POLITICS OF THE MACHINES – ART AND AFTER
EVA-Copenhagen 15-17 May 2018Deadline (500 word proposals): 22 December, 2017
The question of how the machine impacts and contextualizes artistic production and perception is the overall topic of this conference. Recent research on the impact of machines and technology on art places the machine in the centre of ‘ecologies’ (Fuller), ‘archaeologies’ (Parikka) and ‘aesthetics of interaction’ (Kwastek) pointing towards a ‘techno-ontology’ (Broeckmann).
However, the growing interest in describing the phenomenon of the ‘computer’ as the electronic machine has risked to keep both the computer and technology more broadly trapped within a logic in which technology appears as our transcendence from which we ‘cannot escape’ (Heidegger, Zizek). Whereas the matter of technology should always be approached critically, the focus on machines as ‘digital’ and ‘electronic’ hides the alternative, experimental and different ontologies and materialities of the machine and the correspondingly different epistemologies they may operate in. Throughout his writings, Bruno Latour, for instance, develops a thinking based on the notion of the ‘politics of things’, which may also give our relation to machines a less immaterial and semiological bias. How are the relationality and operationality of machines being negotiated into cultural and social ontologies? With this conference we want to address the politics of machines and the ‘inescapable’ technological structures, as well as the critical infrastructures of artistic production in-between human and non-human agency.
Where do experimental and artistic practices work beyond the human / non-human dualisms and into biological, hybrid, cybernetic, vibrant, uncanny, overly material, darkly ecological, critical, (etc.) machines?
We welcome submissions that take a fresh approach to the politics of the machine, and exemplify, analyse and/or contextualize alternative and experimental ontologies and epistemologies of art beyond dualisms.
We are calling for proposals within nine streams or framings:
– Emotional Machines
– Cyborgs/Hybrids
– Religion, Technology, and Art
– Algorithms and Intelligence in Art After Aesthetics
– Machines of Atmospheres
– Wet Machines
– Robots in art
– Returns of the machine
– Institutional PresentationsAll papers will be published online on the British Computer Society platform. More information will follow.
Submit a proposal of a maximum 500 words via the website.
http://www.eva-copenhagen.dk/pom-call-for-proposals/
Important dates:
– Deadline for abstracts – extended: December 22, 2017
– Deadline for submission of papers: March 10, 2018
– Registration for conference: 13 April, 2018
– After a double-blind review process, the papers will be presented at the conference, May 15-17, 2018.
– Final paper for peer-review: 15 June, 2018
– Camera-ready paper submission: 1 September, 2018The conference is hosted by Aalborg University Copenhagen and IT-U Copenhagen in collaboration with EVA London, Computer Arts Society, British Computer Society, and DIAS Gallery Copenhagen.