[Commlist] MAST Journal: call for abstracts: Automating Visuality

MAST: The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory

CFP special issue:
AUTOMATING VISUALITY: THE IMAGE BEYOND REPRESENTATION

Guest Editors:

Kathrin Maurer, Lila Lee-Morrison & Dominique Routhier (University of 
Southern Denmark)


Deadline for abstract submissions: 15th February 2021 (for publication 
in November 2021).

Today, it is no longer merely human labor power but also the labor of 
looking that is potentially rendered superfluous by automation. Whether 
in the routine inspection of manufacturing processes, the interpretation 
of drone surveillance footage, or the curating of fine-art, we are 
witnessing what the art critic Hal Foster describes as “the gradual 
automation not only of labor and war but also of seeing and imaging.” 
While the human remains in the loop in most cases, the “robo-eye” 
increasingly substitutes for human judgment in such diverse contexts as 
drone warfare, preventive policing, border control, insurance and tax 
collection, medicine, consumerism, online social interaction, and art.

Current developments in machinic vision—including drone sensors, pattern 
recognition, artificial neural networks, spectral imaging, and lidar 
technologies—are profoundly challenging ideas of vision and visuality as 
intrinsically related to human perception and understanding. Scholars 
and artists, in turn, have developed a host of new concepts—the 
operational image, soft image, post image, differential image, invisible 
image, to name a few—that address changes to the image-form and to the 
late-modern paradigm of visuality. While some scholars claim a loss of 
representation, others see new non- or posthuman representational 
mechanisms emerging through machine vision processes.

Whether celebrated or shunned, AI-powered machine vision unsettles 
entrenched notions of meaning and interpretation while highlighting 
discontinuities between machinic and human scales of sensing, 
perception, and judgment. The automation of visuality is pushing the 
image to the limits or even beyond the perimeters of traditional 
theories of representation. Do we in the humanities still know what an 
image is, how it functions, what it represents, to whom it matters, and 
why? Perhaps “art history,” as artist-theorist Hito Steyerl 
provocatively asks, was something like “an anticipatory tutorial to help 
humans decode images made by machines, for machines?”

For a prospective interdisciplinary special issue, we ask contributors 
to take stock of the automation of visuality and to reflect upon 
questions related but not restricted to the following:

– What new forms of machinic vision bring historical paradigms of the 
image into relief in fields such as media studies, art history, media 
aesthetics, cultural theory, communications studies, and visual culture 
studies?

– How does the advent of automating visuality intervene in and change 
the cultures and technical procedures of film, photography, and art 
production?

– In what specific ways are practicing artists and curators negotiating, 
addressing, criticizing, and interpreting representation in the context 
of machinic vision?

– How do the mechanisms of representation in machine vision processes 
intervene as forms of “social sorting” and subject formation, especially 
regarding race and gender identities?

– How does the image-form retain value and meaning in the context of 
specific contemporary uses of machinic vision (e.g., in drone 
surveillance, automatic facial recognition systems, preventive policing, 
border control, and other relevant contexts)?

– How do new forms of machine vision map onto the larger cultural and 
political conditions and shifts within our current conjuncture?

We invite interdisciplinary contributions that bring into dialogue 
perspectives from e.g. visual culture, art history, literature, media 
studies, science and technology studies, cultural studies, gender and 
sexuality studies, critical race theory, and other related fields in the 
humanities. Independent scholars and artists are also encouraged to 
submit. We particularly welcome submissions that closely analyze 
specific visual technologies and their possible contexts of application.

Please send your abstract of 300-500 words accompanied by a short 
biography to Dominique Routhier ((dominique /at/ sdu.dk) 
<mailto:(dominique /at/ sdu.dk)>) no later than February 15, 2021. Notification 
of acceptance will be sent on March 1, 2021. To submit, no payment from 
the authors will be required.

For more info, see MAST website: 
https://www.mast-journal.org/cfp-special-issue-automating-visuality 
<https://www.mast-journal.org/cfp-special-issue-automating-visuality>

MAST <https://www.mast-journal.org/> is an online, open-access, and 
double-blind peer-reviewed journal, featuring interdisciplinary 
scholarship in the domain of media art study and theory.


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