SOCIN’ 25 - Mapping Memories
Samuel Szoniecky 
Elen Riot
Khaldoun Zreik
Imad Saleh
SOCIN 2025 - Rethinking Innovation : Inclusive Practices and Interdisciplinary Perspectives
September 23-25, 2025 Macerata, Italy
Mapping Memories for an Archeology of Creations at Paris 8: Designing a Digital Environment for Capturing Memories and Exploring Memorial Narratives
Presentation
Abstract
The Vincennes experimental center has been the subject of several publications (Soulié 2012; Merlin et al. 1979; Merlin 1980; Ohayon 2022; Grésillon et al. 2021), a thesis (Dormoy-Rajramanan 2014), a documentary film (Sluys et al. 2018), a radio broadcast (Mauduit, n.d.)… After its relocation to the university in Saint-Denis, the center continued its activities. However, this continuation remains much less documented and seems neglected to this day: it is as if Vincennes only lived through the memory of the 68s. The objective of this research is therefore to explore the memory of the actors of this experimental project since then, from generation to generation, from Franck Popper (Nechvatal 2004) to the present day, passing through Jean-Pierre Balpe, Marie-Hélène Tramus and Jean-Louis Boissier, moving beyond the walls in time and space (Riot 2009). Our focus is on the field of digital creation (Eymet 2016) which, through disciplines not yet taught at the university in the 80s such as hypermedia and artificial intelligence, forges (Citton 2010) a path in the academic sphere until today even as Paris 8 proclaims itself “the university of creations”.
We conceive this project in an exploratory and interdisciplinary approach that aims to develop an editorial environment by collecting traces and cross-referencing points of view.
We have shown how this type of editorial approach oscillates between a desire to express formally interoperable facts to build a logical argument and that of a more intuitive expression driven by creative inspiration and going through expressiveness and emotions (Szoniecky 2019). In the project we are dealing with here, these two modes of editorialization are combined through mapping, a formal exercise, and the memory expressed in situ in an intuitive way. Thus, the edited contents are interoperable without constraining the spontaneity of the testimonies.
Another very important point is the role of human intelligence in connection with artificial intelligence (Andler, 2023) which can bring about collective intelligence (Lévy 2011; Surowiecki 2008), an ethics of discussion (Habermas 2013) and ecologically responsible uses (Lefevre et al. 2023) if the collective construction of common issues guides practices.
A first version of this editorial environment will have been tested during the colloquium dedicated to the work of Jean-Pierre Balpe on June 12 and 13, 2025 (https://balpe2025.sciencesconf.org/). It will be based on a digital device called “Freloche” which stages the analogy of the garden and butterfly hunting to stimulate the memorial reactions of the colloquium participants with images from digitized collections, notably those of Paris 8 (https://octaviana.fr/). The objective is to initiate a dialogue through time (mellification) which takes several forms: focus groups, individual interviews. We wish to experiment with a new version of this environment by exploring this time the movement through space (pollination), during the SOCIN 2025 “Rethinking Innovation” conference to broaden the network of actors and the potential for expressing a common memory.