ALEA

The Collaborative Research Project ALEA aims to analyze the role played by artistic representation in the construction of Western ideas of chance. Starting from the fact that the way we represent chance determines our understanding of the role it plays in the organization of the physical world and in the occurrence of events, the project intends to measure how much our societies’ capacity for projection and forecasting owes, since the beginning of the modern era, to the cultural portrayal and/or modeling of a reality understood as being governed by contingency. In bringing out and historicizing the main modes of fictional and factual depiction of chance, the Collaborative Research Project ALEA intends to highlight the central role that art and literature have played in the perception of contingency in the West since the Renaissance, in order to better understand contemporary human attitudes toward risk. Benefitting from the contribution of more than 50 researchers coming from 17 multidisciplinary laboratories (literature, history, art history, philosophy, mind sciences, sociology, mathematics, neurosciences, complex systems physic), in close relation with international networks of research on risk studies, probability and aleatory phenomena, “Figures du hasard/ Figures of Chance” will constitute the main product of the Collaborative Research Project ALEA. Issued in two versions (French and English), “Figures du hasard/ Figures of Chance” will anchor the particular contribution of French research on chance in the international context of reflections on the following subjects: the human treatment of risk, the testing of proposals in the field of mind sciences as to the epistemological status of literary practices, and post- chaos and complexity theory conceptions of the contingency of events. The chronological scope and thematic precision of the collective book Figures of Chance will allow it to become a reference tool for the analysis of cultural phenomena linked to the evolution of human presentations of contingency. - A plan for the interactive valorization of scientific culture (website/media outreach/academic events/cultural events/serious games) will ensure the dissemination of the project results but also the participation of a non-specialized public in research on the cultural processes of figuration and representation of chance. - A plan for university studies (Master-Doctorate-Postdoc), encompassing the three Northern French universities which are carrying the project, will create a multidisciplinary field of inquiry on chance whose impact will be immediately visible thanks to the three foreign universities which are partners in the project (U. Chicago/IITDehli/U.Oslo).