[spectre] CFP: Conf. Politics of the Machine (Aalborg, May 2018), deadline 22 Dec 2017

[Andreas Broeckmann]

Call for Proposals

Conference

POLITICS OF THE MACHINES – ART AND AFTER
EVA-Copenhagen 15-17 May 2018

Deadline (500 word proposals): 22 December, 2017

http://www.eva-copenhagen.dk

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 Presentations

All 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, 2018

The 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.