[Commlist] CFP: Cultural Representations of Machine Vision

CALL FOR PAPERS: SPECIAL COLLECTION ON CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF 
MACHINE VISION

Abstracts due 1 Oct/ Decisions 15 Oct/ Full papers due 15 Jan

Editors: Jill Walker Rettberg, Gabriele de Seta, Marianne Gunderson, 
Linda Kronman(University of Bergen)(Contact: (jill.walker.rettberg /at/ uib.no) 
<mailto:(jill.walker.rettberg /at/ uib.no)> or (Gabriele.seta /at/ uib.no) 
<mailto:(Gabriele.seta /at/ uib.no)>)

The ERC project Machine Vision in Everyday Life invites submissions to a 
collection of papers dedicated to the representation of machine vision 
technologies in cultural and creative works including fictional 
narratives, videogames, and artworks. The collection will be published 
in the Open Library of Humanities or a similar university-funded open 
access journal. No payment from authors will be required.

As visual technologies are increasingly automated, using machine 
learning to interpret and generate images, societies around the globe 
face practical and ethical questions about how machine vision 
technologies should be implemented, evaluated and governed as they 
impact people’s everyday life. With their anticipatory and speculative 
potential, cultural representations of machine vision play a key role in 
answering these questions.

Our premise is that cultural production – including literature, art, 
cinema, video games, science fiction, memes, fandom and more – is a rich 
source for understanding the impact of machine vision technologies on 
society, as well as their potential future trajectory. What can we learn 
from how machine vision is represented, used and discussed in digital 
art, video games, novels, movies, TV-series, fan fiction, electronic 
literature, popular culture, social media content and other 
aesthetically or culturally expressive genres?

The Special Collection welcomes submissions engaging with the project’s 
dataset on machine vision in 500 creative works (see references below) 
as well as qualitative analyses, close readings and speculative studies 
of machine vision in fiction, art, games, social media narratives, and 
other forms of cultural production. Creative contributions such as 
artworks or short fictions are also welcome.

Potential topics include:

                 •              Science fictional representations of 
machine vision

                 •              The use of machine vision technologies 
in contemporary art

                 •              Machine vision in videogames, board 
games or role-playing games

                 •              Cross-cultural comparisons of machine 
vision imaginaries

                 •              Corporate science fiction and the 
marketing of automated vision

                 •              Imaginations and figurations of the 
machine vision user

                 •              Surveillance assemblages and 
surveillant landscapes

                 •              Narratives of trust and distrust in 
machine vision

                 •              Machine vision and emotions

                 •              Analyses of the Database of Machine 
Vision in Art, Games and Narrative

We encourage submissions from scholars from disciplines including 
Communication and Media Studies, Digital Culture, Digital Humanities, 
Digital Anthropology, Visual Studies, Art History, Literary Studies, 
Science and Technology Studies and related fields.

Submission guidelines: Send your 250-word abstract to 
(jill.walker.rettberg /at/ uib.no) by 1 October 2022. Invitations to contribute 
will be delivered by 15 October 2022, and full-length submissions will 
be due by 15 January 2023. The Open Library for Humanities offers Open 
Access publishing with no author-facing processing fees, and publishes 
submissions on a rolling basis as soon as they are accepted, so we are 
aiming at a speedy publication starting from February/March 2023.

REFERENCES

Contributors are encouraged to engage with the project dataset, 
available on DataverseNO:

Rettberg JW, Kronman L, Solberg R, et al. (2022) A Dataset Documenting 
Representations of Machine Vision Technologies in Artworks, Games and 
Narratives. DataverseNO. DOI: 10.18710/2G0XKN.

The data can also be browsed in a more human-readable database: 
http://machine-vision.no

More information on the data is available in this data paper:

Rettberg JW, Kronman L, Solberg R, et al. (2022) Representations of 
Machine Vision Technologies in Artworks, Games and Narratives: 
Documentation of a Dataset. Data in Brief. DOI: 
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2022.108319.

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