Tag: call for papers

Digital Ecologies II: Fiction Machines

Digital Ecologies II: Fiction Machines has a website with cfp and submission details. See here: https://www.bathspa.ac.uk//news-and-events/events/digital-ecologies-ii/

Digital Ecologies II: Fiction Machines

Tuesday 16 July, 2019
9:00 AM – 5:00 PM
The Centre for Media Research
Bath Spa University
Newton Park, Newton St Loe, Bath, BA2 9BN

Keynote speakers

  • Professor Simon O’Sullivan, Professor of Art, Theory and Practice, Goldsmiths College, London
  • Dr Tony David-Sampson, Reader in Digital Media Culture and Communication, University of East London

Call for papers

In the introduction to his book Fiction as Method (2017) Jon K Shaw identifies a fictional place called ‘Null Island’, a fiction that is located at a point in the centre of the earth where no one can travel to, set amongst the lava.

“From this unreal centre the machines can tag our photos to map our memories and images onto the material world, can align our satellites to coordinate and connect us across the planet. Whenever we perform one of these actions, we pass through this fiction. We are transported home via the fictional island.”

Our vision of the earth and of each other is increasingly filtered through the operations of a complex assemblage of networked computational writing machines and, as Shaw implies, these exist at the centre of our world and our daily experience. As a result the planet itself is increasingly becoming computational, Nigel Thrift describes how the ‘real’ as we know it is the result of multiple simultaneous ‘writing machines’ using a continuous looping process of algorithms.

Humans now exist within complex informational spaces that produce affects, simulate, analyse and respond to user and environmental data. Within these conditions fiction and reality become increasingly blurred, machine and human voices difficult to distinguish.

These machines allow for the generation of complex webs of fabulation which exist in a plethora of contexts from corporate identities to labyrinthine brand stories, to political propaganda and the operations of the derivatives market.

Furthermore our understanding of the ecological is itself increasingly filtered through multiple layers of networked technologies, sensors, algorithms and data visualisations. Jennifer Gabrys discusses the notion of ‘planetary scale computerisation’ and how this leads to the generation of ‘new living conditions, subjectivities, and imaginaries’. (Gabrys, 2016)

Within this context new fictional strategies within creative practice emerge as important weapons for critique, intervention, speculation and change. As Simon O’Sullivan notes: fiction can be used not as a matter of ‘make believe’ but rather in a Ranciere sense of forging the real to better approximate historical and contemporary experience.

In the symposium we ask how fictional methods are being employed to rethink and renegotiate our relationship with current and future technologies; how such methods can be used from activist and political perspectives; how they can address and critique post-truth conditions; how they can reveal forgotten histories and non-human perspectives; and how they can be used to speculate on, and design, new futures.

As Benjamin Bratton notes: ‘Our shared design project will require both different relationships to machines (carbon based machines and otherwise) and a more promiscuous figurative imagination.’

We are interested in submissions from interdisciplinary researchers including artists, filmmakers, writers, geographers, scientists and theorists whose work connects with the themes of the symposium or the below listed research strands.

Symposium strands

  1. Activist fictions – responses that employ fiction as a political or social method for recuperation/change/intervention
  2. Speculative design fictions – responses that utilise fiction to reimagine social, environmental and technological futures
  3. Non-human fictions – responses that employ fiction to bring non-human perspectives and voices into view
  4. Post-truth – responses that critique and subvert the mechanisms and mediation of post-truth.

 

Call for Papers for A&SM#4: Notifications from the Technological Nonconscious

Affect & Social Media#4: Notifications from the Technological Nonconscious

Conference date: Wednesday, November 7th 2018

Venue: University Square Stratford Building, East London, UK

Keynote: Patricia Ticineto Clough

Keynote Panel (tbc)

Conference Information Page: https://viralcontagion.wordpress.com/affect-social-media4/

Francesco-Tacchini

To mark the publication of the first Affect and Social Media book (Rowman and Littlefield, July 2018) we are very pleased to announce a cfp for a special A&SM#4 one day (free registration) conference.

We welcome 250 word abstracts for 15min presentations from scholars working across disciplinary borders, theories, concepts and methodologies (arts & humanities, social sciences, psychology, computer and data science etc.).

We especially welcome contributions from postgraduate students and early career researchers.

Abstracts should ideally respond creatively (and flexibly) to one of the six conference themes set out below.

Deadline for submission of abstracts: Sept 15th 2018.

Send a 250 word abstract as an email (no attachments) including full name, affiliation and email contact address to t.d.sampson@uel.ac.uk

Accepted abstracts will help to frame a series of subsequent discussion points/questions that will be addressed by our keynote panel (to be announced shortly).

Conference Themes

  1. Unthinking

The exponential rise of social media in the early twenty first century has drawn much critical attention in the humanities to a seemingly paradoxical human-computer relation. On one hand, human thought is both contemporaneous with, and frequently outperformed by, the uber-cognitions of corporate computational media technology. There is, indeed, much concern expressed about the possible absence of human consciousness from the computational world it created (Hayles, 2017; Hansen, 2015). On the other hand though, it would seem that the thoughts, feelings, behaviours and experiences of social media users, far from disappearing, are, often by design, captured and nudged from here to there by an expanding yet mostly imperceptible technological nonconscious (Clough, 2000, Thrift, 2007, Grusin, 2010). What, if anything, is disappearing in the human-computer relation?

  1. Addicting    

Computational media can no longer simply be defined through the operations of narrowly defined cognitive machines implicated in clandestine data harvesting and the manipulation of individual users through e.g. psychographic profiling. Social media is a “social” machine of capture that works on relations and shared felt experiences (Sampson, Maddison and Ellis, 2018), triggering habitual tendencies (Chun, 2016) that seem to produce mass media addictions (Bartlett and Bowden-Jones, 2017). As a major component part of the propagation of the technological nonconscious, social media is less defined today by the familiar ease of connection discourses of Web 2.0 than it is by the difficulty of disconnection (Karppi, 2018). Like other media of addiction (drugs, gambling, sex), social media hooks users in the event of the habit refrain, triggering subsequent emotional anxieties and contagions. Is social media addiction a problem of personal compulsion or collective masochism?

  1. Feeling 

Computational social media is a feeling machine. It feels, or prehends, the event (Ellis, 2018). But this does not mean that it has feelings, in the sense in which humans feel. There are limitations imposed on the potential of affective computing to actually feel (Shaviro, 2015). Social media is constrained to the mere reading of sentiment data, and like an actor, it can feign expressions of human emotion, but cannot feel them. However, the operational level of computational media can learn, algorithmically, from emotional experiences. It can pass on, or transmit, feelings. It can plant a behavioural hook in the user experience. Social media has an affective tone or atmosphere through which the human-computer relation strives. Feeling the event is a different matter.

  1. Sleeping

Always on social media never sleeps! “Prolonged awakening, work without the limit of time, excessive light, surplus information… links… attentional capture is the new Atopia” (Neyrat, 2017). But the users of social media are often positioned as vulnerable, sleepwalking user-subjects: the user unconscious (Clough, 2018), the network somnambulist (Sampson, 2012, 2016). Like Crary’s (1999) earlier rendition of attentive analogue media subjects, the users of social media are simultaneously attentive and inattentive, and attracted and distracted by the fascinations of notifications, posts, tweets, likes, shares… This technological nonconscious, or Unthought (Hayles, 2017) human-computer relation is not unconscious, as conventionally understood.

  1. Dreaming

In The User Unconscious: On Affect. Media, and Measure (2018), Patricia Ticineto Clough argues that computational media networks have fundamentally affected what it means to be human. “We are both human and other-than-human.” This luminous text explains what it means to live, think, and dream from this “other-than-human perspective.” Here Clough moves to answer questions concerning the extent to which human lives are now animated in the multiple layers of these vast computational networks and how these layers radically transform our sense of self, subjectivity, sociality, and unconscious processes. How can we probe what it means to live, think, and dream through this newly animated technological nonconscious?

  1. Trumping

Who is to blame for Trump? Trump on Twitter may seem like the unpredictable personal opinions of a racist, sexist, xenophobe that infects a population, but the technological nonconscious, or thing-self of the user unconscious, as Clough points out, “transgress[es] the separation of the personal and the networked.” It is the “affective tone” of social media itself that made Trump possible! Social media has given expressive support to a kind of microfascist populism or “population racism” that is currently spreading everywhere. What will it take to out trump the collective impulse that is Trump?

Top illustration by Francesco Tacchini, 2015

sholim

Final Call for Abstracts: “Neuroaffect” at Capacious

Final Call for Abstracts: “Neuroaffect” at Capacious: Affect Inquiry/Making Space Conference: August 8 to 11, 2018
Final reminder – The final deadline for submissions is Thursday, March 15, 2018.
Call for 250-word paper abstracts for Stream 15: Neuroaffect
For Capacious: Affect Inquiry/Making Space Conference: August 8 to 11, 2018 at Millersville University’s Ware Center, Lancaster, Pennsylvania: http://capaciousjournal.com/conference/

S15: “Neuroaffect”
cropped-phrenology

Call for 250-word paper abstracts can now be submitted to
The final deadline for submissions is Thursday, March 15, 2018.
STREAM ORGANIZER
Tony D. Sampson
For the most part affect theory has enthusiastically welcomed the neurosciences into its fold. Through the work of Libet (1985), Damasio (1995), and LeDoux (2003), for example, affect theorists have challenged mainstream anthropocentricism in the humanities, upsetting the stability of a model of human cognition previously assumed to hold sway over the perceptible world. As follows, the brain sciences have helped to support an alternative perspective in which humans arrive late to consciousness since their brains take time to build a cognitive reaction. Immediate experience of consciousness is, as such, a backdated illusion and just one of many responses to the dynamics of the exteriority of experience. As Gibbs (2010) argues, there can be no “pure cognition… uncontaminated by the richness of sensate experience, including affective experience” (p. 200). Indeed, according to affect theory, thinking is not at all limited to the thought inside the brain. On one hand, somatic markers act as a kind of corporeal thinking in which emotion becomes a capture of affect in consciousness. On the other, a new materialist affect theory extends the image of thought to a wider remit of incorporeal sense making including nonhumans, self-organizing matter, assemblages and events. The analytical focus has thus shifted away from conventional cognitive processes (perception, memory, representation) to the significance of such things as imperceptibility (Grosz, 2003), precognition and nonrepresentation (Thrift, 2007), premediation (Grusin, 2010), processual incorporeality (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010) and discognition (Shaviro, 2015).
There has, nevertheless, been an inevitable backlash against affect theory’s cosying up to the brain sciences. Wetherall (2012), for example, argues that Thrift and Massumi take the wrong message from neuroscience (p. 61). Her work does not simply reject neuroscience, but instead uses it to (re)personalize affect and renegotiate it alongside discourse, representation and meaning. Similarly, Hayles (2017) has recently drawn on the same neuroscientific resources as affect theory (e.g. Damasio, Libet), but argues against the Spinoza-Deleuzian overtures of new materialism and returns the brain (and its fellow cognizers) to the cognitive theoretical frame.
The neuroaffect stream welcomes provocative, inventive and speculative interventions that engage with the wide-ranging influence of the neurosciences on affect theory and related areas. It asks for submissions that engage with neuro-concepts of affect, such as the nonconscious, somatic markers, lags, mirror neurons, neuro-typicality, assemblage brains, technological nonconscious and discognition, while also addressing the numerous challenges and reinventions of affect stemming from various interventions in the humanities and social sciences.
Possible topics for the stream are not limited to the following neuros:
Neuroaffect, somatic markers, lags, mirror neurons, neuro-typicality, cognition, noncognition, discognition, consciousness, nonconsciousness, technological nonconscious, brains, microbrains, assemblage brains, temporality and space, locationism, neuroevents, neuropolitics, neuropopulism, neuro-dystopia/utopia, neurocapitalism, neuromedia, ontology, nonhumans, Anthropocene, contagion, organic and inorganic matter, assemblages, antilocationism, neurophilosophy, neurophenomenology, neuroprocess philosophy, neurocomputing, neural nets, brain-computer interfaces, neurofiction, brain-art, neuroaesthetics, neurobleedin’ everything…
REFERENCES

Damasio, A. (1995). Descartes’ error: emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: Penguin.

Damasio, A. (2000). The feeling of what happens: body, emotion, and the making of consciousness. London: Vintage.

Gibbs, A. (2010). After affect sympathy, Synchrony, and mimetic communication. In Gregg, M. & Seigworth, G. J. (Eds.), The affective theory reader (pp. 186-205). Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Gregg, M. & Seigworth, G. J. (2010). The affective theory reader. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Grosz, E. (2002). A politics of imperceptibility: A response to ‘anti-racism, multiculturalism and the ethics of identification’ Philosophy and Social Criticism. 28 (4) pp. 463-472.

Grusin, R. (2010). Premediation: affect and mediality after 9/11. New York, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hayles, K. N. (2006). Traumas in code. Critical Inquiry 33(1), 136-157.

Hayles, K. N. (2017). Unthought: the power of the cognitive nonconscious. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Karppi, T. Kahkonen, L. & Mannevuo, M. (Eds.) (2016). Affective capitalism. Ephemera (16)4 Ephemera.

LeDoux, J. (2003). The synaptic self: how our brains become who we are. New York: Penguin Books.

Libet, B. (1985). Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action. Behavioral Brain Sciences. (8)5, 29–566.

Rolls, E. T. (2012). Neuroculture: on the implications of brain science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Shaviro, S. (2015). Discognition. New York: Repeater Books.

Sampson, T. D. (2016). The Assemblage brain: sense making in neuroculture. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

Thrift, N. (2004). Remembering the technological unconscious by foregrounding knowledges of position. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 22(1), 175-190.

Thrift, N. (2007). Non-Representational theory: space, politics, affect. New York, London: Routledge.

Dr Tony D Sampson PhD, MA, BSc, FHEA
Reader in Digital Media Cultures and Communications
College of Arts, Technology and Innovation
UEL

 

Streams of Consciousness: Data, Cognition and Intelligent Devices cfp

Call for Papers

Streams of Consciousness: Data, Cognition and Intelligent Devices conference at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, Warwick University, 21st and 22nd of April 2016

“What’s on your mind?” This is the question to which every Facebook status update now responds. Millions of users sharing their thoughts in one giant performance of what Clay Shirky once called “cognitive surplus”. Contemporary media platforms aren’t simply a stage for this cognitive performance. They are more like directors, staging scenes, tweaking scripts, working to get the best or fully “optimized” performance. As Katherine Hayles has pointed out, media theory has long taken for granted that we think “through, with and alongside media”. Pen and paper, the abacus, and modern calculators are obvious cases in point, but the list quickly expands and with it longstanding conceptions of the Cartesian mind dissolve away. Within the cognitive sciences, cognition is now routinely described as embodied, extended, and distributed. They too recognize that cognition takes place beyond the brain, in between people, between people and things, and combinations thereof. The varieties of specifically human thought, from decision-making to reasoning and interpretation, are now considered one part of a broader cognitive spectrum shared with other animals, systems, and intelligent devices.

Today, the technology we mostly think through, with and alongside are computers. We routinely rely on intelligent devices for any number of operations, but this is no straightforward “augmentation”. Our cognitive capacities are equally instrumentalized, plugged into larger cognitive operations from which we have little autonomy. Our cognitive weaknesses are exploited and manipulated by techniques drawn from behavioural economics and psychology. If Vannevar Bush once pondered how we would think in the future, he received a partial response in Steve Krug’s best selling book on web usability: Don’t Make Me Think! Streams of Consciousness aims to explore cognition, broadly conceived, in an age of intelligent devices. We aim to critically interrogate our contemporary infatuation with specific cognitive qualities – such as “smartness” and “intelligence” – while seeking to genuinely understand the specific forms of cognition that are privileged in our current technological milieu. We are especially interested in devices that mediate access to otherwise imperceptible forms of data (too big, too fast), so it can be acted upon in routine or novel ways.

Topics of the conference include but are not limited to:

– data and cognition

– decision-making technologies

– algorithms, AI and machine learning

– visualization, perception

– sense and sensation

– business intelligence and data exploration

– signal intelligence and drones

– smart and dumb things

– choice and decision architecture

– behavioural economics and design

– technologies of nudging

– interfaces

– bodies, data, and (wearable) devices

– optimization

– web and data analytics (including A/B and multivariate testing)

Please submit individual abstracts of no longer than 300 words. Panel proposals are also welcome and should also be 300 words. Panel proposals should also include individual abstracts. The deadline for submissions is Friday the 18th of December and submissions should be made to cimconf@warwick.ac.uk. Accepted submissions will be notified by 20th of January 2016.

Streams of Consciousness is organised by Nathaniel Tkacz and Ana Gross. The event is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council.

Affect and Social Media Symposium #2 – cfp Dec 15th deadline

Affect and Social Media Symposium #2 – cfp Dec 15th deadline

Wednesday 23rd March 2016

University of East London, Docklands Campus, Room EB. G.06

Call for 15min Presentations/Position Papers

Following on from the success of last year’s Affect and Social Media research symposium, the emotionUX lab in the School of Arts and Digital Industries at UEL, and in collaboration this year with Cass School of Education and Communities at UEL, will be hosting a second event continuing to explore the relation between social media, affect, feelings and emotions.

Numerous studies from various fields have described interactions with social media in terms of emotional, affective and feely experiences. It is claimed that habitual access to Facebook can have a negative impact on mood and subjective well-being (Kross et al, 2013). Likewise, emotional states experienced on social media can be transferred to others through emotional contagion, ‘leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness’ (Kramer, 2014). Similarly, positive emotions, like joy, are regarded as more likely to spread than negative ones (Berger and Milkman, 2010).

This year’s call for 15min presentations/position papers asks contributors to explore emotional, affective and feely experiences with social media. More specifically, we ask contributors to investigate how social media ‘work[s] in concert with bodies in the production of emotional and affective activity’ (Ellis and Tucker, 2015: 177).

We welcome proposals on a wide variety of themes that cross disciplinary boundaries. For example…

Addiction and social media
Affective contagion
Affect theory relating to social media
Care, emotions and social media
Methodologies relating to emotion, affect and social media
Consumption, emotions and affect on social media
Education, emotions and social media
Emotional and affective contagions
Emotional social media design (theory and practice)
Ethical considerations
Felt experiences on social media
Social gaming and emotions
HCI and emotion
Learning, emotion and social media
Marketing, emotion and social media
Networked emotions
Online emotional ethnographies
Pervasive computing and emotion
Emotions and privacy
Emotions and security
Sharing emotions
Emotions and trust
The politics of emotional user experiences
Please send a title, brief outline (100words) and institutional affiliation to
t.d.sampson@uel.ac.uk and E.Theodotou@uel.ac.uk

Activities

Deadlines

Abstract Submission

15th December 2015

Acceptance notification

15th January 2016

Registration for presenters

Details to follow

Registration for all participants

Details to follow

Fees and registration
(Refreshments, after symposium drinks and nibbles and attendance certificate included in all registration types)

Presenters – Free

UEL students/academics – Free

External students – £3

External academics/participants – £5

Please keep an eye out for follow up emails regarding registration
Updates will also appear on the Virality blog and EmotionUX news page
https://viralcontagion.wordpress.com/
http://emotionuxlab.co.uk/news/

Ephemera call for papers on special issue on Affective Capitalism

This from the organizers of the Affective Capitalism symposium in Turku last week…

Call for papers for an ephemera special issue on: Affective Capitalism

Issue Editors: Tero Karppi, Anu Laukkanen, Mona Mannevuo, Mari
Pajala, Tanja Sihvonen

This special issue aims at describing and understanding the regime of
‘affective capitalism’. Read on CFP_AffectiveCapitalism_ephemeraSI

AffectiveCapitalismPoster

cfp Radical Space (CCSR) – please tweet

The Centre for Cultural Studies Research at the University of East London invites proposals for Radical Space, a conference to take place at the UEL Docklands Campus on Friday and Saturday, 18th and 19th October, 2013. We are pleased to announce that Deborah Dixon and Carl Lavery of Aberystwyth University have now been confirmed as keynote speakers. They will be joined by Dimitris Papodopoulos (University of Leicester) and the independent artist Joanna Rajkowska.

We are interested in presentations which address the problematics of space both as concept and as lived social reality, with a particular emphasis on the tension between spaces of control in the context of contemporary neoliberalism, spaces of resistance and the apocalyptic spaces which emerge from war, forced migration and the failures of consumer capitalism.

What are the politics of space in contemporary contexts? How can we re-think space beyond the public/private divide? How do spatial arts re-configure space and the way in which it is experienced? What new configurations of space may emerge from burgeoning forms of community? How do the theatres of contemporary war force a re-assessment of spatial concepts? Is it still possible for the notion of virtual space to function in opposition to the striated space of contemporary cities?

We would welcome proposals which take a novel approach to presentation, particularly those which include elements of performance or which make creative use of the spaces made available for the conference.  Topics may include (but are not limited to):

Occupations and other resistant practices

Squatter communities and displacement camps

New theatres of war

Art in/of the street

Imagining extra-terrestrial space

Utopias and heterotopias

New imaginative architectures

Psychogeography in the 21st century

The space of the body and the body in space

Digital architectures and virtual space

Social networking as a new public sphere

Hacking, hacktivism and other digital spatial incursions

Cinema and post-urbanism

Cartography and performance

Class and social space

Music scenes and spaces of community/expression

The apocalyptic city

For further details, please refer to our website http://culturalstudiesresearch.org/?page_id=1155  . Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be submitted to either Debra Benita Shaw (d.shaw@uel.ac.uk) or Tony Sampson (sampson2@uel.ac.uk) on or before 15th April, 2013.