Les Maintenants & Marlies Pöschl — Pepper Perceval — CAC Brétigny — Event — Slash Paris

Past: Friday, May 4, 2018 6 PM → 9 PM

First performance: 6.30 pm
Second performance: 7.30 pm

With Lycée Paul Belmondo, Arpajon; Lycée Edmond Michelet, Arpajon; EHPAD Le Village, Arpajon; the Multimedia Library, Breuillet; Community Centers, Breuillet; the Seniors Residence, Marolles-en-Hurepoix; the Multimedia Library Jean Farges, Marolles-en-Hurepoix; EHPAD Le Château, Villemoisson-sur-Orge; Les Érables Primary School, Villemoisson-sur-Orge; the Berthe Morisot Social and Cultural Center, Saint-Germain-lès-Arpajon.

Artistic collaborators: Julien Jassaud, Gaël Segalen, Marie Verhoeven.Free Paris-Brétigny shuttle is available by request at reservation@cacbretigny.com. Pick-up at 5:45 pm at 104 avenue de France, 75013 Paris (the Bibliothèque François Mitterrand metro stop).

Working with “Les Maintenants,” as those participating in the Cœur d’Essonne project are called, the Austrian artist Marlies Pöschl has created a piece of science fiction, imagining the possible futures of intra-action with the objects around us.

It’s an old story, a simple one, based on the legend of Percival the knight. It’s a meeting of young people and seniors. It’s an invitation to visit another reality, an enchanted royal court, a residence dreamed up for the elderly. It’s also a story that deals with empathy. How is it shown? How are we “affected”?

This quest for the affect is shared by Percival the knight and Pepper, a humanoid robot that is supposedly capable of feeling empathy. Pepper thus represents a completely new way of supervising and controlling feelings, the domain of “affective computing”. If the machines around us become increasingly capable of decoding emotions and understanding human behavior, does that mean they can take care of us?