Call for Papers | TEXT [S-oN] IMAGE 8: FLESH & FLASH on the Borders of Bodies and Machines | School of Fine Arts, Tetouan (Mr)

Call for Papers

F R O N T I E R [ S ]
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Mohamed Choukri is a true legend in Tangier. Published and translated with the help of American writer and composer Paul Bowles, his first short story Al-Unf ʿala al-shati, meaning Violence on the Beach, appeared in 1966 in the Beirut monthly Al-adab. A regular contributor to Arabic, American, and English literary journals, he formed friendships with Jean Genet and Tennessee Williams: “I don’t know how to write about birds’ milk, the delicate embrace of angelic beauty, dewdrop clusters, the lions’ waterfall… I don’t know how to write with a crystal brush. For me, writing is protest, not parade.”
Aomar Mohellebi, Algerian journalist and writer from Kabylia, recounts that it was in prison that Mohamed Choukri—then illiterate but captivated by the sound of Tunisian poet Abou El Kacem Chebbi’s verses, recited by his cellmate—“asked for their meaning to be explained and realized that such expressions couldn’t be uttered without education.” He finally resolved to learn to read, then to write, and thus to transcribe—like Choukri—the sounds of figures, cartridges or i+D/signs.
To create one’s language is never to fully renounce the innocence of form or the musicality of expression, but perhaps to provoke, in another way, all the brutality of the world, expressed through flesh and thus definitively separating it from a consciousness aspiring to be purely rational.

A L G O / R H Y T H M [ S ]
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With digital media, writes Martine Baldino Putzka in the introduction to her dissertation, “new linguistic forms have emerged and continue to emerge, new writing and communication cultures have unfolded and continue to unfold, particularly on the Internet.”
The image eclipses the word, replaces it. It fuses with sound, noise, ambient textures to generate new readings of the plural worlds surrounding us. As observed in the workshops linked to the Urban Game SUGOROKU in 2008, these networked platforms—between tangible and intangible—host multiple learning processes where textual, sonic, and visual forms and elements merge: images, myths, and metaphors resulting from passages and interpretations across successive filter layers and diverse cultures.
This unique mix of imaginaries and codes adapts expression to the demands of rapid transmission. For instance, “writing processes, figures of speech, and symbols such as abbreviations or acronyms enable rapid speech acts. To express emotions, one can rely on multiple tools such as ideograms, emoticons, and emojis.”
Today, anyone with a smartphone or transmission device is both sender and broadcaster of information, “and partakes in this acceleration of language evolution,” as well as in the semantic construction and rapid diffusion of sounds and images—with or without AI’s contribution.

Eric Sadin writes: “To engage an ethical theory of technology is not merely to conceive of human genius as an ingenious producer of artefacts, but as one that, at some point in the process chain, must pause and subject its procedures—not to a moral judgment of good or evil—but to an evaluation of whether certain frameworks or devices foster individual and collective fulfilment, or conversely suppress or annihilate it.”

L A N D S C A P E [ S ]
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Eric Sadin, in The Algorithmic Life, emphasizes our responsibility in the face of AI. Perhaps the intelligence of information lies in determining how its @perception of the ®-DEVICE reflects our worldview and how it operates, with / through / despite the media.
Because in order to imprint their voice or images onto existence, everyone must always seize one or more languages—whether bodily or computational.
These individual ways of appropriating and creating from given data—always exceeding mere learning—thus lie at the edges of a device, a country, a nation, an order system, a textual or software grammar.
To avoid producing—in the worst imaginable scenario—a form of “patrouillotisme,” as Arthur Rimbaud wrote to Georges Izambard on August 25, 1870, in reference to war.
Thus, more than ever, we need to rethink these boundaries: of languages, of bodies porous to technologies, of sounds slipping across images, of images bursting from prompts we constantly share across networked systems; sounds that resonate in plural ways to our ears, between our hands glued to our mobile phones, in our headphones.
How do these—with our bodies / with machines—allow us to express ourselves in singular ways? How do they anchor in the Earth or evaporate into data, continuously ®-PRODUCING (on the i+D of the in/Registered) sensitive cartographies, structuring new imaginary, physical, or utopian territories, sometimes penetrating the thickest walls through our original, individual, and porous ways of being with the Other—living or machinic—of being in the world. Why they are—and make—LANDSCAPE?+

H Y P E R R E A L
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In 1997, for the Skulptur Projekte Münster, German artist Hans Haacke “built a cylindrical log cabin about five meters in diameter and around seven meters high, with its upper edge topped by a crown of barbed wire. Inside, a children’s carousel rotates to the sound of a hastily remixed Deutschlandlieder, which the viewer can only glimpse fleetingly and partially through gaps between the planks. The installation roughly mirrors the dimensions of a war memorial erected nearby in 1909, at the Mauritztor, commemorating the German victories of 1864, 1866, and 1870/71 as well as the newly formed Empire. […]
Next to the monstrous 1909 victory painting—its outer wall adorned with the muscular buttocks of naked heroes—(Haacke) presents a children’s carousel from the same era, inaccessible behind construction planks and barbed wire, so that the painted birds of paradise and trotting carousel ponies are visible only through the cracks.”

F L A S H
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This question of the “crack,” of a flash, in the wordplay between flesh and flash that William S. Burroughs uses in his preface to Brion Gysin’s The Exploding Desert, resembles a potentially noisy but perpetually fragmented vision—stimulated by the upbeat melody of an information carousel.
(But are we spinning around the carousel, or is the carousel spinning around us?)
It questions our way of seeing… or glimpsing.
For our body now reaches toward what we might call a “point of view” — a punch of perception; an alteration of the tangible through this system of aggression, where the sensory/target body is affected by speech, images, the entire phenomenological—or machinic—process of this Other—living or not—since AI is this Other, placing us in situ within the world.
And in return, how can we voice, challenge—rise up against—question this Other, which is not of our nature, on the far side of this open yet impassable meta-boundary tuned like sheet music?
How to adopt a critical stance when all is organized in tension between attention and slumber, through the constant simulation of the hyperreal Jean Baudrillard proposes?
Even cautiously, let us compare this carousel to what happens with AI when it allows us to view images—or rather loops of images—appearing before our eyes with subtle differences, leaving us stunned, almost petrified by the speed of this loop…
Intelligence may then lie in grasping why this speed (the tyranny of speed at work in this hyperreal already described by Paul Virilio) leaves us little time to grasp, assimilate, or study what’s unfolding before us.
Indeed, this speed overwhelms us, clouds our perception of the world, and thrusts us immediately into the machine’s norm—conditions us, stuns us into accepting our incomprehension…
And in the process, to ultimately see nothing, to possess nothing in the flesh.

F L E S H
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It is these manipulations between TEXT / SOUND / IMAGE, all the possible redactions, outcries, collages, memories of vanished or unfinished documents, ghosts, scripts, or shifts that continually explode and mutate the determinism of programs, overturning the rules; these recordings of the world that soak in and spread, merge or vanish across digital media.
The profusion and collusion of different forms of information replacing or accompanying images, words, sounds, and noises unsettle our certainties, shattered by the emergence of AI, which confronts us with the notions of authorship and consumption…
All these upheavals will be at the heart of this new international symposium, TEXT [S-oN] IMAGE 8.
How the Mediterranean, as a networked platform, invites us—through these flashes that imprint / express themselves through our flesh—to the frontiers of language.
This new edition, still focused on sensitive cartographies, identity, and the relationships Between [Body/Machine] (Carole Brandon, 2016), will take place from Thursday 27 to Saturday 29 November 2025 at the National Institute of Fine Arts in Tetouan, with the support of the Institut Français, the Paragraphe Laboratory at Université Paris 8 Vincennes–Saint-Denis, the LLSETI Laboratory at Université Savoie Mont-Blanc, and Transcultures.
It will be accompanied by an exhibition of works within the Institute’s grounds.
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Philippe Franck / Marc Veyrat, 2024 – 2025