Interview

3Marie-Hélène Tramus. Could you please define this notion of vicariance, which you consider as an essential strategy in our interaction with the outside world?

5Marie-Hélène Tramus. Is it possible to consider artistic creative processes as vicariant? In the same way, can we regard artistic creations as singularities arising from the subjectivity of an author, painter, filmmaker or writer, far from the universal laws? Does the notion of vicariance allow us to go beyond the traditional issue of reality versus illusion in arts?

7Marie-Hélène Tramus. Can’t we extend these multiple “realities” pertaining to the brain-body of earth’s varied species and their particular Umwelt to the worlds created by artists? Metaphorically speaking, can we regard the latter as a “variety” within our human species, which is capable of inventing singular worlds through this sensorimotor, perceptive and cognitive capacity of our interaction with the world?

8Alain Berthoz. Is the artist a special creature? We all are special creatures, this is the founding principle of vicariance. The association of epigenesis and experience makes the human being a truly unique creature. In my opinion, engineers are creators too. A plane is an improbable creation. Engineers also contribute to reconstructing the world in a different way, to making an original use of strengths and forms. In the same way, scientists and mathematicians look for and discover new concepts. The question remains as to what is specific to artists in these interactions between reality and illusion.

9Marie-Hélène Tramus. Can we affirm that artists are characterized by the fact that they focus their research on a kind of pleasure, related to a close attention to forms—be they gestural in dance, plastic in visual arts, acoustic in music, etc.?

10Alain Berthoz. I disagree with you when you say that artists essentially look for pleasure. Consider Nolde and the German expressionists for instance, who question the pleasure of form so much that they inspire anguish and horror (cf. Munch’s The Scream). They had foreseen the coming atrocities. The artist resorts to forms as much for pleasure, as to potentially express fear, anguish, horror, or any kind of emotion.

11Marie-Hélène Tramus. Indeed, but is this close attention to forms, and its resulting practice, what enables artists to create works likely to convey very diverse emotions?

12Alain Berthoz. Then, it would be interesting to reflect on the nature of what a form evokes—whether it is horror, anguish or pleasure. Following on from Dutch physicist Jan Koenderink’s work, we are currently working on the brain’s geometry with mathematician-geometrician Daniel Bennequin and Israeli mathematician and physiologist Tamar Flash. In my opinion, one of the essential questions currently being raised on perception is the following: what are the geometries of our brain? Which leads to another question: do artists—painters, sculptors, dancers—create shapes that correspond to the geometries in which our brain likes to operate?  

13This research is based on the generalization of the two-thirds power law, which links the curve of the trajectory to the tangential speed of the gestures that we make (as we walk or draw) and constrains perception. We are currently trying to go much further than describing the laws of natural motion, in order to understand these underlying geometries. Three years ago, we discovered that these laws of natural motion do not simply fall within Euclidean but also non-Euclidean geometry and we dedicated a publication to that discovery. The idea behind all this, on which we do not necessarily agree with mathematicians (this is a major debate), is that the geometries discovered by mathematicians correspond to geometries of the brain. When artists create shapes that are not necessarily Euclidean ones, they reveal the extraordinary fertility of the brain’s functioning, by expressing it in a space—I use this term on purpose—that is way more complex than the one we are used to, that we are taught in school and that is the Euclidean space.

14When Picasso would paint a portrait from various perspectives at once, he would simply show that our brain offers us the opportunity to change perspectives, through specialized or specific units allowing for the manipulation of these points of view. In other words, artists are discoverers of our brain’s functioning in a way. They escape the dominant cultural norm to reveal ways to grasp reality and above all, show our brain’s operating modes, the latter thus being vicariant in the sense that I used in my book, that is not only in the sense of the substitution of a function for another, or varieties of use, but also in the sense of a true ability to create new combinations.

16Alain Berthoz. It is the whole issue of the concept of shape, acoustic shape, etc. that is raised here. Nowadays, neurobiology essentially regards the brain as a system consisting of paired oscillators, a rather simplistic view, yet quite close to reality. It describes our brain as a set of oscillation generators covering frequencies ranging from fractions of a Hertz to hundreds of Hertz. Besides, these oscillating networks are collaborating, competing, echoing each other. This means that in our brain, the image of a painting is not a photocopy.

18The Nobel Prize for medicine has just been awarded to John O’Keefe, May-Britt and Edvard Moser for their work on the hippocampus. They have discovered in the entorhinal cortex the presence of neurons that code space according to a grid divided up in equilateral triangles (this is absolutely geometric). To explain this division, some of the current models suggest that these entorhinal cortex neurons receive oscillating activities from different frequencies. The interaction between these various oscillations would induce spatial patterns, as is the case with light interferences. So if we want to get to the bottom of things and understand what artists try to reveal to us, one should not content oneself with the mere idea of the appearance of shapes—a line drawn on paper, a dancer’s gesture, a melody—when using the word “shape.” Neurophysiologists draw our attention on the fact that complex mechanisms underlie these shapes.

20Alain Berthoz. Nowadays, the association of technology and creativity (not only the artists’ but also—and I insist on that point—the engineers’) has resulted in an amazing proliferation of virtual reality techniques, taking on traditional forms (such as video games played with joysticks or gamepads), or taking the body movements into account (in the exact same way as what you call performance art). These different virtual reality modes indeed resort to the vicariant properties of the brain, the versatility of which does not simply allow to enrich the representation of the world on a screen, but also to give people the impression that they are in another world.

21Marie-Hélène Tramus. How to achieve this illusion of being in another world?

23At present, an enthralling work is being carried out at the crossroads between digital arts and neurology, and even traditional clinical neurology, on this issue of our ability to project ourselves into an artificial creature. This work sheds light on the issue of the double, implying that we are essentially twofold. There is a twin version of our self that allows us to dream and carry out seemingly real activities while we dream. The brain does not need the outside world to create anything.

24On this issue, I am currently cooperating on three works. The first one, with Étienne Armand Amato and Étienne Péreny, focuses on an avatar that allows for the projection of oneself into the virtual world. The second one, with François Garnier from the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs, and psychiatrist Simon Lambrey, aims to understand what enables the projection into a virtual world, but also how the avatars are able to communicate with one another in the virtual worlds. François Garnier has designed virtual museums in which two people, each one in their own home, can project themselves through their personal avatars and discuss in front of a virtual painting. He was struck to see how people had the impression to be teleported. We will try to understand the factors conveying this impression of a social communication between the avatars in the virtual world. The third work also focuses on the issue of communication, and is conducted in cooperation with two young artists, Claire Sistach and Soizic Sanson, who immerse themselves in virtual worlds. Therefore, the link between neurology, psychiatry and digital arts on this issue of avatars is rewarding as far as the realities-illusion theme is concerned.

25These works are very interesting, not only because the youth of today spends hours in virtual worlds creating one or even several avatar(s) to play, but also because these practices now spread to the world of work. There are virtual factories, in which people make their avatars work. Virtual universities are being developed. I would like to emphasize the importance of conducting researches on virtual worlds, firstly because of their consequences in the field of psychiatry, since they can be used for entertainment or mediation purposes, but also because they can serve propaganda, as we are witnessing today, with risks of manipulation likely to induce fanaticism.

26Marie-Hélène Tramus. There is this double, the avatar, in which we project ourselves, allowing for our immersion in virtual worlds. There are these doubles, the avatars allowing us to “telecommunicate” by gathering us in the virtual world, as if we were really there. Finally, there is this artificial “other,” who would be endowed with behavioural independence. In this perspective, you give the example of humanoid robot HRP2, which uses its legs to go grab an object that is initially out of its range, without the use of its legs for that purpose being explicitly programmed. In your opinion, what is the prospect of these researches?

27Alain Berthoz. Together with his robotics team, Jean-Paul Laumond—who held the technological innovation chair at the Collège de France for a year—has designed this robot capable of finding a vicariant solution. In this case, it is a typical functional vicariance. In the field of the re-education of neurological disorders, one presently tends to use robots, but this poses a problem, as these robots are programmed and often train patients to the function planned by the robot. In this way, one tries to fix the damaged function, while a good re-education robot would in fact give the patient’s brain the possibility to find a vicariant solution that is not included in its re-education program, just like this humanoid does.