[Commlist] CFP: Digital Ecologies II: Fiction Machines

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Digital Ecologies II: Fiction Machines

One-Day International Symposium: Tuesday July 16th 2019

The Centre for Media Research, Bath Spa University

Newton Park, Newton St Loe, Bath, BA2 9BN

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Professor Simon O’Sullivan, Professor of art, theory and practice,

Goldsmiths College, London

Dr Tony David-Sampson, Reader in Digital Media Culture and 
Communication, University of East London

The Centre for Media Research at Bath Spa University is proud to host 
the second /Digital Ecologies/symposium: *Fiction Machines*and it will 
take place on Tuesday July 16th 2019. We are interested in submissions 
from interdisciplinary researchers including artists, filmmakers, 
writers, geographers, scientists and theorists whose work connects with 
the themes of the symposium.


In the introduction to his book Fiction as Method(2017) Jon K Shaw 
identifies a fictional place called ‘Null Island’, a fiction that is 
located at a point in the centre of the earth, amongst the lava that no 
one can travel to.


‘From this unreal centre the machines can tag our photos to map our 
memories and images onto the material world, can align our satellites to 
coordinate and connect us across the planet. Whenever we perform one of 
these actions, we pass through this fiction. We are transported home via 
the fictional island.’ (Shaw, 2017: 7)


Our vision of the earth and of each other is increasingly filtered 
through the operations of a complex assemblage of networked 
computational writing machines and as Shaw implies, these exist at the 
centre of our world and our daily experience. As a result the planet 
itself is increasingly becoming computational, Nigel Thrift describes 
how the ‘real’ as we know it is the result of multiple simultaneous 
‘writing machines’ using a continuous looping process of algorithms. 
(2005, loc.2879)


Humans now exist within complex informational spaces that produce 
affects, simulate, analyse and respond to user and environmental data. 
Within these conditions fiction and reality become increasingly blurred, 
machine and human voices difficult to distinguish.


These machines allow for the generation of complex webs of fabulation 
which exist in a plethora of contexts from corporate identities to 
labyrinthine brand stories, to political propaganda and the operations 
of the derivatives market.


Furthermore our understanding of the ecological is itself increasingly 
filtered through multiple layers of networked technologies, sensors, 
algorithms and data visualisations. Jennifer Gabrys discusses the notion 
of ‘planetary scale computerisation’ and how this leads to the 
generation of ‘new living conditions, subjectivities, and imaginaries’. 
(Gabrys, 2016)


Within this context new fictional strategies within creative practice 
emerge as important weapons for critique, intervention, speculation and 
change. As Simon O’Sullivan notes:  fiction can be used not as a matter 
of ‘make believe’ but rather in a Ranciere sense of forging the real to 
better approximate historical and contemporary experience. (O’Sullivan, 
2016: 6)

In the symposium we ask how these fictional methods are being employed 
to rethink and renegotiate our relationship with current and future 
technologies; how fiction can be used to reveal forgotten histories, 
non-human perspectives and to speculate on, and design, new futures.


As Bratton notes: ‘Our shared design project will require both different 
relationships to machines (carbon based machines and otherwise) and a 
more promiscuous figurative imagination.’ (Bratton, 2016, loc.283)

Symposium Strands:

(i) Activist fictions: responses that employ fiction as a political or 
social method for recuperation/change/intervention.

(ii) Speculative design fictions: responses that utilise fiction to 
reimagine social, environmental and technological futures.

(iii) Non-human fictions – responses that employ fiction to bring 
non-human perspectives and voices into view.

(iv)  Post-truth: responses that critique and subvert the mechanisms and 
mediation of post-truth.


Proposal Submission


We encourage proposals for practice based presentations and traditional 
papers as well as performance lectures. The duration for each paper 
should be 20 minutes.Please send proposals (300 words approx.) for all 
papers – outlining their aim and form – along with a short biography to 
the symposium coordinator: Dr Charlie Tweed ((c.tweed /at/ bathspa.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(c.tweed /at/ bathspa.ac.uk)>) by no later than Friday March 1st, 2019.

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