Anthropologist Emmanuel Grimaud, CNRS bronze medalist in 2011, is interested in human and technical frontiers. Accustomed to Asian terrain, particularly India and Japan, he has explored subjects as diverse and original as the organization of a film studio (Bollywood film studio, CNRS, 2004), the life of a Gandhi double (Gandhi’s Double or the incredible story of Ram Dayal Srivastava, CNRS, 2007), the anthropology of an archaeological excavation (“Archéologie et ventriloquie”, in “Gradhiva”, 2013) or even hypnosis techniques and past life experiences (“Reborn in real time”, “ Field. Anthropology and human sciences ”, 2016).
It is within the framework of his research in robotics that this researcher at the Laboratory of ethnology and comparative sociology (LESC) of the CNRS set up, with his colleague Zaven Paré, the experiment Ganesh Yourself conducted in India. This consisted of creating a robot with the appearance of the elephant god Ganesh allowing anyone to embody this god or have a conversation with him.
From this experience came a documentary, Ganesh Yourself (Arte, 2016), and the book Zero point god published in June (PUF, 232 pages, 24 euros), in which the researcher reflects on how an attempt to renew the divine makes concrete metaphysical situations conducive, where each one asks an unprecedented question: what still unexplored forms could God to take ?
What does the “Ganesh Yourself” experience, carried out in Mumbai in 2014 with the artist Zaven Paré, consist of and which fed your work “Dieu point zero”?
Emmanuel Grimaud.- The experience Ganesh Yourself consisted of creating a robotic interface of Ganesh, one of the most popular elephant-headed god in India, which allows anyone to embody this god and have a conversation with him. We baptized the robot Bappa because this is how the divinity is commonly called.
Concretely, it was about a completely minimalist machine, of which only the trunk was animated by sensors. The machine was then remotely operated by a person embodying Ganesh and whose face was transmitted in the robot’s mask via a webcam connected by a cable.
A sort of role-playing game was then set up close to a Turing test (artificial intelligence test questioning the machine’s ability to imitate human conversation) between the operator, or “incarnant”, who put himself in the place of god, and the interlocutor who tested the ability of the first to properly embody this role – this operator, posted near the robot, not being hidden.
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