6 May 2023 - University of Antwerp
Initiated by Mona Hedayati
Guest speakers: Dr. Marie-Luise Angerer, Dr. Chris Salter, Dr. Ana Viseu
The focus of this call is on our daily interaction with our technology-mediated surroundings; i.e., interaction between humans and computational devices and systems. The coming together of humans and machines has shaped the current understanding of our environments as well as the everyday technological practices and their spatio-temporal but also socio-cultural situatedness.
The goal behind this call is thus to address the politics of this convergence by questioning techno-scientific objectivity. As such, we aspire to grapple with cross-disciplinary disconnects, notably the existing gap between computational research-practices, problem-oriented critical perspectives from social sciences and humanities, and artistic practices. Accordingly, we intend to look into human-machine codes of interaction, leaky boundaries and shifting agencies to explore spaces in between the quantitative, the qualitative, the performative, and the subversive.
Such spaces not only encompass computation as social practice but also insist on technology-mediated artistic/performative interventions with their potential to fuse the disparate epistemic sites. This call, thus, is meant to cut across disciplines to take a closer look at situated knowledges that can emanate from issue-based human-machine collaboration and question the non-negotiable holiness of the analytical, the statistical, and the algorithmic. In anticipation of such formations, it engages with but is not bound by the following questions:
- How can we bring socio-political thickness and critical perspectives to human-machine interaction to interrogate the trope of measurement, classification, and implementation, e.g., in affective computing, as the hallmark of techno-scientific knowledge production?
- In what ways can artistic practices shift the focus from techno-scientific processes as objects of study in themselves and instead implement them as mediators to draw attention to critical issues and injustices?
And in its aftermath, it inquires:
- What types of creative and critical tactics, tools, and methods can emanate from situated approaches to human-machine convergence and how can they be adapted and translated to other relevant frameworks?
Programme
- 09:30 - 10:00 Registration and coffee/tea – *mandatory for attendees*
- 10:00 - 10:15 Welcome and opening remarks
- 10:15 - 12:00 Roundtable: Human-Machine Hybrid in a Petri Dish: Zooming in on Affect, Sensoria, and Augmentation
Dr. Marie-Luise Angerer (University of Potsdam), Dr. Chris Salter (Concordia University/Zurich University of the Arts), Dr. Ana Viseu (European University of Lisbon) - 12:00 - 12:30 Q&A session
- 12:30 - 13:30 Lunch break
- 13:30 - 14:15 1st panel presentation: Machines as Agents for Affective Attunement?
Manuel Hendry (Zurich University of the Arts) – The Feeling Machine
Mona Hedayati (Concordia University/University of Antwerp) – Eventing collective affectivity of Trauma through Sensory Entanglement: Eating with the Ears, Listening with the Tongue - 14:15 –15:00 2nd panel presentation: Troubling the Extractivist-Solutionist Paradigms
Yann Patrick Martins (Basel Academy of Art & Design) – From Post-Luddites to Ludism: Critical Debugging as Playful Browser Practice
Felix Gerloff (Basel Academy of Art & Design) – Co-Creating Response-able Environments: Interdisciplinary Media-Ecological Design Research - 15:00 - 15:30 Tea/Coffee break
- 15:30 - 16:15 3rd panel presentation: Sensory-Performative Technoscientific Assemblages
Dr. Stelios Manousakis (independent artist) – Sensing Bodies with Ubiquitous WiFi Signals: Juxtaposing Artistic and Techno-Scientific Practices
Dr. Lotfi Gouigah (Bristol School of Art) – Art’s Theories of Everything: Performativity, Science, and the Enigma of their Entanglement in Art - 16:15 - 17:00 4th panel presentation: Unhinging Quantification Temporalities
Dr. Kevin Walker (Coventry University) & Dr. Helga Schmid (London College of Communication) - Beyond Runtime: Towards a Postdigital Temporality - 17:00 - 18:00 Closing remarks & future perspectives
- 18:00 - 20:30 Reception & networking dinner
Supported by
