Brice Ammar-Khodja

Brice Ammar-Khodja is an artist, graphic designer, and Ph.D student based in Montreal, Paris, and Strasbourg. He holds a Graphic Design Master Degree from Haute École des Arts du Rhin. His work arises where digital arts, data design, material science, and sensory studies meet. He is currently pursuing a thesis jointly supervised by Concordia University – Montreal (Individualized Program) and EnsAD, EnsadLab – Paris (Reflective Interaction research group, SACRe program).

He combines responsive materials, video, and soft robotics to explore the symbolic, spatial, sensory, and socio-environmental interconnections pertaining to materiality and visual information. To this end, he contextualizes his research-creation in the frame of “resilient cities”. Thus, he seeks to experiment with the interactive potential of matter to increase the sensitive representations and perceptions of data linked with the public environments’ quality (air quality, temperature, and noise pollution) to enhance the aesthetic relationships between the citizens and their milieu.

Brice Ammar-Khodja is affiliated with EnsadLab (Paris) in the Reflective Interaction research group (dir. Samuel Bianchini) and with Concordia University (Montreal) in the Speculative Life Biolab (dir. Alice Jarry), the Centre for Sensory Studies (dir. David Howes) and the Concordia’s Canada Excellence Research Chair in Smart, Sustainable and Resilient Communities and Cities (dir. Ursula Eicker). Brice is a current member of the international research-creation network Hexagram.

Co-director of the typography magazine Pied de Mouche, Brice Ammar-Khodja is also involved in creating workshops and educational tools for the general public.

His works have been exhibited at Centre Pompidou, Biennale internationale du Design, la Cité internationale des Arts, V2_Institute for Unstable Media, Musée historique de la Ville de Strasbourg, and Modulab.

Website: b-ak.com

Julie Blanc

Julie Blanc is a graphic designer and student researcher. She is preparing a PhD in ergonomics and design at the C3U team (Laboratoire Paragraphe, University Paris 8) and EnsadLab under the direction of Anne Bationo Tillon and the co-direction of Samuel Bianchini. This doctorate is part of the ArTeC university research school (Art, Technologies and Creation).

At EnsadLab, Julie works for the Experimental Publicization axis of the Reflective Interaction research program. Her work and research mainly focuses on the design of multi-media editorial objects, both digital and print. Her main study is on the recent shift from desktop publishing software to the use of web development technologies and methods (HTML5, CSS3, javascript, epub) in editorial chains and particularly in design practices. She also works on the implications of automated typesetting on graphic design.

Julie is part of the collective research of the PrePostPrint and works on the development paged.js, a free and open source Javascript library to make book in browsers.

website: julie-blanc.fr

Raphaëlle Kerbrat

Currently an artist and student researcher at the Reflective interaction research program from EnsadLab, Raphaëlle Kerbrat graduated from Beaux-arts de Nantes in 2017. In her work, she is interested in the paradox of digital “immateriality” in relation to the hyper-materiality of the infrastructure that supports it. The artistic devices that she develops attempt to reveal “infra-ordinary” phenomena, stemming from the uses of digital technologies, by a material manipulation of their media. By confronting the information processing systems on their own condition, they reflect the paradoxical and unwavering link between digital and analog, information and matter, language and support.

Website: raphaellekerbrat.com

Corentin Loubet

Graduated of a master’s degree in object and space design in 2020 at the ESAD of Reims, Corentin was first interested in the user affection towards objects, and more precisely how intelligent objects can stimulate particular emotional reactions to the user.

In 2021, he joined the PhD training year of EnsadLab within the Reflective Interaction research group. He gradually focused his interest on the notion of Curiosity as a metaphor for the data collect process realised by intelligent assistants. Starting from the observation that this hidden and sometimes intrusive process leads to an ambient distrust of these devices, he proposes to question about the way of which an object design and an object behavior design could reveals this process to clarify the relationship between these virtual assistants and the user.

Next to his PhD training, Corentin co-founded the Bureau Commun design studio, where he and others designers are interested in the impact of digital technology on society.

Olivain Porry

Born in Fort-de-France in 1990, Olivain Porry graduated with a DNSEP from ESBANM in 2015. Firstly interested in painting, he developed, during his studies, a reflection which concentrates on the relationships between the individual and technologies of communication. The main part of his artistic practice is creating programs, machines and generative and participative processes. His attraction to science of communication urged him to envisage a doctorate within the EnsadLab where he works on the notion of perception in networks through the technologies of communication.

Website: olivain.art

Jonathan Pêpe

Jonathan Pêpe (born in Toulouse, 1987), studied at the National School of Art in Bourges then at Fresnoy, the National Studio of Contemporary Arts. His constantly changing plastic research can materialize in the form of drawings, films, videos, interactive digital and robotic installations. He exhibited in particular at the Villa Vassilief, the Salon du dessin, the Pair2 art center (Taiwan), the Palais de Tokyo, the EDF Foundation and the French Institute in Budapest.

Anna Schaeffner

Anna Schaeffner, is an interaction designer and researcher. After studying product design in France she graduated with a Bachelor’s degree (2018) and a Master’s degree (2021) in interaction design, at the Kunsthochschule Weissensee in Berlin where she lives since 2015. Her various professional experiences abroad; in San Francisco or Copenhagen, helped her refine her design practice, around the development of new forms of hybrid interactions, which mix new technologies and societal and environmental concerns.Today she collaborates on many projects with a Berlin-based design studio, and in parallel Anna is enrolled in a pre-doctoral year at EnsadLab, in the reflective interaction group.Her research focuses on softrobotics, and the design of deformation, as a vector of motion, as a capacity for dynamic material adaptation and expressiveness. Through the practice of design, she explores the deformation to tend to other forms of interface between robotic objects and their environments. 

Website: anna-schaeffner.com