Chaire à vif 2026
Chaire à vif 2026
The ecology of the mind in the age of artificial intelligence: machines, memories and powers
CHAIRE À VIF is an open chair at La Cambre, consisting of a series of lectures throughout the academic year. Each edition is entrusted to a European personality who stands out in the artistic, academic, societal or scientific fields, thus offering a space for critical and creative reflection at the heart of the institution.
Led by Anne Alombert and artist-researcher Judith Deschamps, the next series of lectures analyses the metamorphoses of our minds in the age of digital technologies, from Plato's allegory of the cave to generative artificial intelligence. These devices reorganise our memories, our attention and our symbolic environments, proving to be both remedy and poison, instruments of emancipation and vectors of fragility. Philosophy, media history and artistic research and creation come together to rethink these technologies, not as mere prostheses of the mind, but as sensitive partners revealing our vulnerabilities and the richness of our collective imaginations.
Wednesday, 2 February 2026
The ecology of attention in the digital environment: artificial caves and media archaeology
Anne Alombert
In his famous allegory of the cave, Plato already evoked the power of fascination and the risks of manipulation inherent in artificial images. Since ancient Greece, our artificial caves have continued to evolve, transforming our memories and imaginations, blurring the lines between reality and fiction. In the contemporary digital cave, new powers are emerging: those of the digital giants who capture our attention and influence our behaviour through ‘persuasive technologies’ and recommendation algorithms.
What becomes of the life of the mind in this new artificial environment? How do digital media affect our attention, reflection and memory? What are the political consequences of the digitisation of our public spaces and symbolic environments? We will attempt to answer these questions by comparing philosophical analyses with contemporary issues.
Wednesday, 18 February 2026
Pharmacology of artificial intelligence: psychological and political issues surrounding digital automata
Anne Alombert
In the famous dialogue Phaedrus, Plato questions the pharmacological dimension of alphabetic writing, which was spreading throughout Greek society: writing made it possible to increase the amount of knowledge preserved, but citizens also risked no longer practising their living memories, no longer interpreting and renewing knowledge, and allowing themselves to be seduced by the discourses of the Sophists. These three risks are being replayed in the context of “generative artificial intelligence”, to which we are delegating our powers of expression: probabilistic calculations risk standardising our symbolic environments, and ideological biases risk influencing the ways we speak and think.
How do these new linguistic machines affect our ability to write, think and connect? What exactly are we doing when we interact with a chatbot that simulates otherness? Will we still be able to believe what we see, read and hear when the majority of content is automatically generated? We will attempt to answer these questions by drawing on the history of philosophy and contemporary research on these unprecedented phenomena.
Wednesday, 8 April 2026
AI at the end of life: technology, finitude, sublimation and melancholy
Judith Deschamps (in discussion with Anne Alombert)
During this session, Judith Deschamps, artist and doctor at EUR ArTeC, will present her research and creative work carried out as part of her thesis entitled ‘AI at the end of life: towards a resubjectivation through the machinic’: this presentation will be followed by a discussion with Anne Alombert and then with the audience.
Contrary to transhumanist and techno-solutionist ideologies and their ableist imagination, which swear by augmentation, power and immortality, Judith Deschamps' research-creations invite us to test our bodies and our finitude in a reinvented relationship with digital technologies, which are not to be compared, but rather reappropriated through practices that are at once manual, sensory and memorial.
Through two artistic and collective projects, Judith Deschamps explores how the experience of puberty by soprano children and that of old age by people living in nursing homes can help us rethink our relationship with artificial intelligence and sublimate our relationship with finitude and mortality.
Between childhood and old age, incompleteness and completeness, incarnation and disincarnation, to generate new forms of relationship with AI, not in spite of our/its limitations, but through them.