[Commlist] Special Issue of Culture Machine Machine Intelligences in Context: Beyond the Technological Sublime

Special Issue of Culture Machine

*Machine Intelligences in Context: Beyond the Technological Sublime*

Edited by Peter Jakobsson, Anne Kaun & Fredrik Stiernstedt

We are seeking contributions for a special issue of /Culture Machine/ 
<https://culturemachine.net/about/> – an international open-access 
journal of culture and theory – exploring /Machine Intelligences in 
Context/.

/Culture Machine/is a series of experiments in culture and theory. Its 
aim is to seek out and promote scholarly work that engages provocatively 
with contemporary technical objects, processes and imaginaries from the 
North and South. Building on its open ended, non-instrumental, and 
exploratory approach to critical theory, /Culture Machine/ calls for 
creative scholarship and research that contests globalizing technical 
narratives and their environmental logics of extraction.

This special issue is a long overdue confrontation with the hype 
surrounding artificial intelligence. The supposed blessings that AI will 
bestow upon datafied societies, as well as the associated dangers, are 
now well-known both to the academic specialist and to the general 
public. Representatives from the tech sector and the world of politics 
claim that the fourth industrial revolution will be powered by AI and 
that AI will eventually become ubiquitous within politics, industry, 
culture and in everyday life. The impulse behind this special issue is 
to interrogate these prophesies a bit closer and to get a look behind 
the shiny surfaces of these new, often unseen technologies. Because it 
does seem that what AI actually promises, and most of all, what it 
actually delivers, is neither found in the realm of the fantastic nor 
the uncanny, and a lot of it is not even particularly new, intelligent 
or artificial.

The task of this special issue is thus to provide a counter-narrative to 
the dominant accounts of AI. It is not a matter of debunking AI, of 
unmasking the ideological interests behind it or revealing its dirty 
algorithmic secrets, but of putting AI in its critical contexts beyond 
the technological sublime – ie. the myths surrounding current 
technological developments that are meant to inspire both awe and 
fantasies of control and mastery. By combining phenomena that do not 
normally go together, such as AI and intersectionality, this special 
issue seeks to un-familiarize the familiar and to make unexpected 
connections, while also exploring potential critical and more just 
futures. One question that seems particularly pertinent to ask is of the 
relations, substitutions and combinations of different forms of 
intelligence, both human and more than human, and to explore how these 
come together in different contexts.  Contributions that employ critical 
perspectives from either the social sciences or the humanities are 
welcome, but we also invite and encourage experimental and 
transdisciplinary approaches, including contributions from the 
information sciences, software studies, and articles focused on case 
studies of AI with stakes for Latin America, Asia, and Africa.

It is time to move past an understanding of AI that borders towards 
viewing it as a technological sublime. In order to do so we should 
analyse it as a broad phenomenon that questions the integration of 
machinic forms of intelligence in lived settings, particularly across 
the relations it is generating in the Global South.

We welcome proposals that address, build upon and expand the following 
topics:

  * Critical interrogations of definitions and conceptualizations of
    intelligence(s)
  * Pluralities of machine intelligences
  * Sensory capacities and AI
  * The biopolitics and geopolitics of AI
  * Sex, gender and AI
  * Race and AI
  * Critical interrogations of AI narratives
  * Critical perspectives on AI sited in the Global South
  * Progressive regulation of AI

Please submit a 500-word abstract and 2 page CV to (peter.jakobsson /at/ sh.se) 
<mailto:(peter.jakobsson /at/ sh.se)> by 1 March 2020

*Timeline:*

Submission of abstracts                              1 March 2020

Notification of acceptance                               20 March 2020

Submission of full papers                                  1 September 2020

Peer Review                                              
                 15 November 2020

Revision                                                     15 December 
2020

Publication 
                                                               January 2021

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