[Commlist] cfp: Nonhuman Vision: How Technologies and Animals See and Make Sense

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*Nonhuman Vision: How Technologies and Animals See and Make Sense*


Seeing—and the sense making that follows—is usually conceived as 
something humans alone do. Anthropocentric vision has been radically 
decentered by both computer vision and by multispecies ontologies, even 
if all-too-human biases stain the former and the latter is anything but 
surprising to indigenous people. And yet nonhuman vision remains 
under-examined and under-theorised in disciplines cognate to STS, where 
image and sense-making often remain the privilege of the human. This 
panel offers a corrective by advancing vivid case studies in non-human 
vision that center technologies and animals as agents of meaning-making.


 From analogue photography to computer vision, technologies of vision 
see in nonhuman ways (Mackenzie and Munster 2019, Zylinska 2017). 
Photons are processed into computer readable code, filtered by 
algorithms, and correlated by machine learning to build so-called 
artificial intelligence. Animals, too, can see beyond, differently, and 
better than RGB, the human visual light spectrum (Barad 2007). While the 
chasm separating human vision from other animal vision is vast, efforts 
towards remembering and forging inter-species companionship are 
essential to responding to the species extinction and climate crisis 
(Haraway 2016). Seeing as non-human–technological or animal–uniquely 
challenges key concepts in media studies: who or what makes sense of 
symbols.


Across the assembled papers, this panel explores some of the crucial 
technical, affective, multi-species and multi-modal ways in which 
nonhuman vision figures in the contemporary moment. In doing so, it 
brings expertise in STS, new materialism, visual culture, media arts, 
and cultural studies to the study of communication and technology. 
Collectively, we question the politics of vision: who or what sees who? 
What, how, and when? What or who can avoid being seen, provide consent, 
and avoid the gaze? Awareness of how vision technologies and non-human 
animals see and sense–or avoid such efforts–in uncanny and alien ways 
not only challenges but should transform human relationships to others, 
both technical and animal.

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*Contact: */(mediacultures /at/ protonmail.ch) 
<mailto:(mediacultures /at/ protonmail.ch)>/

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*Keywords:* vision, animal, drone, visual, seeing, gaze

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*Categories: *Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Information, Computing and Media Technology

STS and Social Justice/Social


How to apply:


https://www.easst4s2020prague.org/call-for-papers-and-panels/

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