Think and make like a dune

The 7th speculative exploration workshop in partnership with ENSCI, organised by Nathalie Guimbretière, postdoctoral researcher at House for potential humanities (MHP), and Emmanuel Ducurneau, postdoctoral researcher at Laboratory of Ethnology and Comparative Sociology (LESC – CNRS/University of Paris Nanterre) for the AS1 project, will explore experimental and visualization devices related to sand granularity.

Sand is a weird, almost unimaginable substance. Depending on the conditions, it behaves alternately as a load-bearing solid, a flowing liquid, or a gas of suspended particles. It is everywhere and yet almost invisible: the second most used material by humanity after water, it permeates our cities, our roads, our screens, and mostly the objects of our daily lives.
For the past eighteen months, at the House for Potential Humanities, we have chosen to take sand seriously—not as a mere resource, but as a partner in thought and experimentation. We have assigned it various roles within our house: a silent critic of the geological footprint of our activities and a revealer of the planetary transformations we produce; a source of inspiration, capable of suggesting alternative ways of thinking, writing, and creating; and now, a field of technical exploration.
Our first experiment with sand fluidization opens a new horizon: the one of robotics inspired by granular media, where action no longer arises from rigid mechanisms but from the collective movement of particles. Between art and science, we are exploring what sand can teach us—and perhaps what our technologies could become if they learned to think like a dune.

Programme for the afternoon:

• 3pm | Welcome
• 3pm15 – 3pm30 | Introduction: From sablocene to granular fluidization as robotic actuation.
  Emmanuel Ducourneau
• 3pm30 – 5pm30 | Masterclass: Experimenting with sand fluidization.
  Patrick Augustin & LPCA and MTE ULCO group teams
• 5pm30 – 6pm | Show: Slam(s)able.
  Nathalie Guimbretière & Emmanuel Ducourneau
• 6pm | Cocktail
• 7pm | End

Concept of the speculative exploration workshops

These open-ended workshops aim to explore avenues related, directly or indirectly, to the future of our technologies and their social, philosophical, and cultural implications. These workshops are open to everyone, in addition to researchers from the PEPR O2R research group and students from affiliated art and design schools.

Note: It is not necessary to have participated in the earlier sessions to attend this one.

Is hardness always rigid? Is softness necessarily soft? Is fluidity necessarily liquid? Should we persist in solidifying everything, or on the contrary, strive to liquefy everything? What urgently needs to be made softer? At what point do we cross into the realm of the weird? How do we distinguish between the persistence of hardness, the promises of softness or viscosity, and the risks of the weird?

This workshop explores and develops the visual imagination of the hard, the soft, and the weird, in engineering, design, science fiction, and far beyond, in all their forms and states, without creative or disciplinary limits. Through performative readings of texts, viewings of cinematic, literary, or choreographic works, the creation of experiments and scenarios, and meetings with artisans, artists, designers, researchers, and experimenters who explore the properties of the transient states of matter, whatever its nature. For its second year, the MHP will offer regular sessions in the form of debates and explorations of matter.