TELE

TELE is a network project designed to prepare an application to the ERC Synergy call. The call is aimed at collaborative projects involving 2 to 4 excellent researchers. Maximum funding is €10 million*. The maximum duration of a SyG project is 6 years. The ERC SyG TELE project will be led by Sandra Laugier, who is in the final year of her ERC AdG DEMOSERIES project (2020-2024). S. Laugier has begun work on the TELE concept in collaboration with Pr Andrea Pinotti, who also is the PI of an ERC AdG project in the humanities. Another PI in digital studies and AI is currently being integrated in the network and a 4th PI is already in the works. The TELE project aims to bring together researchers in philosophy, aesthetics, art history, history of science and data science to explore, analyze and renew the contemporary ontology of distance. It is deliberately rooted in the humanities. It aims to define the new conceptual content of the prefix TELE- (from tle-vision to telepathy, teleportation, tememedicine). The aim of TELE is not to study the various remote communication devices that have been widely developed in recent years, or the political forms of remote power, but to map the actual transformation of the world happening through changes in the distal medium. TELE corresponds to the ambitions of a Synergy project in terms of the new research question it raises and the concept it embodies, as well as its dimension of excellence. "I can't get it! "It's too far away! How many times has each of us experienced frustration at the possibilities and means of apprehending or reaching the world and its objects? How many times have we had to resort to prostheses, tools and devices to compensate for this inadequacy? Conversely, how many times have we felt that a person or situation was too close, too suffocating, too "give me some air"? How many times have we felt someone physically close, yet distant, cold? How many times have we experienced their emotional, intellectual or human proximity despite their spatial distance? This simple but fundamental polarization of the experience of distance in the anthropology of everyday life introduces us to the central theme that TELE intends to explore: the constitutive ambivalence of distance, in the forms of human experience; its agentivity, with the prefix TELE- indicating both distance and the possibility or difficulty of reaching, the contemporary transformation of the ontology of distance and the re-evaluation of ordinary terms tele-vision, tele-phonics and so on. Our guiding research idea is that the prefix TELE refers to phenomena and experiences at odds with current representations and knowledges of distance. We propose a conceptually unified approach to a series of phenomena that have not been studied systematically but only in a disseminated way, such as: - The theological dimension of new virtual reality technologies: for example, the concept of "avatar" and its roots in Hindu doctrines of incarnation. - Telepathy as a new avenue for transforming human relationships. - Teleportation as a promise to make the gift of bilocation accessible to all - The relationship with remote environments: permanently distant (physically and geographically), such as isolated islands, mountain villages, polar prisons or outer space, or momentarily distant. - The tension between the environment as seen from a distance (the earth seen "from above") and the everyday ordinay environment close at hand - The question of remote care, and of telemedicine practices etc. The network of 4 PIs will prepare the application to the ERC SYG call over 18 months, for a submission in 2025. The financial request concerns travel missions in order to organize workshops hosted by the various PIs, and the hiring of a service provider to help set up the project.