2025 Vintage

Welcome, dear readers, to the Bauhaus Exhibition 2025, where 97 students collectively decided that the best way to understand communication theory was to build something, perform something, or make you deeply uncomfortable in a room with a cardboard panopticon. Across 19 projects, they took the ideas that usually live in academic papers and dragged them into physical space: Aristotle's rhetoric staged as a romantic dinner, Lasswell's five questions turned into an interactive obstacle course, Foucault's surveillance theory reconstructed from coffee cups and red thread. They examined media ownership in Marseille, the mechanics of propaganda from wartime posters to TikTok algorithms, and the century-long history of visual manipulation hiding inside your phone's interface. Some built boxes. Some kidnapped their visitors. One group made you wait for permission to leave.The blogs below document a selection of what they made, how they made it, and what happened when the room filled up. The slideshow at the bottom of the page gives you the rest. Read on.

La Fabrique du Regard

We spend hours on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube convinced we are choosing what we watch. The students behind La Fabrique du Regard started from a different premise: that what appears on our screens is largely determined by systems we cannot see, and that those systems have a history longer than the internet. The question they asked was not what we watch, but who built the frame through which we watch it.

The answer they found ran through three moments. First, the Bauhaus, which in the early twentieth century developed a visual grammar based on geometric forms, primary colours, simplified typography, and a resolutely functional approach to composition. Its ambition was democratic: a universal language accessible to all.

Order, chaos, equilibrium

Claude Shannon, the American engineer and mathematician who founded modern information theory in 1948, proposed that information could be measured and quantified in terms of uncertainty, independently of the meaning of the message.

The core idea is deceptively simple: the more unexpected a message is, the more information it carries. This group of students took this abstract proposition and transformed it into a three-part immersive exhibition, designed to make visitors feel the concepts of entropy, noise and signal not as mathematical formulas, but as lived physical experiences.

Propagande 2.0 : du XXe siècle aux réseaux sociaux

Propaganda did not end with the twentieth century. It changed channels. This was the central argument of Propagande 2.0, an exposition that traced the mechanics of persuasion from wartime posters to TikTok trends, using Harold Lasswell's communication model as both its theoretical spine and its physical architecture.

Lasswell's five questions, Who says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect, became five stations. Each one asked visitors to do something rather than simply observe. At the first station, images of wartime governments, electoral campaigns, humanitarian organisations, and contemporary influencers were placed side by side, not to equate them morally but to show that the structure of their messages follows the same logic regardless of who is sending them.

Let's Date

A candlelit table. A nervous volunteer. Three very opinionated advisors. This was the premise of Let's Date, the live exposition created these students for their Bauhaus Exposition. The concept was deceptively simple: use the theater of a romantic date to teach Aristotle's three rhetorical devices, logos, pathos, and ethos, to anyone willing to sit down at the table.

The premise held that a first date is, at its core, a persuasion exercise. You are trying to convince the person across from you that you are worth a second one. Rhetoric, the students argued, is not confined to political speeches or courtroom arguments. It lives in every conversation where someone is trying to win someone else over.

Propaganda Saadé

In France at the dawn of 2025, nine billionaires control 90% of private national media. This hyper-concentration of ownership is not incidental. It is a structural condition, one that subordinates information to private interest. Among those nine, one figure stands apart for his reach into the south of France: Rodolphe Saadé, CEO of CMA CGM, the Franco-Lebanese shipping giant founded in Marseille in 1978 and now the third largest container transport company in the world. Since 2022, Saadé has moved systematically into media. La Provence for 81 million euros. A stake in M6. La Tribune. Then Altice Média, bringing BFMTV and RMC into the fold. By 2025, he had added Brut, Chérie FM, and Corse-Matin. Each acquisition was framed publicly as a philanthropic act, a rescue operation for a struggling press. Before the National Assembly's economic affairs committee, Saadé positioned himself as a defender of pluralism and journalistic independence. The recorded evidence told a different story.

Panoptic surveillance

We live in a society saturated with images. In the media, on the street, on our phones, images are everywhere and none of them are neutral. But the question the students behind Mise au Point chose to ask was a more specific and more uncomfortable one: what happens when images are used not to document reality, but to control it?

The exposition traced this question across four technological eras, from the invention of photography to artificial intelligence, showing at each stage both the liberating potential of a new visual technology and the speed with which governments moved to weaponise it. Photography, celebrated in the 1860s as a revolutionary scientific and artistic tool, was used after the Paris Commune of 1871 to identify and execute revolutionaries.