V. The machine's jokes
Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel
In summer, we rest. We walk around, we discover new horizons, we have fun.
For this fifth episode of the exhibition Visual Contagions, the team has gathered together a few gems from its work on the illustrated press of the twentieth century: amusing images, sometimes very funny, sometimes disturbing or annoying, sometimes depressing.
Some of them speak of a past that is often more exotic and gangly than we think, while others make us laugh at our own practices, our expectations, our illusions.
We first wanted to see how people had fun a century ago in the illustrated press.
chess games, crossword puzzles,good stories and caricatures: the old ones certainly knew how to have a good time. Our machines bring back many illustrations designed for this purpose.
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Illustration of an advertisement for the Edison Phonograph.
"In the days of the Arabian Nights, the main amusement was storytelling. There were no books. Professional narrators went from house to house, entertaining anyone who could pay them. This idea of being entertained is as old as the human race. "Give us something to entertain us!" has been the perpetual cry. In our day the answer to that is the Edison phonograph."
Le Monde illustré, 6 juillet 1907, p. 92.
May we suggest you play along?
The Explore platform can be a lot of fun. Search our corpora for your favorite images! The study of the global circulation of images is a long-term project, which will be all the more fruitful if it is based on the imagination of people from all walks of life.
Send us the results of your queries on social networks with the hashtag #Visualcontagions!
You'll see that image research is not always a smooth ride.
The clusters speak as much about the visual cultures of the past, the international circulation of images and their economy, as about the economy of our project, our fantasies and our anxieties.
Many clusters gathered by our algorithms raise more questions than they solve. The machine seems to mock us, especially when it combines images and texts, whose proximity, born of chance, gives rise to logic and meaning that take us by surprise.
What is, indeed, a research on three million illustrations, on a worldwide corpus, which one will never have time to read everything? It is an experience of the deluge, but also of random scuba diving, sometimes an opportunity to discover treasures, when other times it is only old shoes or cans that come up from our lines.
In both cases, what the machine does with our sources surprises us, amuses us, intrigues us. New questions arise, the search is revived just as we were beginning to tire.
This month's chapters:
* Do we share our jokes between countries? Humor in pictures, on a global scale.
* This summer, getter bigger breasts and grow your hair back...
* when the machine laughs at us .