Audio episodes drawn from François Giard’s writing on images, technics, attention and AI. Each episode is available in English and in French thanks to generative voice technologies.
Episode 1
Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media to Understand Societies.
Think about the last time you used your phone. You may remember what you read, watched or wrote. But did you ask yourself what that phone was doing to you? More than sixty years ago, a Canadian literature professor argued that this is the only question that really matters. What transforms us, he said, is not the messages. It is the media themselves.
Based on the chapter on Marshall McLuhan in Les penseurs de l’image (ICONEMIA, 2026).
Episode 2
Walter Benjamin
The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.
Every year, millions of people line up at the Louvre to catch a glimpse of the Mona Lisa, behind glass, for a few seconds. And yet they could see it in very high definition on their phones, for free, without leaving home. So why do they make the trip? Almost a century ago, a German philosopher proposed an answer to this riddle. And his answer helps us understand today what is happening to images that machines can generate without end.
Based on the chapter on Walter Benjamin in Les penseurs de l’image (ICONEMIA, 2026).
Episode 3
Sherry Turkle
Digital identity and artificial attachment.
More and more people are confiding their sorrows to an artificial intelligence. They talk to it at night, when no one else is answering. And they feel heard. Fifteen years ago, long before these apps existed, a researcher at M.I.T. had already described this phenomenon. Her name is Sherry Turkle. And she understood something we are only beginning to grasp: the problem is not that machines are becoming human. The problem is that we are declaring ourselves ready to settle for them. So, why do our machines make us lonelier?
Based on the chapter on Sherry Turkle in Les penseurs de l’image. Tome 1 · L’image et le regard (ICONEMIA, 2026).
Episode 4
Donna Haraway
Cyborg Vision, Situated Knowledges, and the Ecology of Machines.
When an artificial intelligence makes an image, where is it looking from? The question sounds strange. We have grown used to believing that machines see the world as it is: without a body, without a history, without prejudice. One American philosopher devoted much of her work to taking that belief apart. For her, no one sees from nowhere. Not even a machine.
Based on the chapter on Donna Haraway in Les penseurs de l’image (ICONEMIA, 2026).
Episode 5
Laura Mulvey
The Pleasure of Looking: Cinema, the Male Gaze, and the Politics of Looking.
Open any app on your phone. Before you have even searched for anything, images are waiting for you. Someone, or something, has already chosen what you were going to look at. In 1975, a British theorist and filmmaker asked a question that seemed to concern only cinema: who organizes our gaze? Fifty years later, that question has never been more urgent.
Based on the chapter on Laura Mulvey in Les penseurs de l’image (ICONEMIA, 2026).
ICONEMIA