[Commlist] CFP: Digital Matters: Designing/Performing Agency for the Anthropocene

*CFP: Digital Matters: Designing/Performing Agency for the Anthropocene
*

*25th annual conference of the DRHA (Digital Research in the Humanities 
and Arts), Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, 5-7.09.2021.*

The Anthropocene highlights a fundamental fracture in contemporary 
culture between what we know and how we act. In the public sphere, this 
contradiction can be summarized by the overwhelming sense of apathy in 
the face of growing complexity and crisis. In scholarship the 
Anthropocene has been tied up with the experience of the unthinkable­­ 
by thinkers including Timothy Morton, Donna Haraway, and Amitav Ghosh. 
Yet, the current COVID-19 pandemic—which as a crisis also exemplifies 
the human impact on and a reshaping of environments—challenges the 
pervasiveness of the key concepts of abstraction and unthinkability. 
Instead, the pandemic has turned the Anthropocene into a concrete, 
intensely lived, globally shared experience. In doing so, the pandemic 
asks us to reflect on and, more importantly, experiment with the borders 
between material and digital spheres and the shifting experiences they 
currently render.

Taking place from *September 5-7, 2021* in Berlin, the 25th Digital 
Research in Humanities and Arts conference invites contributions and 
interventions that focus on such transfers and interactions between 
digital and natural environments. /Digital Matters/ takes on the 
challenge to explore new material and multi-species agencies, forms of 
embodiment, and interactions between the performing arts, the humanities 
and the natural sciences that engage the sense of relationality and 
expanded scale that the Anthropocene affords. We welcome contributions 
that create a sustained encounter between designers, hackers, 
performers, artists, and philologists to examine how these emerging ways 
of communicating and creating proximity and solidarity across distance 
can shape new responses to conceptualising life in and beyond the 
Anthropocene. We would like to generate new perspectives on any of these 
three interrelated spheres:

·What do we make of the various encounters between digital and embodied 
materialities across the cultural, creative, and scientific spectrum?

·How do we make perceivable the invisible dimension of environments in 
our cultural practices?

·How do we create new forms of agency to match the altered realities of 
the Anthropocene?

DHRA 2021 <http://www.drha.uk/2021/>offers a creative platform for 
transdisciplinary exchanges in a variety of formats: it will be part 
academic conference, part curated programme of digital performances, 
workshops, and installations that seek to break new ground in how 
artists, digital makers and researchers can share knowledge and engage 
with each other.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

*Dr. Nicholas Johnson*(Drama Department, Trinity College Dublin)

*Prof. Claudia Mareis *(Institute of Experimental Design and Media 
Culture, Basel/ EXC Matters of Activity, Humboldt University Berlin)

*Prof. Joanna Zylinska*(Department of Media, Communications and Cultural 
Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London)

*Key Roundtable on the Non-Human in Artistic Practice and Research *with 
design/researcher *Kim Albrecht *(Harvard metaLab/Potsdam University*)*, 
artist/researcher *Siobhan Leddy *(Institute for Theatre Studies, Free 
University Berlin) and *Prof. Annette Jael Lehmann *(Harvard 
metaLab/Free University Berlin).

We are seeking submissions on topics including, but not exclusive to, 
the following:

  * Performing the Anthropocene across the arts
  * Sonic environments and the environmental politics of listening
  * VR, AR, and AI in performance
  * Renegotiating liveness in performance
  * Creating digital narratives of scale: micro & macro-levels
  * Configuring the non-human in digital and natural environments
  * Negotiating scarcity and waste with digital media
  * Designing nature in the digital/virtual sphere
  * Digitality in protest/activism
  * Indigenous knowledge and digital media
  * Visualizing scientific data in artistic practice
  * Exploring Object-Oriented Ontology
  * Possible futures and post-pandemic transformations of artistic practice

Please submit a 300-word abstract together with a short bio (ca. 75 
words) and indicate the preferred format (digital or F2F) for your paper 
or presentation (15min), digital media provocation (up to 15min), 
workshop (30/60min), or alternative creative interventions (15min) on 
the theme of the 2021 DRHA conference. To submit your proposal, please 
visit our website <http://www.drha.uk/2021/call-for-paper/>. All 
proposals will be reviewed and selected by a peer-review process. 
Deadline for submissions: *May 15th, 2021*. /Currently, we are planning 
this conference as a hybrid event in Berlin with social distancing 
measures in place. If the development of the pandemic does not permit 
any form of gathering, we will shift to a fully online event./

Conference Organizers:

Dr. Lindsey Drury (EXC 2020 “Temporal Communities”, FU Berlin)

Dr. Ramona Mosse (EXC 2020 “Temporal Communities”: “Viral Theatres” 
Volkswagen Foundation Fellow, FU Berlin)

Dr. Christian Stein (EXC Matters of Activity, HU Berlin)

This year’s DRHA conference is hosted by the interdisciplinary 
Excellence Cluster (EXC) Matters of Activity 
<https://www.matters-of-activity.de/en/>at the Humboldt University and 
also supported through partnership with the Excellence Cluster (EXC) 
2020 Temporal Communities <https://www.temporal-communities.de/>at the 
Freie Universität-Berlin and the “Viral Theatres” Research Project, 
funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.

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