[Commlist] cfp: Arts & Humanities in digital transition conference

Arts & Humanities in digital transition



Conference | 6-7 July | Nova University of Lisbon
Venue: Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities | Nova Institute of 
Communication (ICNOVA)

Transformations stemming from digital technologies are growing with 
every passing decade, even if the newness of new media is gradually 
fading. In the idea of digital transition, a feeling of disruption is 
intertwined with that of inevitability and becoming, mixing voluntarism 
and the design of the artificial with new evolutionary narratives. 
Between a persistent post-historical atmosphere and the spectre of an 
era of extinctions, the certainty of a generalised digital transition 
stands out as an inescapable path towards the future. A path where not 
only capitalism but also the insufficiently acknowledged co-evolution of 
nature and technique would definitely take the place of history itself. 
The question concerning the digital (Krämer, 2018; Hui, 2019; Galloway, 
2021), which has just only started, is crucial for understanding the 
deep anthropological, ecological and cosmological crisis (Latour, 2021) 
of the present and resisting a one-way universalization sense of 
technology. This crisis makes it urgent that we prefigure and care about 
possible futures but also that we concern ourselves with the digital 
(Stiegler 2010, 2019) and critically explore its relationship with 
different temporalities and transits, as well as its transformative, 
transgressive and translation possibilities.
The generalisation of computation and algorithms and the planetarisation 
of information networks and infrastructures reveal the breadth and 
capillarity of the digital transition involving the domains of 
physicality, life, and the human, and their various interactions. The 
crossovers between cybernetics and environmental sciences, molecular 
biology and informatics, neurology and robotics expand our knowledge of 
the human and lead, at the same time, to the questioning of the 
centrality of the Anthropos in all of his/her dimensions – agency, 
production, perception and cognition.
In the humanities, the digital has mostly been seen as the post-media or 
metamedia stage of media history (Kittler 1997, Bolter&Groosin 2000, 
Manovich 2005), and often as a culmination point of the long history of 
the symbolic and the alphabets (Kittler, 2009; Krämer, 2018), allowing 
us to expect changes as fundamental as those related to the beginning of 
language in human history. Most importantly, media theory, digital 
studies and the philosophy of technology have long been the source of a 
crucial anthropological questioning (Stiegler, 1984; Kittler, 1997; 
Hayles, 1999) that has shown the co-constitution of the human and its 
technological milieu. This kind of questioning is also central to 
ecological thought, in which the human is equally defined by its 
interactions with the environment and with the non-human. That is why 
media theory and ecological thought  coincide today in the claim of a 
post-humanist turn of the humanities. Accordingly, one of the main 
challenges of the post-humanities (Braidotti, 2019) will be that of 
helping to form a critical cosmology that will be able to include a 
techno-ecology of the digital, which is also a cognitive ecology or an 
“ecology of spirit” (Stiegler), in the general ecology (Stiegler 2010; 
Hörl, 2013; Hayles 2017).
The initiative of this conference is indebted to the paths opened up by 
the digital humanities and digital arts in recent decades, but also to a 
reflection that increasingly exceeds the specificity of each of these 
fields. The increasing interest and discussion about the cognitive and 
epistemological implications of the widespread use of AI and 
computational methodologies have cast new themes around DH themselves 
(Burdwick et al. l, 2016, Berry and Fagerjord, 2017; Dobson, 2019). 
Likewise, reflection on creativity and the digital has long gone beyond 
the genealogy of media and procedural art to think how the digital is 
penetrating aesthetic, affective and political experience, as well as 
creative and collaborative practices in ways more fundamental or also 
indirect (Zielinski, 2006; Bishop, 2012; Weibel, 2019). Thus, the scope 
proposed by this conference is that of a broad epistemic, cultural, 
political, and artistic reflection on the transformation of knowledge, 
creativity, praxis, literacies, cultural techniques and institutions in 
an era increasingly characterized by the distribution of capabilities 
and agencies between humans and technology.
Adding to a new stage of the industrialisation of culture and the arts, 
we are now witnessing the emergence of an industry of knowledge built on 
the accumulation of data, AI and machine learning, automatic analysis 
and information visualisation (Negri & Vercellone, 2008; Boutang, 2012; 
Zuboff, 2019; Manovich, 2021). The new cognitive industries threaten to 
trigger a general dispossession of cognitive practices, learning and 
“savoir vivre” (Stiegler, 2019), and the replacement of the civic 
mission of institutions and practices related to knowledge transmission 
by infrastructures, platforms and algorithms (Bratton, 2016; Srnicek, 
2016). However, the digital condition and the new cognitive ecology 
allows, in turn, for a deepening and dissemination of knowledge on a 
scale that is unprecedented in human history, the strengthening of 
diverse forms of connectivity and collaboration (Castells, 2012; 
Gerbaudo, 2017) and, for the first time, the sharing of a common 
language between sciences, humanities and arts.

Establishing a political cosmology and ecology for the digital 
transition emerges as a new task of critical thought, a fundamental 
epistemic, cultural and creative task of the humanities and the arts in 
the XXI century. This call invites participation in this task by 
tackling topics such as, and not restricted to, the ones below. In 
addition, in homage to the intellectual legacy of Bernard Stiegler, one 
of the most influential thinkers of the digital condition and the 
relationship between culture and technique, a specific exploration of 
themes from his extensive work will also be welcome.

  * Digitality, post-digital and digital transition
  * Tecno-ecology, digital ecology and cognitive ecology
  * Post-human and post-humanities
  * Digital Humanities, theory, methodologies and practices
  * Digital arts, post-media aesthetics and artivism
  * Cognitive and creative economy and industries
  * AI, Machine Learning and automation
  * Digital literacies
  * The university and the digital
  * Bernard Siegler’s thought for the digital age (mnemotechnics,
    general organology and       digital technologies; pharmacology and
    care; disruption and bifurcation; etc.)


Please submit abstracts for individual papers (max. 300 words) with 
presentation title, up to 5 keywords, your name, affiliation, email 
address and a short biographical note (max. 100 words; the biographical 
note should be submitted annexed as a pdf or a word file). Proposals 
should be written in English.
Please submit your proposal on 
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ahdt2023 
<https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ahdt2023>
Deadline for submissions: 6th March, 2023
Notification of acceptance: 30th March, 2023

Early Bid inscription: 15th April
Deadline for Inscription: 30th April

Publication: Full papers are invited to be submitted to a special 
edition of a Scopus Indexed Journal.
For further information, please send us an email: 
(digitaltransition /at/ fcsh.unl.pt) <mailto:(digitaltransition /at/ fcsh.unl.pt)>
Conference website: ah-digitaltransition.fcsh.unl.pt 
<http://ah-digitaltransition.fcsh.unl.pt>


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