Visual Worlds is an artistic research and creation programme that focuses on the multiplicity of visual phenomena and the variety of their modes of production and perception, in living beings, within artificial vision systems and in the interactions between them. The programme was presented to the GDR Vision in 2019, just as it was being launched. After 4 years of existence, I propose here to present an overview of what has been achieved.

What is seeing? This is what this research programme intends to explore. Spontaneously, a set of satellite questions arise: Who sees? Who sees what? In what context, at what intensity, with what frequency? Intentionally? With what intention? With what organ? With what algorithm? What certainty? ... This programme of research and creation aims to explore the sensory experiences that vision provokes, the narratives that these experiences generate or that accompany them, the worlds they create, as much in living beings as in artificial vision systems or in the interaction between one and the other. Visual arts and their study traditionally focus on the notion of image, in other words on a manifestation, real or virtual, which seems to be able to be kept at an objective distance. The methodological orientation of Visual Worlds is that of the primacy of perception over the image. The programme adopts an ecological approach to perception, where a wide variety of vision regimes, with no necessary common denominator (of time, scale, space, spectrum, etc.), can interact and coexist. Humans, in that context, are no longer always the primary standard to which these vision experiences relate. As a transdisciplinary project, Visual Worlds finds its references as much in lens-based visual arts (photography, cinema, video), media arts and technology, contemporary art and art history, as in the humanities, sciences and techniques, philosophy, and society in general. It develops its methods of working, presenting and sharing by taking advantage of this diversity.

Web: https://visualworlds.net