Social Sciences: Performing Public Space Between IRL and URL

Public talk organized since 2022 by the OVNi Biennale. These Talks aim to bring together, through multiple formats and in a converging flow, different fields of art, science, and philosophy. The goal is to offer a better understanding of image-making — from analog creation to Artificial Intelligence — and to help decode the technological, artistic, aesthetic, and ethical issues at stake.

How do digital arts and cultures « perform » the social body today? This session explores the tension between a body that is increasingly quantified, captured, or confined to a digital interface, and a political body that is trying to reassemble itself, build community, and reclaim common space in the face of the world’s automation. This Talk is a way of questioning what remains living and shared in our ways of forming society, by considering the staging of the self and an ecology of bodies in public space.

Filipe Vilas-Boas is at the heart of this question with his performative installation Re:public, created for the OVNi Biennale 2026. He will share his experience of art as an « agora » and a playful « Trojan horse » for reawakening citizenship. Laurence Allard addresses the attempt to reclaim public space in light of the concepts of « situated knowledge » and engagement. Can art repair the social bond where social networks tend to fragment bodies?

Speakers

Filipe Vilas-Boas
A conceptual artist, his works play on the porosity and mutual pull between two public spaces — one digital, the other physical.

Laurence Allard
A senior lecturer in Communication Sciences, researcher at Université Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle-IRCAV, and teacher at the Université de Lille, Department of Cultural and Media Studies. She co-leads the AI Observatory (established in 2025).