In July 2022, while megafires were devastating the the southwest coast of France, the mayor of one of the affected villages organized a boat gathering in front of the dunes where the pine trees were still burning. Beautiful drone footage showed yachts and powerful speedboats circling on the water. 

The image is absurd: motorboats burning energy in support of an area ravaged by fire, the symptom of an environmental crisis caused by such human activities. But this absurdity reveals our collective difficulty in moving beyond a certain imaginary of the “machine for carrying around” (to paraphrase Le Corbusier’s “machines for living in”). It is as if our imagination were trapped in that circle of motorboats, unable to do away with the fantasy of machines that are bigger, faster and safer. 

The same applies to the circulation of information. The transport of information involves movement but the physical conveyor of information is not transported per se. After WWII, and cybernetics, information and media theories introduced something new in our imaginary of transport affecting our cartographic imagination in multiple ways. However, it seems our means of information transport are also fast, big, and safe—and therefore energy-intensive. We even speak of information superhighways.

Yet some forms of transport escape this imaginary field. The bicycle is the most obvious example: it is neither big, nor fast, sometimes not even safe. The machine and the body become one and the same thing, the body the very agent of its transportation. One can also be transported by love (an expression more common in French and Italian). In love, what is transported seems to escape the duality between matter—or bodies—and information. The same holds for dreams. In Poetique de la rêverie, Bachelard identifies a paradox in the “transport of the dreamer into another world,” where they are both the same and different. The case of Sisyphus is also a counterexample: he is not a cargo ship, not even a delivery man, and he transports stones, which are not goods.

The purpose of this seminar is not so much to analyze the role of this transport-machine imaginary in the development of capitalism, colonial enterprises, or the formation of a centralized state. We invite proposals that explore alternative imaginaries of transport which can range from lowtechs to dreams and drugs, or from the image of Sisyphus to that of pregnancy. Alternative imaginaries of transport can be identified in fiction especially in science-fiction or fantasy. The seminar will encourage proposals dealing with the forms of spatiality and worldliness alternative imaginaries of transport entail, and the subjectivities they imply—ones that no longer conform to the two-fold distinctions of passengers versus goods, matter versus information, space versus times. Depending on submissions, one of the three sessions of the seminar will be devoted to research-based creative approaches.