[Commlist] Culture and Technics conference: Call for abstracts

Culture and Technics conference: Call for abstracts

December 4 and 5 2025, Faculty of Social Sciences and Faculty of Arts, 
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

"Culture has constituted itself as a defense system against technics," 
Simondon proclaimed in his seminal book on the theory of technology On 
the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects Simondon in in 1958, offering 
a profound diagnosis of the relationship between culture and tenchics 
While the outlined defensive stance that established culture tends to 
uphold vis-a-vis technology has not changed much since the mid-20th 
century, culture itself has certainly radically transformed culture 
still functioned as a (technicised) culture industry which impoverished 
human experience due to the unintelligence of the technology involved, 
as pointed out by critics from Adorno to Stiegler.  In contrast, in the 
21st century, with the development of autonomous machine intelligence in 
the form of generative artificial intelligence based on deep learning, 
technics itself has been cultivated and has become a culture parallel to 
the one generated by humans. On the non-established – both avant-garde 
and mass-commercial – side of culture, the attitude towards technics has 
been known to be more playful, accepting and experimental and remains so 
today. However, it is also changing fundamentally, with technics itself 
becoming culture. This poses new challenges even for non-established 
culture (while established culture does not really let anything get in 
the way of its archaic humanism).

Technology today is no longer – if it ever really was – in an 
instrumental relation to culture, as something that culture (as a 
supposedly exclusively human activity) uses to varying effects, while 
the real creativity is on the side of the human. Today, machines use 
natural language and generate cultural content autonomously, making 
20th-century forms of cultural critique no longer relevant for 
understanding and critically engaging with today's culture. The problem 
(intellectual and practical) is no longer that culture is technical, but 
that technology has become cultural; and this in turn entirely 
transforms the terrain of cultural critique and the theory of technology.

The conference aims to address precisely this turn and its theoretical, 
cultural, economic and other effects, and welcomes contributions from 
sociology of culture, cultural studies, media studies, philosophy, 
linguistics, theory (and practice) of contemporary art and design, 
computer and information science and others. We are interested in both 
theoretical as well as empirical and methodological contributions and 
their intersections, i.e. how to think and research new forms of 
technologically generated culture and how to overcome prejudice and 
defunct notions, tied to past forms of culture and technology, in the 
process.

Some of the sub-topics of the conference (the list is neither exhaustive 
nor exclusive) are: language and artificial intelligence; generative 
artificial intelligence and cultural production; technology and 
creativity; the persistence and significance of culture as a defence 
system against technology; the economic effects of new cultural 
technologies; the dangers and risks of (cultural) artificial 
intelligence; new forms of cultural critique and theory; a re-evaluation 
of classical forms of cultural critique and theory; the effects of 
large-scale linguistic models on linguistics; new forms and new theories 
of intelligence, regulation of generative AI and cultural policy; big 
data analyses of culture ...

The conference will consist of lectures, roundtable discussions and 
thematic panels with 15-20-minute papers (first draft programme to be 
drawn up in June 2025).
You can apply for the conference as a panel presenter by sending a 
100-200-word abstract  and a 50-100-word biographical note to Jernej 
Kaluža at (jernej.kaluza /at/ fdv.uni-lj.si) <mailto:(jernej.kaluza /at/ fdv.uni-lj.si)>.
Further questions regarding the conference can be sent to Primož 
Krašovec at (primoz.krasovec /at/ ff.uni-lj.si) 
<mailto:(primoz.krasovec /at/ ff.uni-lj.si)>.
The deadline for abstract submission is June 1 2025.
Applicants will receive notifications of acceptance to the conference by 
July 1 2025.
The official languages of the conference will be Slovenian and English.
The conference will be free of charge, open to the public and without a 
registration fee.
The conference website is under construction and will be published in 
September 2025.
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