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1. Identifying, Deceiving, Protecting and Hunting: What Fictional Machines and Humans Do with Machine Vision Technologies

   This presentation explores the cultural imaginaries of machine vision as it is portrayed in contemporary science fiction, digital art and videogames. How are the relationships between humans and machines imagined in fictional situations and aesthetic contexts where machine vision technologies occur?

   Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:07

2. ‘Doing e-lit’ in print: Plus-Human Codes and the (re)Turn to the Bookbound

   “He may be a superdecoder or a superspy but he’s sort of neutral, though not quite like a machine, more like he’d, sort of, come and, reversed all our, traditional, oppositions, and questioned, all our, certainties”, or so Zab falteringly describes the Martian boulder-cum-supercomputer that has crash-landed in a disused Cornish mine.

   Christine Brooke-Rose’s 1986 novel, Xorandor, is remarkable as much for its eponymous radioactive-waste-guzzling, double-crossing rock, as for being partially narrated in the programming language, Poccom 3. Invented by siblings, Jip and Zab, first as a kind of idioglossia and then as a lingua franca for communicating with Xorandor, Poccom 3 is rather like the indeterminate rock: its presence in the text requires a supreme effort of decoding to begin with, becomes increasingly naturalized with exposure, but consistently questions all our certainties about the language of literature.

   Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:11

3. Literary and Aesthetic Posthumanism

   Grace Dillon, an Anishinaabe scholar of science fiction, writes that “Native slipstream,” a subgenre of speculative fiction, “views time as pasts, presents, and futures that flow together like a navigable stream.” The immense possibilities inherent to this genre, she continues, allow “authors to recover the Native space of the past, to bring it to the attention of contemporary readers, and to build better futures.” 

   Biidaaban (Dawn Comes) (2018), a short stop-motion film by Vancouver-based Michif filmmaker Amanda Strong, illustrates the political possibilities of Indigenous slipstream, and Indigenous science fiction more broadly, to envision liberatory futures in the face of forces that naturalize the current destructive, capitalist, and colonial order.

   Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:21

4. "the flows, the systems...the field of flesh": posthuman poetics, material assemblages, and networked cartographies in contemporay irish poetry

   This presentation examines a selection of poems by contemporary Irish poets at the intersections of technology, ecology, and literary aesthetics. I argue that the discussed poems, published during the past 30 years, anticipate or comment on the emerging posthumanist paradigm, what Rosi Braidotti describes as a system of “discursive objects of exchange” within a community of “transversal ‘assemblages’ […] that involves non-human actors and technological media”. 

   The work of poets described as “neo-modernists” has been, from the 1990s onwards in particular, closely attuned to changes in technology, environment, and the media. The work of Randolph Healy draws on his background in mathematical sciences. Trevor Joyce’s career as a Business Systems Analyst at Apple has informed his approach to language as structured, fragmented, and networked transmission of data.

   Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:32

5. Thoreau’s Radicle Empiricism: Arboreal Encounters and the Posthuman Forest

   It is time to liberate the forest from the anthropocentric metaphor. Donna Haraway, endorsing Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think (2013), says this clearly: “A thinking forest is not a metaphor.” Recent work by Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers on “Gaia,” along with Timothy Morton’s concept of the “hyperobject,” demands that we reevaluate our tendency toward metaphor when dealing with trees.

   Kohn’s work, along with Michael Marder’s and Peter Wohlleben’s, suggests that we emphasize the cognitive life of trees, rather than harnessing the image of trees as metaphors for human cognition. We must view the forest as a thinking entity in its own right.

   In this paper, I examine Henry David Thoreau’s writing as a model for an encounter with trees that moves beyond mere metaphor. Thoreau draws on his position as an American Transcendentalist and an empirical naturalist to approach trees both philosophically and scientifically. As a poet, he does not make poetry out of trees, but instead sees the poetry that trees themselves create.

   Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:36

6. Catherine Malabou, Anne Carson, and the Plasticity of Inheritance

   Catherine Malabou has pursued her philosophy of plasticity across a number of recent works, published over several decades. In books such as The Future of Hegel, The New Wounded, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, Before Tomorrow, and Morphing Intelligence, she has explored the intimate connections between brain plasticity and temporality as pertaining to key figures in the modern philosophical tradition: Hegel, Kant, Freud, Bergson, Derrida, and others.

   One might think of her corpus as composed of a series of adventurous and bold philosophical retracings, where motifs such as doublings, short circuits, metamorphoses, and wormholes through time feature prominently. She is a preeminent contemporary philosopher, but her work importantly interfaces with neuroscience, cognitive sciences, and the history of artificial intelligence too. Likewise, as I wish to argue in my conference presentation, her work has important implications for literary studies. I want to discuss implications and possible styles of practical application by bringing Malabou together with the contemporary poet Anne Carson.

   Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:39

7. Interacting with Empathy: Migrant Narrative in the Context of Mobile Apps

   This paper explores two mobile app narratives that deal with the issue of
   perilous irregular migration, Survival (2017, Omnium Lab) and Bury me, my love
   (2017, The Pixel Hunt/Figs/Arte France). This paper explores the way in which
   the mobile app form lends itself to elevation of migrant narratives and explores
   the capacity of such works to generate empathy.

   The paper will analyse the way in which migration and its subjects are treated
   and placed into relation with the notion of the game. The paper will also address
   the comparison between game-style apps and other online modes whereby
   migrant experience is being represented, such as that of humanitarian
   photojournalism and portraiture as it arises in social media apps, such as
   Instagram.

   Scott Rettberg - 20.05.2021 - 11:52

8. Platforms of contemplation in times of confinement: a philosophicophysiological reflection

   The forced confinement due to the Covid-19 pandemic has been framed as a condition from which to reassess modern life's habits and values, and build upon such reassessment in order to reimagine a more sustainable and equitable future. A ubiquitous feature of such confinement has been the transition from physical/presential modes of expression and interaction to virtual ones, typically supported through electronic platforms. In the current conditions of physical distancing and confinement, electronic-platform culture presents a tension between two opposite but coexisting aspects – isolation and connectedness – both of which it seems to amplify: the former through its implication of physical distance, the latter through its global reach. My poster will offer a reflection on today's recourse to electronic platforms under conditions of physical confinement in light of physiological evidence and philosophical ideas, in particular the work of ancient Chinese thinker Zhuang Zhou's (369-286 BC) emphasis on contemplation as vehicle for the achievement of virtue and wisdom.

   Carlota Salvador Megias - 24.05.2021 - 12:25

9. The Time Travel Agency's The Algorithm of Donated Dreams

   The Algorithm of Donated Dreams is a sociotechnical artifact and a piece of computational poetry. It is the product of a speculative design experience for the blockchain community DAOstack and the Reshaping Work Barcelona conference in 2019. It is also published in Taper 04 and is live here: https://taper.badquar.to/4/ Guests who participated in its making went through a game of futures to speculate "What if we lived in a society where we donated dreams like we donate blood? And what if those dreams were inserted in an algorithm that made us see we can build that society?". Through our game, guests found challenges in that future society and prototyped solutions first with objects around them and then with language.

   Carlota Salvador Megias - 24.05.2021 - 12:40

10. Homenaje a Wlademir Dias-Pino: when a digital poem revisits an e-lit antecedent

    In 1956, the Brazilian avant-garde poet Wlademir Dias-Pino published one of his most famous books: A Ave. All copies of this conceptual work were produced in a craft press, and the content and form of the text (a process poem, as Dias-Pino called it) are inextricable from the materiality of the book, composed of superimposed perforated pages of different colors and transparency levels, with printed letters and polygonal lines. Scholars have considered A Ave an analog predecessor of new media poetry, reflecting on the affordances of paper, ink, punch hole, and bookbinding, and their creative use in a book of visual poetry centered on the imagery of birds in flight. Wlademir Dias-Pino also wrote theoretical texts and a manifest that point to the permutational and the procedural nature of poetic language as code. His contributions as an antecedent to Latin-American digital literature still require further investigation, especially because scholars interested in the history of new media poetry in the continent often pay more attention to the Brazilian concrete poets from São Paulo, such as Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari.

    Carlota Salvador Megias - 24.05.2021 - 12:52

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