[Commlist] CFP - Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference 2025 - Rise of the Machines

Call for Papers
5th Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference
*“Rise of the Machines”*
Toronto, Canada

May 23-24, 2025


Recent breakthroughs in generative AI technology have once again drawn 
attention to cinema's ongoing identity crisis. In the digital epoch, 
under what Davide Panagia calls the algorithm dispositif or what Shane 
Denson refers to as post-cinema, we increasingly encounter moving images 
that are preformatted for our consumption by artificial metabolic 
processes beyond human understanding. Where once computers seemed to 
serve as tools of communication, information processing and 
entertainment, ushering in an era of liberation for humanity from 
needless toil, some now fear the overtaking of human intellect by 
autonomous artificial thought. Critics of AI contend that with the rise 
of “intelligent” machines that mediate our view of the world we become 
interpassive subjects (Robert Pfaller) that delegate our cognitive and 
emotional labour: AI driven algorithms shape the social and political 
sphere in our staid. Without the ability to experience the world for 
ourselves, these algorithms and machines are poised to carry the burden 
of our former humanity.


There are some resonances in such concerns with earlier arguments in 
film theory about the ways that the cinematographic apparatus 
(Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz) constructs and positions spectators 
as passive viewing subjects within the dominant ideology. On the other 
hand, classical film theorists like André Bazin and Stanley Cavell once 
praised the cinema precisely for its ability to reproduce the world 
automatically, showing us a proof of the reality outside our mind's 
biased projections – a necessary condition for any democratic society. 
Similarly, Walter Benjamin believed in the power of cinema's machinery 
to reveal the optical unconscious of modern mass societies and thereby 
counter the alienation and atomization produced by industrial capitalism.


A question emerges: Is AI-mediated post-cinema still for a human 
audience or is the target of its uncanny images the machine vision of 
what Daniel Chavez Heras calls computational spectatorship?


Similarly, are Silicon Valley technocrats dreaming of total digital 
surveillance in the metaverse the extenders of democracy, or they the 
harbingers of a techno-feudalism that subjugates connectively mutated 
neuro-workers (Franco Berardi)?


In the end, are human beings the authors, actors and agents of the 
post-cinematic age or are they losing their autonomy to the automatic 
subjectivity of capital (Karl Marx) taking a cinematic form?


For the 5th edition of the Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference, we 
welcome contributions from scholars, artists and practitioners for 20 
minute presentations on cinema and automation, machines and artificial 
intelligence including (but not limited to) topics like:

    • Algorithmic cinemas • Science fiction and AI • Surveillance and
    cinema • The old/new crisis of cinema • Interpassivity vs.
    interactivity • Techno-feudalism as paradigm • The cinematic mode of
    production • Machine vision in cinema and media • Neuro-work and
    connective mutation • Post-cinema and discorrelated images •
    Cybernetics and moving image media • Legacies of utopian and
    dystopian modernisms • Interface, screens (e.g., Galloway: Interface
    Effect) • Human vs. non-human agency in moving image media •
    Military applications of AI linked to cinema and gaming • Legacies
    of automatism (Surrealism, Cavell) in film and theory • The
    “reality-based community” and investments in observational media •
    Marx’s “Fragment on Machines” and its relevance to film and media
    theory • The “intimacy” of AI and devices in everyday life
    consumption of moving images • Sex Machines / Macho Machines
    (sexuality, gender, and machines in visual culture)



Our confirmed Keynote Speaker is Shane Denson 
<https://shanedenson.com/>, Professor of Film and Media Studies in the 
Department of Art & Art History, Stanford University. Denson is the 
author of Post-Cinematic Bodies 
<https://meson.press/books/post-cinematic-bodies/>(meson press, 2023), 
Discorrelated Images 
<https://www.dukeupress.edu/discorrelated-images>(Duke University Press, 
2020), Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical 
Interface 
<https://cup.columbia.edu/book/postnaturalism/9783837628173>(Transcript-Verlag/Columbia 
University Press, 2014) and co-editor of Post-Cinema: Theorizing 
21st-Century Film <https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/>(REFRAME 
Books, 2016), Digital Seriality 
<https://eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos/issue/view/vol7no1>(special 
issue of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, 2014) and 
Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives 
<https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/transnational-perspectives-on-graphic-narratives-9781441185754/>(Bloomsbury, 
2013).


The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada at OCAD University on 
Friday, May 23 and Saturday, May 24, 2025.


Please send a 350-word abstract, bibliography (5 max.), 5 keywords, and 
short biography (with institutional affiliation, if applicable) in ONE 
DOCUMENT as an EMAIL ATTACHMENT to spiralfilmphilosophy@gmail.comby Feb. 
15, 2025. Notice of acceptance or rejection will be sent promptly via email.


Conference Registration Fee:

Conference Attendance: $120 (Canadian)

Graduate Students and Underemployed: $60 (Canadian)


Conference website: *spiralfilmphilosophy.ca* 
<http://spiralfilmphilosophy.ca>

Facebook: _*@spiralphilosophy*_ 
<https://www.facebook.com/spiralfilmphilosophy/>


For inquiries contact: *(spiralfilmphilosophy /at/ gmail.com)* 
<mailto:(spiralfilmphilosophy /at/ gmail.com)>


Organized by:
The Spiral Collective in collaboration with
Visual and Critical Studies program, Faculty of Arts & Science, OCAD 
University
York University

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