The aim of the thesis project is to take a fresh look at the videogame phenomenon, through a phenomenology of the incorporation and subjectivation processes at work in the videogame experience (mainly in 1st and 3rd person). In doing so, we interpret the game as a virtual and material aesthetic device, characterized by a troubling fusional relationship between the playing body and the machine stimulating and simulating it in the world of images. This strange erotic relationship seems to reveal particular properties of the body-subject, while reconfiguring it in its processes of perception and individuation.

This reconfiguration is interpreted – on the basis of an assiduous reading of Husserl (Ideas II…) and the phenomenological tradition (Fink, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty,…); and of the authors of the 1st critical theory, notably Benjamin and Adorno (The Work of Art… KulturIndustrie, La forme du disque, …) – as a dislocation of modern space-time (embodied by cinema); and as the heralding of an epoch of internal, material dissolution of the flesh – as the epoch of its “total virtualization”.
We will question the political stakes of these fundamental mutations, through a return to the theories of modern montage (Brecht, Eisenstein, etc.), and through an experimental exploration of these mutations of the body.

The aim is to make the erotic dimension of the device sensitive through its material and virtual manipulation. On the one hand, by developing virtual experiences likely to reconfigure the playing body by confronting it with alternative control devices (i.e. joysticks that materially problematize the game as a flesh-machine union). Secondly, by staging these “corpo-machinic unions” in performances combining virtual, machine and flesh bodies.
The aim is to make visible an erotic, unconscious dimension of reality that emerges in our machine and virtual interactions. In the shadow of our bodies and their passionate romps with the machine, a 3rd body emerges, a multi-headed, monstrous synthesis of borderline agentivities. This entity, still difficult to define at the present stage of our research, seems to be the problematic core of our specular and auto-erotic relations with machines. The aim is to map it out – to reveal the defining possibilities it conceals, however tragic.

Icare Bamba

Holds a Master’s degree in Contemporary Philosophy (ENS-Ehess) and a Master’s degree in Game Design (Cnam-Enjmin), and is a doctoral student at the LLCP (Laboratoire des Logiques Contemporaines de la Philosophie) at Paris 8 and the Cologne Game Lab at the University of Cologne in Germany. He is currently working on a thesis in philosophy and design in research-creation under the supervision of Professors Pierre Cassou-Nogue s (Paris 8), and Gundolf S. Freyermuth (CGL). Entitled “Phantom-Flesh : Erotics of the Flesh in the Age of its Total Virtualization”, his research focuses on the metamorphoses undergone by our subjectivities in virtual experience, questioned on the basis of our material, embodied situations. Performance, interactive virtual experiences and plastic experiments are all ways of exploring and making visible the symbioses that emerge from our machinic relationships.
In 2023-2024 he is co-dramaturge of the play “Mars Exploration” by Compagnie UltraCome te, directed by Victor Inisan (Les Plateaux Sauvages, Paris, January 2024), as well as the performance “Green Garden – Journal 2023” with the artist Ida Guibert (Le Vivarium, Rennes, 2024). He is currently collaborating with Sophie Prinssen (Artec doctoral student) and Maeline Li (visual artist) and members of the DIU Artec 2023-2024, to publish a “Theoretical Dungeon”, an experimental work combining game design, fiction and theory.

PROJECT TEAM