Student researchers

Arthur Enguehard


Arthur Enguehard grew up in Nantes and currently works in Paris (France). He studied Earth Sciences at the Geosciences Department of École normale supérieure – PSL (ENS – PSL) and Sorbonnes University. On the side of his academic career, he engages as educator with specialized audiences in metropolitan France and French Guiana. In 2019, he co-founded the association «PePaSon: Pedagogies des Paysages Sonores» encouraging the development of a french speaking network for sharing practices around sound walks and forms of mediation of listening. He is currently developing a PhD in the SACRe doctoral program at PSL University, in the framework of the Reflective Interaction Research Group of EnsadLab and of the ENS Geosciences Department, a PhD research entitled: «Listening to the (E)arth: Hybriding sonic arts and geosciences in knowledge production and sensitization toward the environment».

Web Site: http://pepason.fr

Guillemette Legrand


Guillemette Legrand uses the practice of machine-fictioning to explore the (im)materiality of emerging information technologies and their capacity to form contexts enabling the naturalisation of specific belief systems. Their work can be described as an artistic mobilisation of algorithmic knowledge and its infrastructure, where their goal is to re-imagine their potentialities and frictions through fostering embodied and situated environments (both physical and virtual) to engage with a public.
The work often takes the shape of multimedia installations, game-environments and experimental presentations, which have been exhibited at the V&A (London, UK), V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam, NL), the 4th Istanbul Biennale (Istanbul, TR), LUMA (Arles, FR), Design Museum (London, UK), among other international locations.
In 2020, they initiated a transdisciplinary research project Spectral Plain that seeks to readjust the relationship between scientific knowledge and the modelling of the Earth in the production of world-imaginaries.
They are now PhD candidate at SACRe-PSL within the Reflective Interaction Group of EnsadLab. Her PhD project Climate Cosmograms examines the cosmological dimension of climate images, inquiring how they become more-than scientific representations that also portray political and socio-cultural imaginaries of the Earth. The project researches the visual literacies of design and technological systems through a critical examination of current climate-imaging practices, in order to propose other possible forms of climate visuality and imaginaries. This practice-based research starts with the proposal that current climate images are not neutral representations but act as visual proxies of a complex, autonomous, and speculative modelling system that mediate, hierarchise, and politicise climate data. Climate images used within the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports are produced to inform climate governance, which the project argues, construct imaginaries that reframe people’s political and socio-cultural relationship to the earth. Through examining this reframing, this project proposes to study the tacit role of design and its AI-aided automation by looking at three different realities of the earth that coexist in the imaging of climate; the sensing of the earth biochemical substrate; its computational modelling; and finally the visualisation of this data. Climate cosmograms ask what are the visual practices of climate images? How do they construct and disseminate cosmological imaginary(ies)? And how can creative practices help to critically mobilise current climate-imaging operations to propose other mediums to simulate the climate and its imaginaries? The hypothesis of the project is that by using the medium of cosmograms–a cultural incarnation of the earth–as a research lens, I will be able to document, counter, enrich, and diversify climate visuality and imaginaries. The project proposes to research the design and geo-computational practices of modelling the earth through participatory and practice-based design methods.

Web Site: https://studiolegrandjager.com

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

Projects

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.

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

Projects