[ecrea] Call for Paper : ReClaiming Participation | Technology, Mediation & Collectivity

Call for Paper for Conference:

ReClaiming Participation | Technology, Mediation & Collectivity

Zurich University of the Arts, May 7 – 9, 2014

DFG-Network “Media of Collective Intelligence” | Institute for Critical 
Theory, Zurich University of the Arts | Research Initiative “Media and 
Participation”, University of Konstanz

Participation has become the key issue in popular, economic, and 
academic notions of New Media. The conference seeks to examine and 
unravel the debates of the “Participation Age”, rejecting a mere 
appraisal of the impact of contemporary media on participation. Instead 
of perpetuating euphoric visions of social “all-inclusion”, web 
democracy and collaboration as well as pessimistic views of exclusion, 
top-down hierarchy and the “digital divide”, we aim to reclaim 
collectivity as an effect of technological, historical and political 
conditions and practices.

We are seeking papers that offer a wide array of perspectives on the 
processes of collectivization and individuation in media environments. 
Topics may range from analyses of participatory objects and 
technological arrangements to the reciprocity and entanglement of 
formerly theoretically separated positions. We are welcoming 
contributions from theoretical considerations to case studies and 
examinations in the field of the arts. We particularly encourage PhD 
candidates and early career researchers to submit proposals.

Jean-Luc Nancy (Professor emeritus at Marc Bloch University in 
Strasbourg, France) and Claus Pias (Professor at Leuphana University of 
Lüneburg, Germany) have confirmed as two of the three conference’s 
keynote speakers. The program includes three thematic sessions and 
closes with a final report by the members of the DFG-Network “Media of 
Collective Intelligence”:

1. Participation and the Claims of Community

2. Participatory Practices and Digital Media

3. Art and Media: Theory of Partaking

4. Final report and outlook of the DFG-Network “Media of Collective 
Intelligence”

Session I. Participation and the Claims of Community

As media policy, participation is accompanied by visions of being 
related or tied to something larger and superior. Claims for 
participation are often implicitly or explicitly connected to a certain 
idea of a greater unity: an imagination of collectivity or even 
collective intelligence. This session will question the claims of 
community in a double sense: if participation can be staged as a promise 
and a duty at the same time, what are the utopias of participation and 
what may be their dark sides? Which desires, attractions, and 
impositions are implied in requests for participation? Thinking of 
participatory processes as mediations between disparate human and 
technical entities also means reconsidering the obstacles of 
coordinating and matching these entities. What are the 
interface-processes supporting or impeding the building of communities?

Session II. Participatory Practices and Digital Media

New apps, internet platforms and software codes seem to enhance forms of 
distributed productivity and to open new possibilities to share ideas. 
Simultaneously, these media conditions, and hence the knowledge of 
(non-)participation, are inscribed in media and technical objects or 
devices. Based on this, the session will explore to what extent digital 
media and the rise of networks re-conceptualize user practices and vice 
versa. How can we address the reciprocal relations and transformational 
processes between technical objects predetermining socio-cultural 
practices in the same way as they are shaped by them? The aim of this 
session is thus to critically rethink digital participation. In addition 
to analyzing displays and interface designs, it aims to scrutinize the 
operations of software agents, bots, and hardware components, which 
contribute to and determine the possibilities of participation. 
Consequently, the central question to be discussed is, how can 
participation be thought of as a socio-technological process?

Session III. Art and Media: Theory of Partaking

This session will focus on theoretical and experimental approaches to 
the media conditions of participation. This concerns technological 
prerequisites, practices and techniques, as well as fundamental outlines 
of participatory being while anticipating a media theory of partaking. 
Considerations that focus on relational thinking have gained new urgency 
regarding the fundamentally relational concept of participation. This 
includes ecological approaches, relational ontology, and postulates of a 
technological milieu of individuation. By questioning the 
interconnection of technology, aesthetics, and philosophy, art has 
become a favored field for experiments with participation. Art and 
techniques thereby shall be considered in a wider sense as skills, 
tactics, and practices that might provide a possibility to subvert 
ideologies of inclusion and exclusion, demonstrating alternatives to the 
claims and impositions of participation.

We accept abstracts up to 500 words that should address topics and 
questions relating to one of the sessions. Please add a short CV to your 
proposal. The deadline for the submission of abstracts is 31 December 
2013. Please send abstract and CV to (cfp /at/ reclaimingparticipation.com). If 
you have any questions please refer to our Blog at 
http://reclaimingparticipation.com or send an email to 
(info /at/ reclaimingparticipation.com).

All presenters chosen for the conference are welcome to apply for a 
travel grant. Please fill out the form regarding refunding, also 
available on our Blog, to apply for a grant.

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