Mathematics is a strange and powerful type of artifice. Because of their abstract nature, mathematical notions and operations exhibit extreme conceptual mobility, as they can be deployed in numerous fields of inquiry addressing diverse scales of reality, from the hyper-local to the hyper-global. As a result, mathematics appears to be part of almost everything, yet it remains a diffuse and elusive ‘thing’ since it is rarely directly observable with the naked eye. This paradoxical status poses a set of challenges to thinking mathematics as a vector of cultural production.

That said, mathematical practices have their own distinctive cultures and genealogies. While they might align with historical and technological developments, they can hardly be reducible to them. Numerous contemporary examples show how the emergence of novel mathematical practices—such as recursion theory, graph theory, or proof theory—has coincided with the advent of particular socio-technical artefacts, including computers, their networks, and programming languages. These artefacts often tend to serve as both the metaphor and performative sites of such practices. In this sense, mathematics becomes artificially ‘true’ not because of an intrinsic necessity, but because its concepts are operationalised, stabilised, and made performative and thus effective through their embedding in these socio-technical artefacts.

Our research group engages with this ‘artificiality’ of mathematics through theoretical means and practical interventions. We are interested in mathematics understood as a situated cultural practice: a type of doing that is interwoven in multiple fields—from the sciences to the arts—each having their own epistemic concerns and ways of reasoning. Our aim is to stimulate interdisciplinary dialogues between these fields in order to forge a critical and nuanced understanding of what mathematics is, what it does, and where it operates. Our activities are multiple: we host a reading group, we report on research-in-progress, we organise seminars and events, and we produce experimental artefacts staging encounters with acts of mathematics.

For further information and inquiries, you can contact: David Gauthier

Research Activities