TMNLab: “Digital technology is not a subject that deserves a position for or against...” - Benoît Labourdette

At the invitation of Anne Le Gall, exchange with Benoît Labourdette on innovative and agile working methods for the cultural sector, thanks to digital tools, for a change of posture and openness to the interests of audiences, young people in particular, towards a true cultural democracy.

We are pleased to invite you to an exceptional meeting with the talented director, screenwriter and researcher, Benoît Labourdette, which will take place on Thursday, March 9, 2023. We’re delighted to invite you to this not-to-be-missed event, which promises to be rich in exchanges and discoveries.

Benoît Labourdette is passionate about images, storytelling and audiovisual creation. Thanks to his many skills and boundless creativity, he has made a name for himself in the world of film and artistic production. But that’s not all, as he is also a seasoned researcher in the field of media and new technologies.

At this meeting, Benoît Labourdette will do us the honor of sharing his commitments and research projects with us. You’ll have the opportunity to discover the latest advances and innovations in the field of image and audiovisual creation, as well as the future prospects of this constantly evolving industry.

We are convinced that this meeting will be a unique opportunity to exchange views with Benoît Labourdette and to discover the extent of his skills and research. We therefore encourage you to visit our article dedicated to him to find out more about this event and not miss this opportunity to meet a personality as fascinating as he is astonishing.

http://www.tmnlab.com/2023/03/08/le-numerique-ne-constitue-pas-un-sujet-qui-meriterait-quon-se-positionne-pour-ou-contre/

Comments on Linkedin

Olivier Vandeputte. Communications Manager at Théâtre & Cinéma de Choisy-le-Roi
This morning’s meeting did me a world of good! As soon as I’d finished the video, I e-mailed my colleagues: “I’ve got to tell you everything I heard this morning. It also scratches the surface a little, because it forces you to think outside the box....”. Sharing session planned with them next Thursday 🙂. Thank you Anne (and the whole TMNlab / Théâtres & Médiations Numériques laboratory team) for the remarkable work you’ve been doing since the community was created!

Anne Le Gall. Facilitation, transmission, network animation and always a little more 🚀
Thank you for your message. It made me think too. I’m glad you could organize this time of exchange at your place. And thank you for leading TMNlab’s Digital Mediation group with 8 hands, because it’s our exchanges that have brought us to this point!

Session presentation text

Professionals speak

«Digital technology is not a subject that would deserve us to position ourselves “for” or “against” it» Benoît Labourdette

Garance Potier — March 8, 2023

As a French filmmaker, producer and researcher, Benoît Labourdette brings his expertise on the subject of digital technology by focusing in particular on the social, cultural and political implications of digital technologies. He is known for his view that digital technology represents a form of social determinism implying non-neutral anthropological and social externalities. In other words, this phenomenon would have a profound impact on the way society lives, thinks, interacts and reorganises its system of values and cultural norms. The researcher has therefore seized this opportunity to nourish the cultural system to which he belongs:

«My approach is as much cultural, artistic and democratic as it is reflective, imprinting a multidisciplinary character on my activities, whether personal or collective. (...) I seize upon technical innovations in order to question and subvert them, within the framework of my own artistic projects and collective projects, research projects, and public, creative and playful cultural events, festivals in particular.»

According to Benoît Labourdette, society is marked by a phenomenon of “hyper-connectivity” to digital technology that is profoundly transforming modes of communication, creation and cultural consumption. The author places particular emphasis on the central role of screens in this society, which modify our relationship to time, space and memory, and highlights the paradoxes latently contained within our digital societies, simultaneously fostering individualism and interconnection, surveillance and openness, creation and consumption.

«We live in a society of words, and in a society of images. Citizens have become producers and distributors of their own images, in addition to being spectators. Images and their circulation are profoundly modifying the psychosocial dimension of our lives. Thus, in the fields of culture, social work and psychology, whether as mediators or as artists, I believe we have a duty to work with images, to have images worked on by audiences, to collectively rebuild a contemporary critical spirit.»

Nevertheless, according to Benoît Labourdette, digital technology imposes its use more than it invites debate, as it occupies an omnipresent place in our daily lives. Offering us a pragmatic vision of reality, the author invites us to consider it as a tool-medium forming an integral part of our culture, and invites us to retain power over the impact of our actions within society through its use and appropriation.

«Digital technology is not a subject (...) that would deserve us to position ourselves “for” or “against” it. It is in reality a living environment, in the same way as nature, air, borders, the economy, education… Digital technology must be taken into account as modifying the very conditions of life.»

Although at first glance, the pairing of digital technology and art seems to inspire a certain apprehension regarding the artistic limits of this encounter, Benoît Labourdette believes that the artistic interests of the image are perfectly compatible with digital technology, as this technology would push the creative boundaries of audiovisual work or traditional painting and explore new forms of expression by offering exponential possibilities for editing, assembling and manipulating images. This allows artists to create images that are not simply representations of reality, but artistic creations to be shared freely across the web…

«Photography, by virtue of the mechanical nature of its technical functioning, is for me a material of lived time, time of vision, time of poetry; Painting is the original material of plastic work, which connects intimately with photography (...) because it too contains the time of its gesture and its imagination (...).»

Digital technology also leads us to rethink the traditional challenges and opportunities of the cultural and creative industries. Indeed, young audiences tend to be more demanding and critical of the cultural offer presented to them. Benoît Labourdette highlights that young people do not simply want to consume cultural products, but rather seek authentic and relevant experiences that reflect their reality and point of view. Furthermore, according to the researcher, young people are now conscious of societal and environmental issues, and they seek to engage in projects that have a positive impact on the world. They are therefore more inclined to participate in cultural projects that have a social, political or environmental dimension into which digital technology can be integrated.

«The cultural offer is sometimes challenged in a brutal manner by “young” audiences. A questioning that manifests itself notably through indifference towards the prescriptions of cultural institutions (...). In order to be in a position to rethink projects adapted to the real needs of contemporary youth, which falls within the mission of cultural policies, I believe we must first deconstruct our preconceived ideas, the judgements we can hold without truly knowing. It is a matter of taking the full measure of new representations of the world and new cultural practices closely linked to digital technology.»

• How can the cultural sector engage with digital technology in its full depth, in terms of mediation and heritage construction?
• Who is an artist, in an era of democratised creation tools and, above all, distribution tools?
• What is the new place of artistic creation, in the dialectic between cultural democracy / cultural rights and digital tools / networks?

We invite you to browse his website or subscribe to his excellent newsletter to follow his projects and reflections on these subjects: benoitlabourdette.com

Café TMNlab with Benoît Labourdette

Benoît Labourdette will be the guest of the next Café TMNlab, this Thursday March 9, 2023 from 9am to 10am, to discuss the challenges of mediation in relation to youth in a context transformed by digital technology.

Full transcript of the speech

Café TMNLab — Exchange with Benoît Labourdette

Podcast of the meeting with Benoît Labourdette as part of the TMNLab café on March 9, 2023 (1h08’), at the invitation of Anne Le Gall.

Theme: innovative and agile working methods for the cultural sector, using digital tools, toward a change of posture and openness to the interests of audiences — young people in particular — moving toward genuine cultural democracy.

---

Introduction — Anne Le Gall

Thank you for joining us this morning for an exchange with Benoît Labourdette, who is kind enough to be with us. Today, we wanted to address questions of digital mediation, which are much discussed within the network, particularly through the Digital Mediation working group, who will also take the floor to explain how they operate. Those who don’t know the group yet can still join it.

These mediation questions are quite broad: sharing around the use of tools, different audiences, projects adopted, purely digital formats… And one of the questions that keeps coming back, as it always has, is the question of the relationship to youth. The digital question, when it was first addressed by the theater sector — very early on, particularly in communications — was somewhat used as a way of waving youth as an audience to be reached as quickly as possible through digital means, with a great lack of understanding of digital uses and youth practices more broadly. In any case, that was a common narrative, one we hear a bit less now, but which still comes back from time to time.

It also raises questions about the digital transformation of relational dynamics: the positioning between institutions, territories, and audiences. It truly raises the question of the role of institutions and the relationship they maintain with people. These are things you address in your work, in what we’ve been able to read on your website and in your publications.

I was already familiar with the work you do — I’ve been following your work for a long time. But also through your collaboration with the Observatoire des politiques culturelles, with whom we are close at TMNLab: last year you offered a first edition of a training course on “Culture, Youth, and Digital,” which you’re offering again this year. I found the way you present it quite interesting, particularly the phrases used to describe this training, which challenge our certainties and prejudices and try to shift them. I wanted to invite you so we could explore this topic together for an hour over coffee.

I’ll hand over to Claire or Marion just before we start, to introduce the Digital Mediation group and how it works.

Presentation of the Digital Mediation group — Claire

The Digital Mediation group was created about a year ago, maybe a little more, following a TMNLab café, with a group of professionals interested in these questions of live performance mediation through digital means.

Very quickly, we realized there wasn’t really a place to catalog initiatives, particularly in live performance. We found many more in other artistic fields, and a lot around communication but very little around mediation through digital means. We came up with what became a founding idea for the group: creating a collaborative tool to gather and categorize existing initiatives, identified gaps, and the tools that provide access to them.

Beyond that, the group also meets regularly. We’re a small working group of several people. We have Nathalie Dalmasso from Théâtre Massalia and Olivier Vandeputte from the Théâtre de Choisy-le-Roi. We try to move forward, and we also have moments when we meet, either as part of the TMNLab Café or in dedicated Digital Mediation Cafés. The next one is scheduled for April 13, and another in May.

Marion (addition)

In the group, there’s Olivier, Nathalie, Claire, and myself. Olivier just posted the link to the group’s page in the chat, where you’ll find the approach Claire just described and also the link to the collaborative tool. If you’d like to come to the next café, it will be on April 13.

---

Benoît Labourdette’s presentation

Thank you, Anne. Hello, everyone. I hope we’re going to have an interesting exchange — I’m certain of it.

Just as a preamble: these moments of exchange without any productivity stakes, but focused on substance — as you said, Anne, we’re somewhat formalizing the informal — seem very important to me, and I’m delighted to take part. These are also things I initiate and propose. In fact, in the next issue of the Observatoire des politiques culturelles review, coming out at the end of March, I’ve written an article on the question of how we address youth, titled “Changing Posture?”, which ends precisely with: “What can we do?” And I say: we need to do what we’re doing right now — taking time for open, pressure-free exchanges.

Where I’m speaking from

Let me introduce myself briefly: where I’m speaking from. I think it’s quite important — where we speak from — because our speech is deeply shaped by the position we occupy in the social space. And I’ve chosen — and continue to choose — to occupy several positions at once within the social space.

I’m an artist; that’s my primary activity. It’s audiovisual production, more museum-oriented than audiovisual in the traditional sense. And I’ve always worked within the field of live performance as well. So I have a multidisciplinary artistic practice. I chose long ago to make it multidisciplinary on the one hand, and on the other hand to pursue it in complete freedom — particularly freedom from the question of commissions. Often, when I’m offered residencies or similar things, I quite regularly turn them down because I don’t feel free enough in my movements or I find the expectations can be too strong. This isn’t a criticism at all, but simply, for me, the question of freedom in how I look at my own practice is quite crucial.

Beyond that, I organize cultural events. A long time ago — back in 2005, remember, 18 years ago — I founded the Pocket Films Festival with the Forum des images, a festival dedicated to films shot with mobile phones. The camera had appeared in mobile phones in December 2004. We created a cultural event to accompany the development of a technology that today is everywhere and has changed a great deal in sociological, psychological terms, and also in relation to cultural projects. The Covid lockdowns made us use these tools even more. And as with any violent situation imposed on human beings, we can draw something from it.

What I want to say about this is that at the time, there was of course quite a lot of rejection, of judgment: “What do you mean, films shot with a mobile phone? That’s nonsense. Cinema isn’t that.” And my position — and this is where I speak of freedom — was to say: there’s nothing to judge here. Simply, let’s realize that in 10 years — from 2005, in 10 years, by 2015 — everyone will have a camera permanently in their pocket. It will become a social fact.

I believe this question of openness to what is going to happen, of how we are shaken up, transformed, seemed quite important to address, at the same time as the technology was developing with purely commercial stakes. We were actually partnered with SFR, so the position we were in was terrible. But it becomes a social fact. And what uses can we produce from it? How, starting from this project that has nothing laudable about it but becomes a fact imposed upon us — what do we do with it?

This posture — I’m telling you about the Pocket Films Festival, but I’ve created many other cultural events — is always more or less my posture. I work with drones, with virtual reality. Right now, there’s artificial intelligence, much discussed, and I work a lot with it. I also work a lot with TikTok, which for me is truly the major social network of today in terms of its uses, the sheer volume of uses. What happens there is extremely singular; it doesn’t resemble any other social network. It’s absolutely fascinating. And precisely, there’s no need to say “it’s good” or “it’s bad.” It exists. Do we choose to do something with it, at least to take an interest in it and see where it challenges us? Or do we, from the outside, treat it as something bad without even having tried to understand it?

And then, I’m very much involved in transmission, in pedagogy, in professional exchanges — what we call continuing professional development. But I position it more as spaces for exchange than as top-down spaces where I would somehow be better than others. No, I don’t believe that. I believe I have a certain curiosity and perhaps a skill for organizing spaces for exchange. That’s more how I see my role.

To finish this introduction: I’ve also been working for about ten years on supporting public policy. For example, I’m just finishing a four-year sequence with the cultural affairs department of a city, Les Lilas, where we really worked on experimenting with things, running trainings, imagining new mediation strategies, to try to build something on the question of digital and youth. I can work with local authorities or organizations on support initiatives. That’s my multidisciplinary practice: I speak from several places at once. And that’s what I find interesting to do.

The “Culture, Youth, and Digital” training with the Observatoire des politiques culturelles

The reference point you mentioned, Anne: this “Culture, Youth, and Digital” training offered by the Observatoire des politiques culturelles. I’ve been working with the OPC for a long time on trainings and also on some support initiatives. There was a training called “Culture and Youth Workshops,” lasting 5 days, to which I contributed — I was “the digital guy,” so to speak. Last year, they chose to evolve it: renaming it “Culture, Youth, and Digital” and changing the format. This training took place last year, so I can assess it, and it will take place again this year — registration is closed, it starts in two weeks, at the end of March.

It’s a training conducted entirely by video conference, lasting three days with one day per week over three weeks, with tasks to complete before the first day and between each session. For me, it was a deliberate and intentional choice to do this training by video. We could have done it in person, but I chose to take on that challenge.

I believe that in trainings, when you participate, there are the moments when trainers convey knowledge, in a more or less participatory way. But that’s not all: there are all the informal moments — when people meet, exchange — which are in my view just as constructive as the more traditional transmission moments. When you’re in a video conference, where is that informal space? It doesn’t exist. So, how do you ensure that, with this remote setup — which does enable certain things, notably having three one-day sessions over three weeks rather than five days in one week, which allows you to reach people who couldn’t have freed up five days, and budget-wise, it costs less — how do you ensure that among the participants, there can be exchanges that are rich enough and truly constructive? That it’s not just me talking for three days.

The in-venue experience is not the only experience

There’s a very important issue for me here. We have this received idea in the cultural field that a cultural event, ideally, is when people are physically present together, and that if we achieve that, it’s the pinnacle. And that ultimately, we’ll use digital, but the goal is ultimately to have this embodiment, this sharing of physical presence, and that everything else is just a substitute.

You see it, for example, in the discourse of cinema exhibitors, who say there’s nothing better than a screening in a cinema. I completely disagree with this idea. It’s not true that there’s nothing better than seeing a film in a cinema. It’s wonderful to see a film in a cinema. I conducted a four-year action-research project in Île-de-France on teenagers and cinemas, with numerous exhibitors. I work constantly with cinemas; I’m in favor of cinemas, let’s be clear. But I believe that the experience of watching a film in a cinema is one cinema experience among others. Watching a film on your phone can be a magnificent experience. It’s a different experience.

I’m actually a strong advocate of audiovisual piracy, because it enables access to cultural content. If you position yourself from the standpoint of culture rather than commerce, it’s not the same thing. There’s a confusion skillfully manufactured by the culture industries to make us believe that their commerce is culture. No. Culture is an anthropological fact, and that’s what we connect to, it seems to me, when we’re funded by the common good.

In practices, particularly the practices of young people on social networks and the practices of accessing culture through digital networks, what happens there is not a substitute for what happens in physical life. Very important things take place: people discover works, they’re in relation with one another, they sometimes even find their life partner through digital networks. There’s nothing to judge in any of this.

A training design that mirrors its own subject

To connect all this back to the training: I thought it could be interesting, within the very design of the professional training, to see whether, in a digital format, without physical presence, among people who aren’t avid users of these tools and who tend to have a negative view of remote exchanges, it’s possible for something meaningful to happen. I’m putting one of the training’s subjects in abyme, within the very design of the training itself.

What we did: each day is divided into six one-hour sequences, each with a very precise theme, with 15-minute breaks between each hour. You’re not in a daylong tunnel: you can visualize what’s coming, prepare yourself. There’s the psychosociology of digital, the sociology of youth, various themes, spread across three phases: a first day focused more on knowledge, a second on methods, and a third on projects and their evaluation.

In each of these one-hour sequences, here’s how it works. I start by giving a 15-to-20-minute presentation on the topic, with many examples. I use my hands a lot: I have a camera and can write things, show books, quotes. I use the tools a bit so there’s also some embodiment.

After that, we have a brainstorming moment where I take notes orally in mind mapping format based on everyone’s contributions, for 5 to 10 minutes maximum. And then, I set up a collaborative writing process: a simple-to-use website, using the open-source tool SPIP, widely used in France by museums, city halls, the CNRS, Télérama, etc.

We have the theme that’s been addressed and discussed, and for 15 minutes, each person on their computer writes something structured in three parts: first, what they retained from what was said, what seems important to them; second, questions or disagreements — we have the right to disagree, it’s essential in a democracy; third, proposals for contributions, because there may be people who know far more than I do on a given subject and have things to offer, and in oral exchange there’s no time for that.

For 15 minutes, everyone writes, and then we take a moment to read each other’s contributions. With 16 people — we had 16 participants last year, and we’ll have 16 again this year — from the very first hour, it was very impressive: there was a remarkable richness of contributions and mutual enrichment. We do this six times a day for three days, and what it produces is an extremely rich shared resource, with knowledge, methods, project examples, and evaluation methods. All of this can be very concrete.

---

Discussion

Anne Le Gall — On sharing the training resources

I have a question about what you produce within the framework of this training. It’s of great interest to us. Is it something accessible, or is it reserved for training participants?

Benoît Labourdette

Since it’s a synthesis contextualized within the training, it’s not something we’ve made public. It’s training content. I’m questioning this myself. I’ll send you the link since we share this space — there’s no secret in it. But since it’s contextualized, it hasn’t been editorialized for people other than participants, so I’m not sure it fully works as a public resource. However, what circulates on social media to prepare for the next training are things that were extracted and shared from this training.

Anne Le Gall — On digital/physical hybridization and youth

What I also observe is that the training’s design approach carries its own subject within it: we’re not in a virtual space versus a real space, but in a continuation of life. Our practices are completely intertwined. I find this return of the hand in this digital vision quite interesting. We could see, at the NFT Paris fair last week, startups offering to print NFTs: something that’s always in this back-and-forth between digital and physical. Are these things you observe as well? This question of the back-and-forth? Or is there a stronger shift toward the digital and dematerialization among younger people?

Benoît Labourdette — Hybridization is a fact, not a proposal to mimic

I believe there’s a total hybridization. For me, there’s no longer a separation between a digital space and a physical space. Even between us, we can send each other a text message then meet up, and all of that feels absolutely fluid to us. These are different modalities: we can send an email, make a call… I believe it’s simply fluid now, in sociological analysis.

The question is rather: how do we take this into account in our practices and in our cultural offerings? Not to mimic them, nor to do what people already do. This is something I’m quite clear about: sometimes there’s a somewhat demagogic rush forward — “young people are there, so let’s offer them something where they already are.” No. What will actually interest them is that we offer them something different. But with an awareness of practices.

Proposing to do things on social networks used by young people — I don’t find that necessarily relevant, because they’re already there, it’s their space. It’s interesting for us to understand what they experience there. And the way to understand is to ask them. You don’t need to read Michel Desmurget’s La Fabrique du crétin digital — he’s the one who’s mistaken, in my view, in saying such things. You need to talk to the people you’re interested in. It’s easy to say but not so easy to do, because it shifts us enormously: our preconceptions explode when we truly talk to people. It’s fascinating, but potentially very destabilizing.

So yes, there’s this observation of hybridization, but then, what do we do with it? I find that creating somewhat mimetic projects isn’t necessarily compelling.

Benoît Labourdette — The Les Lilas example: neighborhood memory and digital heritage

I’ll give an example of something I did last year in Les Lilas. We offered people the opportunity to make films. I work a lot on the question of neighborhood memory, the question of digital heritage, which for me is a very important issue. Where do we store this data? What value do we give to these productions? If we put these videos on YouTube, these photos on Google, we’re in my view completely wrong: we’re outsourcing to industrials who have nothing to do with our concerns. We need to know where our data is, build a digital heritage, and give ourselves the means to implement it. The question of territorial narrative is history, identity, culture.

So, in a neighborhood in Les Lilas, we offered people the opportunity to make films in the street: we lent them cameras, they made films from photographs about the neighborhood’s memory. The films were uploaded progressively to a specific video platform — not to a city YouTube channel, but to a video platform where we know where the data is, where we can retrieve it for screening in a cinema, etc. Participants were able to share with others the videos they’d made, and this ability to share meant that an enormous number of people came to the in-person screening.

The kind of belief that says “people will come to discover the films, they mustn’t see them beforehand”: that’s false. You don’t go to the cinema to discover a film. You go to the cinema to have a social experience, of which perhaps discovering a film is a part. But we love going to the cinema to rewatch a film we love: for example, the Rocky Horror Picture Show, screened in Paris since 1975 every Friday and Saturday night. It’s a social experience. The fact of using digital to share — people had made a film, they could share it with their circle — made them want even more to come and share the experience, to be together to see these films on a big screen.

A very simple example of using this hybridization. Simple to describe, but in practice it takes work — it’s not easy.

Claire — Is human presence still essential?

There are things that resonate a great deal. The idea that we need to take ownership of digital so that it’s not only the big commercial platforms that do so, and that culture is present there in a rich and diverse way — I’m convinced of that. There are places where it creates friction, because in what you address, we’re sometimes in a constant battle: we say we don’t make judgments, it seems obvious, and yet we do it constantly, because we’re in a system where programming is still the responsibility of a person recognized for it, and that’s how it’s funded and institutionalized.

My question was more this: I can see that in the training concept, everything can happen digitally on a subject that deals with the digital. However, I’ve also seen that in many of the projects you lead, physical presence remains necessary for mediation. Is the human, at some point, still essential for it to work?

Benoît Labourdette — Digital in service of a more embodied presence

For the OPC training, it’s a choice for three days of training to do it this way. It’s not to say that all trainings should be done remotely. I do a lot of in-person trainings too. I’m in favor of embodied presence, but you can also do things without embodied presence, or in complementarity. I don’t set them in opposition.

I’ll give another example, from a project I did very recently in Villejuif. It was also about the memory of a neighborhood undergoing urban renewal. We offered people the opportunity beforehand to take photos of the neighborhood themselves, and we printed those photos. Then we proposed that people cut everything up and make films from paper cutouts. I provided a tool based on a QR code: by scanning it, people could publish their own photos. I was very surprised by the quantity of photos taken beforehand. The films were then made from the photos people had taken.

Physical presence was absolutely essential, but the remote digital tool allowed for building an even more embodied presence, because we had images made by the people. I presented the project to the Villejuif city council two weeks ago: we distributed this QR code to the elected officials. The same QR code contained the photos taken beforehand by participants, the documentation of the workshop — the filming with the camera, the paper cutouts —, the documentation photos taken by the participants themselves, and the completed films.

This digital mediation tool enabled three things: first, building the heritage that was used to make the films; second, documenting the action; and third, distributing the films. All from a single digital tool. And it’s not on Google: it’s on my own servers, I keep them.

I don’t have a clear-cut answer to your question. I agree on the substance: being together is wonderful.

Claire

It’s just that we need to be uninhibited about all of this.

Benoît Labourdette — It’s work, not a shortcut

Exactly. And also, daring. On this point, I have a fairly clear message: digital means tools, of course, it’s a living environment, and the industrials want us to believe it’s easy, that it should be immediate. But no, it’s work. If it’s immediate, it means we’re the object: it’s not us choosing our method, it’s others choosing it for us. It requires work, attention, training, budget, time. That’s the price of using it well.

There’s a lot of confusion between personal practices and professional practices. Our personal practices with digital — we do what we want. But as professionals, in professional practices, you have to work. When I see, for example, in the cultural field, people taking photos, posting them on Facebook — perfectly good photos, to document their activities — but who don’t even think to copy them to their own documents, their own hard drive… In 5 years, in 10 years, when you want to do an assessment, where are the photos? On Facebook. No. We’re professionals: if we take photos to document our activities, we don’t put them only on social networks. You have to build your own heritage. It’s work, and it’s worth it.

Olivier Vandeputte — The question of participant engagement

I had a question following up on what Claire was saying and the examples given. A question about participant engagement. Each time, we have people who commit: we tell them “take photos of your neighborhood,” etc. We went through a project this season with a video artist — which raises the question of the role he played, since he’s the one making the films, which is somewhat different. We dealt with the question of gastronomic and culinary heritage: the idea was that around a recipe, we asked people to share it, to cook it live, it was filmed, and above all it was an opportunity to talk, to speak about one’s roots, about oneself, about one’s neighborhood. It’s a project that’s actually very complex in terms of engagement: people probably got scared of the camera, even though everything was done with great care. It’s not really a question, it’s a remark on this question of engagement. I’m wondering whether in your projects, what changes things is the fact that you make people the actors: they’re the ones taking the photos, the videos.

Benoît Labourdette — Cultural rights, cultural democracy, and making room for the other

Thank you for that remark, Olivier. Behind what you’re saying is the question of participation, if not cooperation. These are truly cultural rights, a subject I work on extensively. The respect for each person’s right to expression and culture, the place we give to each person’s culture, and the spaces we open so that people recognize the value of their own culture, their own knowledge.

That an exchange, a sharing with artists, can take place: that’s the whole difference between cultural democratization — which comes from above — and cultural democracy — where we enrich one another. This is absolutely not destabilizing for artists; on the contrary. They simply choose, perhaps, to be sincerely transformed by the exchanges they will have.

On this question of engagement: people say that others struggle to participate, that they’re not very engaged. For example, in Villejuif, there was a young man passionate about computers, completely disconnected from school, who became fascinated by the tool. He’s the one who did the mediation, who managed the computer, and it was wonderful. He had planned to come back the next time: he didn’t come back. I knew he might not return. And there’s no judgment to make about that. I don’t know his life, I don’t know his constraints. On the other hand, the fact that he left with the QR code — I made sure he had the link bookmarked in his phone to the space where we were sharing things —, whether he came back or not, he had the means to connect to what others had done.

In my projects, I try to give people a real expressive role. The injunction “it has to be a good film”: in terms of mediation, that’s of no interest to me whatsoever. I make my own films separately. And there’s a confusion that needs to be clarified: am I an artist-director making my own films? Or am I an artist with my artistic background who goes out to meet people, to do mediation? These are not the same thing. My entire artistic journey enters the dialogue, but what matters is the people’s place. The film is just a tool.

On the question of participation, I try to take into account that yes, perhaps people have little time to participate. How, in my mediation design and with digital, do I ensure that in this limited time — which is all they can give, and there’s no judgment to be made about that — something happens that is as enriching as possible for everyone, and that can last over time.

Benoît Labourdette — The drone example in a housing project

I’ve done a lot of things in Choisy-le-Roi as well, in the Navigateurs neighborhood, for years. To give you an idea: the first time I intervened, in 2016, it was “we’re going to have young people make films in the housing project.” But the young people couldn’t care less about making films — they have other concerns. It makes no sense to propose that; it’s just to reassure us.

I said no. I’m going to do something very simple: I’ll bring a drone, set myself up, and fly the drone in the middle of the housing project. I can assure you that five minutes later, twenty kids were there: “What’s that? The drone!” And what do I do? I take the drone’s remote control and put it directly in a kid’s hands. He finds himself with something very impressive — the drone goes fast, it crashes into walls… He finds himself bearing a real responsibility. I accept that yes, the drone will get broken, lost under a roof, etc. But we’ll repair it together. I choose the drone that isn’t dangerous, the drone that’s easy to repair.

My goal isn’t to make a drone film about the neighborhood. It’s: how can I hand over the controls, and what are we going to do together from there? What we did: we made short single-take films, went into the community center room, watched these films, and did a live sound design for them. Then the QR code was sent out. Some people spent only half an hour at the workshop. They couldn’t have dedicated more time. But I feel I did my job. That’s really my approach.

Marion — Reaching young people, creating connections, and the TikTok question

I relate to much of what Benoît says, particularly on questions of cultural rights, participatory projects, and on the question of digital as both tool and issue, without opposing in-person and remote.

What challenges me is that there can be a temptation to consider the creativity on TikTok, the feeling of a very large audience on social networks if you manage to use the algorithms well. We have a discoverability challenge that isn’t just mediation per se, but that we in cultural venues try to articulate with mediation projects. The projects you describe are really projects like the ones we do without digital, except there’s also a digital dimension. They’re mediation projects, territorial projects, etc. They’re very time-consuming, costly projects that require significant investment, and we already do a lot of them in our venues.

Where it creates friction is that we’d like — several of us are thinking about this — to try to find, I’m really talking about the youngest, the 15-to-20 age group, ways to create connections with young people with whom we’re not necessarily engaged in a project, and to propose that they create or co-create content that has an impact within their own network, and that this helps us connect with the young people in the territories where we’re based. We really encounter a lot of difficulties with this. I heard in what you were saying that you were almost saying: “There’s no point in trying.” And we’re asking ourselves: do we go for it or not? Particularly on TikTok, which really is one of the places of creativity and growth. We all ask ourselves: what do we do with this big thing?

Benoît Labourdette — On TikTok and the question of listening

To answer you, Marion, there are several things. I’ll tell you a bit about TikTok and how I approach it. I started by running workshops at La Fémis several years ago with TikTok — because after all, La Fémis, a film school… You may know this, but the head of partnerships at TikTok France is none other than Éric Garandeau, who was previously the president of the Centre national du cinéma, and who asked me in 2011 to create what is now called the Fête du court métrage. This national event, I founded it with Isabelle Massy at the request of the CNC. That’s quite telling.

On TikTok: I’ve run workshops with young people recently, in Normandy, over five separate days. I don’t use the TikTok network as such. I run a mediation project where we produce content — videos, photos —, share it, etc. And we use the TikTok app. But the young people absolutely do not want to post on their TikTok account the videos we make in our institutional context. They don’t want to. The students at La Fémis didn’t want to either. However, TikTok is an incredible creation tool, with absolutely amazing editing capabilities. It’s Jean-Luc Godard’s dream, actually, TikTok: in everything he wrote about what the ideal tool for making cinema would be, that’s really it, in purely technical terms.

The application contains wonderful creation tools. We use the application to create, and the skill that some young people have in using this application serves to create other things — things that won’t be posted on TikTok. I didn’t know this at first. Initially, I had a very negative view of TikTok: I’d even given two lectures about it, because I was seeing appalling videos of the hyper-sexualization of young girls. And then, gradually, I understood that there was much more to it than that, and that, as in any space, there are good things and bad things. Once again, it’s about what you do with it.

Benoît Labourdette — Not forcing: a question of pedagogy

On the question of how to offer things to young people and how to create connections: I think you can’t force it. These are truly questions of educational pedagogy. I’m quite informed by psychoanalysis, particularly Alice Miller, on the question of educational violence, which is somewhat the norm in the French national education system — to put it briefly, we’re in systems modeled on carceral principles. In networks and in cultural activities, young people try to have spaces of freedom where they’re not forced to do things they didn’t choose to do.

We can be perceived by young people as extensions of school. Because we’re going to force them to go see shows, to go to the cinema. Yes, they’re forced. Let’s be honest in our potential listening to what they experience. There was a study done 12 years ago by Tomas Legon on the reception of the “Lycéens au cinéma” program in the Rhône-Alpes region. What we see in his study — a study among young people — is that this program, for the target audiences, doesn’t serve its purpose. The study is poorly received at the CNC. Why doesn’t it work for these audiences? Because those whose parents are teachers are very happy to go to the cinema, but they’re not the ones targeted by the program. The program targets cultural democratization — the others, those who presumably wouldn’t have access to these “good films.” And those people experience these situations as constraints. They’re completely cut off from receiving these films, because they experience them as compulsory things, programs in which they receive no listening to their own taste. And so they shut down. And they’re right, it seems to me: we don’t listen to them, we consider them as uncultured people to whom we’re going to bring the right culture. No, that’s not what humanity is.

We shouldn’t try to force people or bring them “the right things.” It’s rather: what do I put out there to share? How do I come to listen? How do I share something where there’s an openness to the other’s place? And how, for me, what I produce isn’t the final object — the film — but the lived experience, shared by the people?

With what we call user experience, UX design, this is precisely what the web industrials work on: the individual experience. And I think we can draw inspiration from it. How do we create setups where we come to share our culture and where there’s an openness, a place given to the other? I have so many things to imagine and share — I’m not the only one imagining them —, I don’t know what the right setups are. What I do know is that everything can be imagined.

In fact, in Villejuif, for the screening on January 14, we had planned something, but I knew that potentially it wouldn’t work. So I’d brought extra equipment. And in fact, we completely changed the project on the spot: with the people who were there, we ended up creating a video installation in the room — we didn’t do at all what we’d planned. Giving yourself this capacity for agility, particularly at the technical level, to be able to potentially change with the people what you’re going to do — having this capacity, and not taking it as an ego thing —, we create together.

---

On evaluation

Anne Le Gall

You’ve mentioned evaluation many times, whether within the framework of the training or for public policy. It’s a topic that comes up often among us: we don’t always plan time for evaluation in a project. Yet we really need to objectify what we do in order to move forward.

Benoît Labourdette — Cross-referencing evaluations

I can tell you one thing about this. We rely heavily on quantitative evaluations that are staggeringly simplistic, let’s be honest. It’s easy to gather a crowd and say we had a crowd. It’s easy to fill venues with people who are obligated to be there and then put up numbers. But what happened? What are we evaluating in all that? We’re evaluating something other than a cultural fact, it seems to me.

The evaluation that has meaning is a qualitative evaluation. Receiving feedback from people is good, but in my view it’s extremely partial. Because between what people say in the moment and what it did for them in perhaps 5 years, 10 years, we have no idea. It’s extremely difficult to truly evaluate the impact of these activities.

However, there is one thing that’s interesting to evaluate: our own practices. Did I shift my position? In particular, the cultural rights framework is very useful for this. And it can’t be done alone — you need to be several people. Did I respect the right to diversity, the right to identity, etc.?

I think there’s a key to evaluation there, and that cultural rights are an excellent evaluation tool. I’m not saying we should reject quantitative evaluation, but it needs to be put in perspective. If, for example, 10 classes came to see a show and when they arrived in the lobby, they all got scolded by the staff because they were making noise — it’s important to evaluate that too. Cultural rights were not respected. There was a failure to work on how we welcome people, with just a normative response of scolding them for being noisy. That makes no sense, and it’s very important that it be evaluated.

For me, you need to cross-reference the qualitative evaluation of participants, the quantitative evaluation of participation, and the evaluation of professional practices through the lens of cultural rights.

---

Conclusion — Anne Le Gall

We’ll wrap up this exchange, which has been very rich. Thank you again, Benoît, for taking the time to share this space. It warrants a great deal of reflection. We’ll post a summary on the TMNLab website fairly quickly, so that people can listen again and find the key points of this exchange. With great pleasure for further exchanges, Benoît. See you soon.