “taking” in creative (…)

The elsewhere of the in-itself
Cultural policies and digital revolution

Cultural policy" is a tradition of the French state since the Middle Ages. It was initiated by Louis XIV in the 17th century as a tool of influence and power. And it was defined in its current terms by André Malraux in 1959, with the State’s (…)

Digifest : conférence et masterclass de création avec drone
Drones

Le drone, cette caméra volante qui arrive parmi nous, soulève, pour un cinéaste, des questions importantes. Objet militaire, objet de surveillance et de mort, objet d’ubiquité cartographique des multinationales, et bientôt objet commercial, objet (…)

Enregistrements audio des conférences
Pocket Films

Pocket Films fut d’abord un festival de cinéma, fondé par Benoît Labourdette avec le Forum des images (Paris, 2005-2010), consacré à la création de films avec téléphones mobiles et caméras de poche. Son succès a fait que c’est devenu un nom (…)

Audiovisual workshops to combat gender stereotypes
Research on image

The image has become a language that everyone “speaks” on a daily basis, much more so than before the democratization of digital tools. Thus the stakes of images touch more than ever our existence in a very direct way, at the psychological, (…)

Opera “The little cunning vixen” : video installation
Performing arts

Performing arts is my training and my initial culture. Young actor in the 90’s with among other La Compagnie du Chaland and Trottoir Express (France), I was teached to the work of the mask and the art of the jester with William Nedel. I also very (…)

Tutorials for making sequence-shot films
Post-Covid-19 cultural projects

What is culture for? Are we going to return to cultural places as much as before and for what reasons? Should we rethink cultural proposals to adapt them? But to adapt them to what and how? These are fundamental questions that are posed today and (…)