[Commlist] Cfp: Special Issue of Culture Machine on Machine Intelligences in Context

Special Issue of Culture Machine
Machine Intelligences in Context: Beyond the Technological Sublime
Edited by Peter Jakobsson, Anne Kaun & Fredrik Stiernstedt
 We are seeking contributions for a special issue of Culture Machine – 
an international open-access journal of culture and theory – exploring 
Machine Intelligences in Context.
Culture Machine is a series of experiments in culture and theory. Its 
aim is to seek out and promote scholarly work that engages provocatively 
with contemporary technical objects, processes and imaginaries from the 
North and South. Building on its open ended, non-instrumental, and 
exploratory approach to critical theory, Culture Machine calls for 
creative scholarship and research that contests globalizing technical 
narratives and their environmental logics of extraction.

This special issue is a long overdue confrontation with the hype 
surrounding artificial intelligence. The supposed blessings that AI will 
bestow upon datafied societies, as well as the associated dangers, are 
now well-known both to the academic specialist and to the general 
public. Representatives from the tech sector and the world of politics 
claim that the fourth industrial revolution will be powered by AI and 
that AI will eventually become ubiquitous within politics, industry, 
culture and in everyday life. The impulse behind this special issue is 
to interrogate these prophesies a bit closer and to get a look behind 
the shiny surfaces of these new, often unseen technologies. Because it 
does seem that what AI actually promises, and most of all, what it 
actually delivers, is neither found in the realm of the fantastic nor 
the uncanny, and a lot of it is not even particularly new, intelligent 
or artificial.  The task of this special issue is thus to provide a 
counter-narrative to the dominant accounts of AI. It is not a matter of 
debunking AI, of unmasking the ideological interests behind it or 
revealing its dirty algorithmic secrets, but of putting AI in its 
critical contexts beyond the technological sublime – ie. the myths 
surrounding current technological developments that are meant to inspire 
both awe and fantasies of control and mastery. By combining phenomena 
that do not normally go together, such as AI and intersectionality, this 
special issue seeks to un-familiarize the familiar and to make 
unexpected connections, while also exploring potential critical and more 
just futures. One question that seems particularly pertinent to ask is 
of the relations, substitutions and combinations of different forms of 
intelligence, both human and more than human, and to explore how these 
come together in different contexts.  Contributions that employ critical 
perspectives from either the social sciences or the humanities are 
welcome, but we also invite and encourage experimental and 
transdisciplinary approaches, including contributions from the 
information sciences, software studies, and articles focused on case 
studies of AI with stakes for Latin America, Asia, and Africa.    It is 
time to move past an understanding of AI that borders towards viewing it 
as a technological sublime. In order to do so we should analyse it as a 
broad phenomenon that questions the integration of machinic forms of 
intelligence in lived settings, particularly across the relations it is 
generating in the Global South.  We welcome proposals that address, 
build upon and expand the following topics:
 •	Critical interrogations of definitions and conceptualizations of 
intelligence(s)
•	Pluralities of machine intelligences
•	Sensory capacities and AI
•	The biopolitics and geopolitics of AI
•	Sex, gender and AI
•	Race and AI
•	Critical interrogations of AI narratives
•	Critical perspectives on AI sited in the Global South
•	Progressive regulation of AI   Please submit a 500-word abstract and 2 
page CV to (peter.jakobsson /at/ sh.se) by 1 March 2020
 Timeline:
Submission of abstracts                              1 March 2020
Notification of acceptance    		         20 March 2020
Submission of full papers     		          1 September 2020
Peer Review                                              	 15 November 2020
Revision                                                   	 15 December 
2020
Publication                                               	 January 2021




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