Justine Emard is a visual artist. Her installations use AI to understand the living, exploring the boundaries between organic life and artificial intelligence. Bee swarms, encephalographic recordings and prehistoric paintings become learning supports for algorithms that, contrary to dystopian imaginations, generate new supra-hyper-organisms.
AI is a new form of intelligence whose development is stirring up concerns and dystopian fables. Far from replacing human intelligence, AIs are emerging as new tools to be trained, controlled and shaped to achieve the desired result. For the artist, photographer, architect, film-maker, musician or illustrator, AIs become an agent with which to collaborate, resulting in co-creation. Inaugural lecture of the “AI and Creation” series at the Stream Innovation Center.
The Center for Contemporary Creation (CCC) of Tours occupied a dilapidated location that was devoid of identity. PCA-STREAM conducted an experimental reflection on the identity of this place of artistic production, eventually leading to an architectural project of a second skin for the façade. One hundred and fifty blades of LED-backlit Plexiglas make up an organic and shifting scenery that interacts with the street and the public. This hybrid object between sculpture and architecture has become the emblem of the CCC.
PCA-STREAM has designed a museum for the art collection of the Ukrainian philanthropist Victor Pinchuk in the heart of the historical city center of Kiev. Inaugurated in 2006, this center is a beacon for contemporary art in Eastern Europe and has contributed to the promotion of cultural exchanges between the East and the West these past ten years.
LUMA Arles is dedicated to supporting contemporary artistic creation. Designed as a creative campus, it promotes the Camargue region in which it is located: its landscapes, materials and know-how. Maria Finders, co-founder of the Atelier LUMA design laboratory, tells us about this atypical place.
"Pièce Lumineuse" is both a piece of architecture and a work of art. It was developed for the Center for Contemporary Creation in Tours and the Palais de Tokyo by PCA-STREAM and Orlan, a pioneering artist and theoretician of “Carnal Art.” This work explores the sensual and experimental dimension of Orlan’s oeuvre, while at the same time illustrating the rich exchanges and artistic collaborations that PCA-STREAM promotes in order to bring some degree of “otherness” to its design work.
Xavier Veilhan is a visual artist. He represents France at the 57th Venice Biennale. Since he has been collaborating with PCA-STREAM on a regular basis for a decade, we interviewed him for the documentary “PCA-STREAM: from research to action”. In this talk, he evokes his relationship to architecture, which he considers both as a constraint to the creation process and as a source of inspiration and reflection that nourishes his practice.
Episode 3/5 of the documentary “PCA-STREAM, from research to action” examines the question raised by STREAM 03 on the links between urbanization and preservation of natural resources in the so-called Anthropocene era, in which Man has become the dominant transformation force of the biosphere. How can we sustainably live on a finite planet? Based on a cradle-to-cradle dynamic, the Stream Building offers a concrete vision of what a metabolic building can be, producing and reusing its own resources. – In the documentary “PCA-STREAM, from research to action”, filmmaker Gilles Coudert takes his author’s perspective, a specialist in contemporary art and architecture, on the link between research and action at the heart of the practice of PCA-STREAM agency. He gives the floor to an international panel of researchers, creators and professionals associated with the work of the agency: philosophers, art critics, artists, investors, policy makers, users, etc. Three architectural projects, realized or in progress, are taken as case studies to illustrate the conditioning of the architectural form by this collaborative exploration approach: #cloud.paris (with SFL), the Stream Building (winner of the competition « Réinventer Paris » , with Eurosic) and Shake (Euralille, with Nacarat). Those projects embody the way in which a metabolic, open and innovative vision of the city takes shape through the exchange and creation of new synergies between actors and visions to move from urban utopia to concrete realization. A film directed by Gilles Coudert for the Lyon Architecture Biennial. A co-production PCA-STREAM and a.p.r.e.s. Production, 54 min, 2017. – With the interventions of: Nicolas Bel, engineer, specialist in urban agriculture, founder of Topager – Timothée Boitouzet, architect, entrepreneur, founder of Woodoo – Patrick Bouchain, architect and set designer – Nicolas Bourriaud, art historian, art critic and exhibition curator – Alain Bublex, artist – Thomas Camus, director of operations development at Eurosic – Philippe Chiambaretta, architect, founder of PCA-STREAM – Gilles Clément, landscape designer -Jean-Louis Cohen, architect, architecture historian, professor at Collège de France – Gilles Coudert, director, producer and publisher – Justine Culioli, assistant director of major projects at SFL – Clément Dirié, editor and art critic – Gilbert Emont, director of the Institut Palladio foundation – Julien Eymeri, strategy consultant and co-founder of Quartier Libre – Aurélien Gillier, publisher and designer, editor-in-chief of STREAM 02 – Bertrand Julien-Laferrière, former general manager of SFL – Thomas Lierman, CEO of Nacarat – Éric Mangion, artistic director of the National Contemporary Art Center Villa Arson – Ariane Michel, artist and filmmaker – Jean-Louis Missika, Deputy Mayor of Paris, in charge of town planning, architecture, the Greater Paris project, economic development and attractiveness – Yann Moulier-Boutang, economist and essayist, professor at UTC Compiègne and UTSEUS Shanghai – Pierre Musso, philosopher, professor at Telecom ParisTech – Julien Prévieux, artist – Julie Rouart, editor, editorial director of the art department at Flammarion – David Ruy, architect, director of SCI-Arc post-graduate program, Los Angeles – Xavier Veilhan, artist.
Episode 2/5 of the documentary “PCA-STREAM, from research to action” traces the researches carried out for STREAM 02 on new work modes and workspaces. From the subprime mortgage crisis to the new liquid form taken by work, which irremediably blurs the line between work life and private life, this episode concludes with the project #cloud, result of cross-reflection on knowledge capitalism and users’ new expectations about comfort. – In the documentary “PCA-STREAM, from research to action”, filmmaker Gilles Coudert takes his author’s perspective, a specialist in contemporary art and architecture, on the link between research and action at the heart of the practice of PCA-STREAM agency. He gives the floor to an international panel of researchers, creators and professionals associated with the work of the agency: philosophers, art critics, artists, investors, policy makers, users, etc. Three architectural projects, realized or in progress, are taken as case studies to illustrate the conditioning of the architectural form by this collaborative exploration approach: #cloud.paris (with SFL), the Stream Building (winner of the competition « Réinventer Paris » , with Eurosic) and Shake (Euralille, with Nacarat). Those projects embody the way in which a metabolic, open and innovative vision of the city takes shape through the exchange and creation of new synergies between actors and visions to move from urban utopia to concrete realization. A film directed by Gilles Coudert for the Lyon Architecture Biennial. A co-production PCA-STREAM and a.p.r.e.s. Production, 54 min, 2017. – With the interventions of: Nicolas Bel, engineer, specialist in urban agriculture, founder of Topager – Timothée Boitouzet, architect, entrepreneur, founder of Woodoo – Patrick Bouchain, architect and set designer – Nicolas Bourriaud, art historian, art critic and exhibition curator – Alain Bublex, artist – Thomas Camus, director of operations development at Eurosic – Philippe Chiambaretta, architect, founder of PCA-STREAM – Gilles Clément, landscape designer -Jean-Louis Cohen, architect, architecture historian, professor at Collège de France – Gilles Coudert, director, producer and publisher – Justine Culioli, assistant director of major projects at SFL – Clément Dirié, editor and art critic – Gilbert Emont, director of the Institut Palladio foundation – Julien Eymeri, strategy consultant and co-founder of Quartier Libre – Aurélien Gillier, publisher and designer, editor-in-chief of STREAM 02 – Bertrand Julien-Laferrière, former general manager of SFL – Thomas Lierman, CEO of Nacarat – Éric Mangion, artistic director of the National Contemporary Art Center Villa Arson – Ariane Michel, artist and filmmaker – Jean-Louis Missika, Deputy Mayor of Paris, in charge of town planning, architecture, the Greater Paris project, economic development and attractiveness – Yann Moulier-Boutang, economist and essayist, professor at UTC Compiègne and UTSEUS Shanghai – Pierre Musso, philosopher, professor at Telecom ParisTech – Julien Prévieux, artist – Julie Rouart, editor, editorial director of the art department at Flammarion – David Ruy, architect, director of SCI-Arc post-graduate program, Los Angeles – Xavier Veilhan, artist.
Episode 5/5, epilogue of the documentary “PCA-STREAM, from research to action”, gives the floor to the various speakers in order to open, in their respective disciplinary fields, the scope of research and foresight. As a reflection laboratory, STREAM aims at questioning our tools and working methods in order to respond to a changing world and to live in it in a contextual and sustainable way while reinventing the profession of architect. – In the documentary “PCA-STREAM, from research to action”, filmmaker Gilles Coudert takes his author’s perspective, a specialist in contemporary art and architecture, on the link between research and action at the heart of the practice of PCA-STREAM agency. He gives the floor to an international panel of researchers, creators and professionals associated with the work of the agency: philosophers, art critics, artists, investors, policy makers, users, etc. Three architectural projects, realized or in progress, are taken as case studies to illustrate the conditioning of the architectural form by this collaborative exploration approach: #cloud.paris (with SFL), the Stream Building (winner of the competition « Réinventer Paris » , with Eurosic) and Shake (Euralille, with Nacarat). Those projects embody the way in which a metabolic, open and innovative vision of the city takes shape through the exchange and creation of new synergies between actors and visions to move from urban utopia to concrete realization. A film directed by Gilles Coudert for the Lyon Architecture Biennial. A co-production PCA-STREAM and a.p.r.e.s. Production, 54 min, 2017. – With the interventions of: Nicolas Bel, engineer, specialist in urban agriculture, founder of Topager – Timothée Boitouzet, architect, entrepreneur, founder of Woodoo – Patrick Bouchain, architect and set designer – Nicolas Bourriaud, art historian, art critic and exhibition curator – Alain Bublex, artist – Thomas Camus, director of operations development at Eurosic – Philippe Chiambaretta, architect, founder of PCA-STREAM – Gilles Clément, landscape designer -Jean-Louis Cohen, architect, architecture historian, professor at Collège de France – Gilles Coudert, director, producer and publisher – Justine Culioli, assistant director of major projects at SFL – Clément Dirié, editor and art critic – Gilbert Emont, director of the Institut Palladio foundation – Julien Eymeri, strategy consultant and co-founder of Quartier Libre – Aurélien Gillier, publisher and designer, editor-in-chief of STREAM 02 – Bertrand Julien-Laferrière, former general manager of SFL – Thomas Lierman, CEO of Nacarat – Éric Mangion, artistic director of the National Contemporary Art Center Villa Arson – Ariane Michel, artist and filmmaker – Jean-Louis Missika, Deputy Mayor of Paris, in charge of town planning, architecture, the Greater Paris project, economic development and attractiveness – Yann Moulier-Boutang, economist and essayist, professor at UTC Compiègne and UTSEUS Shanghai – Pierre Musso, philosopher, professor at Telecom ParisTech – Julien Prévieux, artist – Julie Rouart, editor, editorial director of the art department at Flammarion – David Ruy, architect, director of SCI-Arc post-graduate program, Los Angeles – Xavier Veilhan, artist.
The episode 4/5 of the documentary “PCA-STREAM, from research to action” outlines the subject of STREAM 04 (which will be published at the end of 2017). This new issue explores the repercussions of the Anthropocene era. It proposes to consider a new paradigm for the living, seen as a continuum, to overcome the existing divisions between nature and culture, object and subject, living and non-living. The Shake building in Lille, on which a part of the neighboring park winds up and continues, is a concrete example of this new cycle of study. – In the documentary “PCA-STREAM, from research to action”, filmmaker Gilles Coudert takes his author’s perspective, a specialist in contemporary art and architecture, on the link between research and action at the heart of the practice of PCA-STREAM agency. He gives the floor to an international panel of researchers, creators and professionals associated with the work of the agency: philosophers, art critics, artists, investors, policy makers, users, etc. Three architectural projects, realized or in progress, are taken as case studies to illustrate the conditioning of the architectural form by this collaborative exploration approach: #cloud.paris (with SFL), the Stream Building (winner of the competition « Réinventer Paris » , with Eurosic) and Shake (Euralille, with Nacarat). Those projects embody the way in which a metabolic, open and innovative vision of the city takes shape through the exchange and creation of new synergies between actors and visions to move from urban utopia to concrete realization. A film directed by Gilles Coudert for the Lyon Architecture Biennial. A co-production PCA-STREAM and a.p.r.e.s. Production, 54 min, 2017. – With the interventions of: Nicolas Bel, engineer, specialist in urban agriculture, founder of Topager – Timothée Boitouzet, architect, entrepreneur, founder of Woodoo – Patrick Bouchain, architect and set designer – Nicolas Bourriaud, art historian, art critic and exhibition curator – Alain Bublex, artist – Thomas Camus, director of operations development at Eurosic – Philippe Chiambaretta, architect, founder of PCA-STREAM – Gilles Clément, landscape designer -Jean-Louis Cohen, architect, architecture historian, professor at Collège de France – Gilles Coudert, director, producer and publisher – Justine Culioli, assistant director of major projects at SFL – Clément Dirié, editor and art critic – Gilbert Emont, director of the Institut Palladio foundation – Julien Eymeri, strategy consultant and co-founder of Quartier Libre – Aurélien Gillier, publisher and designer, editor-in-chief of STREAM 02 – Bertrand Julien-Laferrière, former general manager of SFL – Thomas Lierman, CEO of Nacarat – Éric Mangion, artistic director of the National Contemporary Art Center Villa Arson – Ariane Michel, artist and filmmaker – Jean-Louis Missika, Deputy Mayor of Paris, in charge of town planning, architecture, the Greater Paris project, economic development and attractiveness – Yann Moulier-Boutang, economist and essayist, professor at UTC Compiègne and UTSEUS Shanghai – Pierre Musso, philosopher, professor at Telecom ParisTech – Julien Prévieux, artist – Julie Rouart, editor, editorial director of the art department at Flammarion – David Ruy, architect, director of SCI-Arc post-graduate program, Los Angeles – Xavier Veilhan, artist.
Nicolas Bourriaud sent this letter to Pierre Hyughe while the artist was on an expedition for several months. The historian and art critic questions the artist’s approach, addressing notions such as spare time and exploration in the light of a finite, well-known and already completely mapped world. How can the artist create knowledge on contemporary space without this knowledge being categorized in the existing disciplines? Nicolas Bourriaud is an art historian, art critic, theorist and exhibition curator. Since 2016, he is the director of the future Montpellier Contemporain (MoCo). A visual artist, Pierre Huyghe has long been associated with relational aesthetics, having explored the relationship between reality and fiction, the issue of memory, of expeditions and exhibitions. A recipient of many awards, and having been exhibited in the most prestigious international cultural institutions, he is now investigating the complexity of organic life, which is a way of departing from the control of authorship to create the conditions for the emergence of a self-evolving work. Catalog text for the GNS (Global Navigation System) exhibition, Palais de Tokyo, Éditions du Cercle d’art, Paris, 2003 (pp. 118‒9)
“At a rate of a meter a day, we will remain sealed in for twenty days, and despite everything, this will indeed be a journey. I have always argued that the quality of a journey is primarily linked to the means of transport that it employs and not necessarily to its destination,” Laurent Tixador quips to Nicolas Bourriaud during an interview on their practice as artists-explorers. Laurent Tixador is a performance artist and modern day explorer. Explorations represent a form of studio in his work and he has thereby conducted a great many exploration performances. Nicolas Bourriaud is an art historian, art critic, theorist and exhibition curator. Since 2016, he is the director of the future Montpellier Contemporain (MoCo).
Caroline Goulard is a data journalist and co-founder of Dataveyes. She turns collected data into digital experiences to make it more understandable for everyone. Thanks to new ways of visualization, it is now possible to understand a population’s needs and to develop services that anticipate new uses.
Researcher and data scientist Stanislas Chaillou investigates how AI can enable architects to support and enhance their practice. A small sampler of a new book published by Éditions du Moniteur in March 2021.
François Taddei is a geneticist and co-founder, with Ariel Lindner, of the Learning Planet Institute (formerly known as CRI). Conceived as a school for the 21st century, the institute combines artificial intelligence and collective intelligence to reinvent ways of learning, teaching and doing research.
Hubert Beroche is the founder of the Urban AI think tank, dedicated to the field of urban artificial intelligence. He is the curator of the Eyes on the street lecture series, run together in partnership with the SCAI (Sorbonne Center for Artifical Intelligence), and explains here how urban AI can help us understand the city.
Contemporary architectural research is often fascinated by biological life but with an approach that goes beyond simple organic metaphors thanks to recent technological developments. Alisa Andrasek discusses the link between biology and her architectural practice, and her interest in the distribution of information in natural processes—a complexity that she tries to approach via big data. Her work in computational design is influenced by the convergence between information and materials, in an increasingly complex and open synthesis which enables it to go beyond the production of form and address the dynamic processes of matter itself. Alisa Andrasek is an architect, director and founder of the Biothing laboratory. She teaches at the Architectural Association of London.
Researcher Claire Lesieur works at the CNRS Ampère Laboratory on the Go Pro project, which applies a computational model developed for protein folding to urban environments. The shape-changing properties of proteins are put to use in an attempt to map out the opportunities for urban growth that don’t involve urban sprawl.
In the face of the promises of the prophets of artificial intelligence and the marketing of those major economic players promoting the smart city as a solution to urban ills, Jérôme Denis and David Pontille remind us of the irreducible materiality and fragility of cities. Demystifying what they perceive as a form of “neopositivism” of data, they point out that data doesn’t exist per se, and in fact must be generated and then maintained at a significant cost. As a result, data is never neutral and takes on a fundamentally political dimension. Understanding this framework leads them to promote a paradigm of maintenance and fragility, instead of the more common one of sustainability and resilience, when approaching urban realities.
stream voices
Eager to share more generously the results of its collaborations and research, PCA-STREAM publishes STREAM VOICES, its online magazine!
