- Date
- 12 SEPTEMBER 2025
- Author
- GLORIA MARIA CAPPELLETTI
- Image by
- NEW WAYS OF SEEING
- Categories
- Interviews
New Ways of Seeing: Kim Lê Boutin on Collective Intelligence and the Future of Images
As our world becomes increasingly mediated by algorithms, networks, and hybrid forms of creation, the question of how we see — and what shapes our seeing — has never been more urgent. Enter New Ways of Seeing, an international festival founded and curated by Kim Lê Boutin, which launches its very first edition in Paris this October. Dedicated to exploring the intersections of art, design, science, and emerging technologies, the festival brings together voices from across disciplines to rethink the images, interfaces, and imaginaries that define contemporary culture.
Kim is no stranger to pushing boundaries. Before embarking on this new venture, she co-founded and led the award-winning creative studio DVTK (London/Paris, 2015–2023), working on digital-first projects for global names such as Apple, Dior, Nike, and Farfetch. Today, alongside curating New Ways of Seeing, she heads the Digital Innovation category at Le Club des Directeurs Artistiques in Paris, continuing to shape the dialogue between creativity and technology at an institutional level.
We at RED-EYE are proud to be media partners of this inaugural edition of New Ways of Seeing (Paris, Friday 24/10 and Saturday 25/10, 2025). In this exclusive interview, we sit down with Kim to discuss the thinking behind the festival, its unique positioning between heritage and innovation, and the urgent questions it raises about collective intelligence, identity, play, performance, and the evolving ecology of attention in the digital age.
This is the very first edition of New Ways of Seeing. For readers who are discovering it for the first time, can you tell us what the festival is about and what makes it unique?
New Ways of Seeing starts from a simple observation: conversations about technology and images are happening everywhere — in universities, in cultural institutions, in industry fairs — but rarely in the same room. One side tests ideas and critiques; another demos tools and opportunities; another explores new forms of creation. The result is a polarized landscape where each sphere deepens its own view and overlooks the rest.
The festival brings these worlds together. Taking its title from John Berger’s intuition that “seeing” is never neutral — it changes with our media, our myths, our machines — this first edition sits between symposium and creative gathering. We’re meeting at a moment shaped by the pandemic’s accelerations and AI’s rapid spread, when the ways we perceive, circulate, and make images are shifting at speed. Our aim is to create a common ground where artists, researchers, designers, curators, and technologists can really meet — to test ideas in public, share methods, and open up new ways of seeing and relating to the world.
The program begins at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, a highly symbolic venue. Why did you choose to start here, and how does it reflect your vision for the festival?
Beginning at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie is both an honor and a statement. On that Friday, our guests will be able to explore the MEP itself — its exhibitions, its bookshop, its library — and immerse themselves in the spirit of a place entirely dedicated to the act of seeing. Without revealing too much, I can say there will be major photographic voices on view during the festival, a dialogue between generations and perspectives that will echo our themes.
The timing also matters. The festival unfolds during Paris Art Week, when the city is alive with fairs like Paris+ par Art Basel and Paris Internationale. To be part of that moment, while rooted in an institution like the MEP, situates New Ways of Seeing within a larger ecosystem of artistic exchange.
And then, the following day, we move to the École Supérieure du Digital — a school dedicated to training the talents of tomorrow in digital innovation. This dual presence — between a historic cultural institution and a school looking to the future — says a lot about the DNA of the festival. New Ways of Seeing really sits between these two poles: heritage and innovation, research and education, image and technology. We didn’t want a neutral “white box” space, but to inhabit existing institutions, to cross-pollinate with their programs, their intentions, and their audiences. That in-between position — hybrid, porous, multiple — is exactly where we want to be.
The panel Uncoded Collective Intelligence brings together an artist-educator and a filmmaker to discuss “collective intelligence.” What kinds of questions are you hoping will emerge from this dialogue?
The very idea of “intelligence” is being reconsidered. Machine learning recombines countless fragments into something new — one form of collective intelligence. This panel explores the tension between different representations of intelligence today: algorithmic, human, collective, poetic.
In Léa Collet’s films, participants are drawn into situations she initiates, and the work unfolds through their interactions. It’s a sensitive approach to directing — less about control, more about creating the conditions for imagination and relation to emerge. Helio Pu, whose short film Every Heaven in Between will open the session, also works from this tension between the personal and the collective. When he couldn’t find family archives from the village in China where he was born, he turned to online platforms, borrowing images from neighbours to tell his own story. It’s incredibly moving — a reminder that sometimes our shared histories live in the images of others, and that digital spaces can unexpectedly return to us a sense of belonging.
I first met Shanu Walpita at London College of Fashion, where she has been rethinking what it means to educate: shifting the role of the teacher, placing care at the center, and cultivating learning as a collective process. She will guide this dialogue through that lens — her pedagogical practice rooted in compassion and community-building.
Together, they’ll test how structure, care, and shared authorship can change what a work becomes.
Embodied Multiple Identities seems to be a discussion that looks at multiple identities across writing, art, and performance. How does the festival address the transformations of identity in the age of AI and digital hybridity?
In 1993, the New Yorker published a cartoon that became one of the first internet memes: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” It captured the utopian promise of the early web — a space of anonymity, fluidity, and self-invention. Decades later, that promise feels distant. As Legacy Russell writes in Glitch Feminism, the internet once allowed us to glitch, to disguise, to become someone other than our social reality. Today, our online and offline selves have largely merged, and the freedom to reinvent has been replaced by a kind of total exposure. So the question becomes: what’s left of our capacity to shape — or escape — our own image?
Complicating this is the rise of AI tools that harvest, synthesize, and reproduce aspects of our identity — sometimes without our consent. Who owns our image today? What power do we have over what is said, shown, or generated about us? And what happens when digital traces are not just permanent, but generative?
This panel looks at how multiplicity meets visibility — what it means to be seen, or to step aside, when identity is scattered across platforms and roles. John Provencher has moved from digital design into an art practice where visibility itself feels carefully curated. Jean-René Etienne’s trajectory — spanning translation, music, fashion, and film — resists easy definition, with a sparse yet powerful online presence. And Ambre Charpier, as moderator, brings the perspective of a researcher who has studied online identity manipulation and disappearance, while personally choosing near-total invisibility online.
We’re interested in where visibility becomes resource, where it becomes weight — and what autonomy looks like now.
The program features the live performance of Léa Collet. Why was it important to you to include performance alongside panels and screenings?
It felt important to punctuate the days with live, unexpected moments — performances that infiltrate, contaminate, or even hijack the flow. We don’t want the festival to be a one-way transmission of ideas from stage to audience. We want to engage people on multiple levels — through listening, dialogue, and also through experiences that move the body and emotions.
The architecture of our venues played a big role in shaping this. The first day takes place in the MEP auditorium — an extraordinary cinema space with red velvet seats, wooden panels, and beautiful light, which naturally lent itself to screenings but also to a performance that could break the fixed posture of sitting. The second day unfolds in the industrial setting of the École Supérieure du Digital — a former nineteenth-century factory with high ceilings and a glass-and-metal roof — a space that calls for other kinds of interventions.
Léa Collet’s performances emerge from this very idea of rupture. As she describes it, “My work always begins with collective experience: creating situations where participants can intra-act, think, and imagine together. I am interested in how shared imagination can become a tool for collective emancipation.” Her practice often seeks the invisible, the speculative, the not-yet-possible — ways of accessing other realities and crafting new forms of relation. Within the MEP’s cinema auditorium, this sensibility will translate into a moment of disruption, an interruption of the expected, and an invitation to inhabit the space differently.
The panel Playing with Technology features an art director and a 3D/AI designer. Why focus on “play” as an entry point into thinking about technology?
In a world increasingly shaped by optimisation, automation, and predictive systems, play feels like a radical gesture. Most digital tools are designed for efficiency, productivity, and control — yet artists and designers have long subverted these logics, reclaiming technology as a space for experimentation, intuition, and surprise. That’s why we wanted to focus on play as an entry point: because it unlocks something that precision alone cannot.
This panel brings together different ways of approaching that idea. Ines Alpha began by experimenting with 3D software for the sheer joy of it, with no predefined outcome — and from that playful exploration, a whole aesthetic was born. Her practice shows how fragility and dependency on platforms shape creativity: what happens when your favourite tool suddenly disappears?
Vera van de Seyp, by contrast, writes her own tools. She codes, hacks, and even modifies machines, turning them into collaborators. For her, play comes through designing new systems and inviting others to use them — a way of sharing agency and expanding what technology can do in creative hands.
The dialogue will be guided by Florian Zumbrunn, who describes himself as “painting with code.” His practice thrives on iteration and emergence — letting simple ideas evolve through layers of exploration. His presence connects the different approaches of Vera and Ines, weaving together questions of authorship, materiality, and the balance between chaos and control.
Here, “play” is permission — to misuse, to drift, to invent inside systems that weren’t made for wonder.
The conversation Beyond Dualism pairs philosophy, photography, and independent publishing. How do you see critical theory and independent publishing contributing to debates on digital culture today?
The terms we use to describe the digital often betray our attachment to binaries: cloud, virtual, artificial — as if these realms floated somewhere outside the material world. But digital systems are not disembodied. Servers live in data centres, code is written by hands, and images circulate on devices embedded in ecosystems. As artist Woon Tien Wei reminds us: “The virtual also exists physically.”
This panel is about moving beyond those dualisms. Rather than thinking of the digital and the physical as separate, we want to explore how they are intertwined, co-produced, and mutually shaping. Independent publishing and critical theory have a crucial role to play here: they give us tools to translate digital culture into forms we can hold, read, and discuss, while also providing the frameworks to understand how these systems operate.
David Desrimais has been “putting the internet on his bookshelf” through JBE Books, translating online-native culture into printed form. Adeline Mai moves fluidly between analog photography and GenAI experiments, between fashion campaigns and public tutorials. And with Viola Lukács as moderator — whose curatorial work bridges digital infrastructures, institutions, and publics — this panel will ask what it takes to think beyond the surface of dualisms, and to see digital and physical culture as part of one continuous spectrum.
Bodies, Ruins, and Interfaces is a very evocative title for this panel. What was your intention in bringing together artists and spatial designers under this theme?
The title Bodies, Ruins, and Interfaces came from a desire to think about how environments shape us — and how we shape them in return. It asks what happens when bodies meet interfaces, when memory emerges not through linear chronology but through residue, scent, data, or touch.
This panel is less about systems of control than about gestures of sensing and remembering. It explores porous thresholds between spaces, technologies, and selves — the frictions and transformations that occur when memory, matter, and imagination intersect.
Artist and Architecture PhD student Marisa Müsing excavates the similarities between AI and archaeology in their research at the Royal College of Art. Drawing on the site of the Villa of Mysteries in Pompeii, and inspired by feminist thinkers such as Donna Haraway and Legacy Russell, they aim to rewrite the narratives of women depicted in the villa’s frescoes. Beyond their research, Marisa runs two collaborative studios: müsing-sellés, an internationally recognised design and teaching practice transforming object and spatial design through architecture, and mamumifi, a multidisciplinary collective exploring identity through objects from mixed-Asian female perspectives.
Alongside Marisa, HaYoung blurs fiction, data, and memory with works like DATA PERFUME®, which transforms user cookies into algorithmically generated scent profiles. Their practice moves through drawing, installation, and olfactory storytelling, exploring instability and the poetic limits of technological transparency.
Guiding this dialogue is Simon de Dreuille, whose architectural and publishing practice is rooted in ecological and critical design. As co-founder of Habitante, he works at the intersection of theory, fiction, and testimony, cultivating new ways of reading and writing space. With Simon as moderator, the conversation situates technological critique within embodied and ecological imaginaries.
My intention with this panel was to create a space where ruins can become interfaces, and interfaces can be felt as ruins — where the instability of memory, material, and code can open new ways of relating to the world around us.
Overall I see that the panels are moderated not only by curators but also researchers and PhD candidates. How do these different perspectives enrich the discussions?
Over the past years I’ve been invited to speak in very different contexts — tech and innovation conferences, academic symposiums, lectures in art schools. What struck me is that, whatever the setting, conversations now tend to circle back to the same subject: artificial intelligence. Yet the way this topic is approached changes radically depending on who speaks about it — engineers, artists, or researchers. I’ve come to believe that all of these lenses might be right, but it’s only when we start discussing them together that we can move beyond narrow perspectives.
My relationship to digital culture goes back to my teenage years — coding websites for music bands, running a blog that became its own small universe, and even spending Christmas evenings adventuring with paladin friends in Dark Age of Camelot. Later, as a digital designer, I saw how interfaces evolved, and during Covid in particular, how they came to reshape our lives. We rarely go backwards with technology: the new usages that appeared then have stayed. Many of them were driven by big tech companies, which experienced spectacular growth during that time — the food tech industry grew by 70% between 2019 and 2020 (Columbia Business School), Amazon’s profits rose by 70% in the first nine months of 2020 (US$5.8 billion more than the year before), and Zoom went from 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019 to over 300 million by April 2020, with annual revenue jumping 326% in a single year. These shifts had a profound impact on our daily lives, yet at the time we often lacked the resources to think critically about what was happening.
That’s why researchers and thinkers are so important in this festival. Someone like Yves Citton, whose book The Ecology of Attention (2017) has been fundamental for me, gives us concepts to understand what’s happening to our perception and our daily lives. And curators like Viola Lukács bring yet another perspective — one that connects artistic practice with academic research, institutions, and emerging technologies. She is also the founding curator of BINÁLÉ, Budapest’s digital art biennial, whose upcoming edition We Are Not Alone (17 September – 26 October 2025, Merlin Theatre) explores alienation, intimacy, and belonging through expanded media art. Opening just weeks before New Ways of Seeing, it’s a powerful reminder that we are not alone in asking these questions: across Europe, different communities are reflecting on what it means to encounter the Other — whether alien, artificial, glitched, or human.
The aim isn’t to settle anything, but to hold a shared inquiry long enough to see differently — and to step outside our filter bubbles (Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble, 2011)
You’ve chosen to personally close the festival. What message do you most want audiences to take away at the end of this first edition?
For me, New Ways of Seeing isn’t just about this first edition. It’s something we’re building for the long term — not just a moment, but a movement. The project was born to create dialogue across art, technology, performance, digital culture, and research. My hope is that it gives people a space to think critically about emerging technologies, but also to feel curiosity and confidence in navigating them — and maybe even to reclaim a sense of agency and creativity along the way. If it works, people leave more curious — and more in charge of their tools.
Interview by Gloria Maria Cappelletti
Images Courtesy of the Artists and New Ways of Seeing Interdisciplinary Festival
Branding by New Narratives collaborators @kimbtn_ @manskken @caitlinhiggs
