Les écrits du numérique #7 ALPHABETVILLE I LA MARELLE I SCENE44 . N + N CORSINO
Les écrits du numérique #7
ECRITURES AUTOMATIQUES
8 & 9 Avril 2026 à Marseille
Registration alphabetville@orange.fr
Alphabetville and La Marelle
In partnership with La Friche la Belle de Mai, the La Salle des Machines bookstore, SCENE44, and n + n Corsino, a European scene for choreographic creation and digital innovation
Organized by Alphabetville, a multimedia writing laboratory, and La Marelle, a contemporary literature center, and linked to a digital writing residency, the "Digital Writings" events offer opportunities for encounters, exchanges, information sharing, reflection, and experimentation with digital practices, as well as showcases of work in the fields of writing and digital publishing.
These events are aimed at authors, artists, researchers, engineers, tinkerers, amateurs, and professionals, and are open and free to all. They take place every two years in the spring at La Friche la Belle de Mai, where La Marelle and Alphabetville are resident organizations.
The theme of each edition, unique and offering critical perspectives on current events and innovation, brings together individuals from diverse backgrounds and fields of expertise around a shared and openly discussed issue. The theme of the seventh edition is linked to the interactions between writing and reading and generative artificial intelligence applications.
Under the title "Automatic Writing," they will also attempt, or perhaps primarily, to explore a genealogy and history of the automation of writing and to offer a critical perspective on it.
AUTOMATIC WRITING
The recent emergence and widespread deployment, dissemination, and massive use of robots, such as the ChatGPT conversational agent and other applications of generative artificial intelligence, are creating disturbances in human-machine interactions: disturbances in agency and creative capacity, disturbances in the power of imagination, disturbances in the autonomy of the author, in literary and artistic genres… Disturbances in the face of the transformation of typewriters into calculating machines.
For these computational, or algorithmic, artificial intelligences produce content of a symbolic dimension, via agents, or mechanisms, which nevertheless process digital data: data that are in no way symbols but are subject to and governed by automated and probabilistic calculation.
But must this automatic writing become the nightmare of writers, and of all authors? Of every practitioner of writing and reading? Or how can we understand and interact with these artificial producers of content? How can we experience it, and even bring about the emergence of experiments?
This new edition of "Digital Writings" aims to explore the genealogy of the automation of writing, which permeates language and languages through various technical inventions and technological designs, by deconstructing their epistemic and cultural foundations.
It will also refer to experiments in automatic writing, which run through recent literary and poetic history, particularly since the Surrealists invented the term and the method starting in 1924—for whom the primary goal was to challenge the formalizations of rational thought—but also through constrained literature, then computer and digital literature, and so on. It will extend to new states of the text brought about by emerging technologies.
The book will thus attempt a survey of the means and media, forms and movements of automated text production, the mechanization of language, and the computation of languages, up to the present day with generative artificial intelligence. And we will attempt to develop a critical and pharmacological approach to the trends and processes of automation, as well as its overcoming—or the possibilities of de-automation—of humans and their tools, in the practices of writing and reading. And in the becoming, and even the future, of the life of the mind in all its forms.
PROGRAM
Wednesday, April 8, 2026
Labofriche Friche la Belle de Mai, 41 rue Jobin, 13003 Marseille
2:00 PM Welcome
2:30 PM Introduction
By Cécile Portier, author and president, and Colette Tron, author and artistic director of Alphabetville
2:45 PM The Greek Alphabet, Between Democracy and Techno-Feudalism
By Giuseppe Longo, mathematician and epistemologist, and Jean Lassègue, philosopher and epistemologist
3:45 PM Discussion
4:00 PM “I Was Placed Halfway Between Misery and the Sun”
By Chrystelle Desbordes, art historian and editor
4:30 PM “The Book of Thresholds” and its Informational Atlases
By Christophe Bruno, artist, curator, and researcher
5:00 PM Discussion
5:15 PM Break
5:30 PM “Capital Punishment,” a monologue with artificial intelligence
By Marie-Josée Mondzain, philosopher
Presentation of the book published by La fabrique, in partnership with the bookstore La salle des machines
Thursday, April 9, 2026
SCENE44. n+n corsino Media Hub - Belle de Mai, 37 rue Guibal, 13003 Marseille
10:30 Welcome by n + n corsino, choreographers
10:45 Theatre and its Disturbance
By Jean-François Peyret, author and director, and Thierry Coduys, sound designer and programmer
11:45 Discussion
12:00 Lunch Break
2:00 PM Ars Generalis Ultima versus The Engine
By Pascal Jourdana, publisher, co-founder of La Marelle
2:30 PM "Stone of Poems"
By Philippe Bootz, poet and physicist
3:00 PM Discussion
3:15 PM Generative Fur
By Damien Beyrouthy, artist-researcher in visual and digital arts
3:45 PM Discussion and Animal Karaoke
