[Commlist] DEIII: Living with automation. CFP

Coordination of the DIGMEX network

We are happy to announce Digital Existence III: Living with automation – 
a conference about artificial intelligence (AI), biometrics and the 
human condition.

The conference will be held at The Sigtuna Foundation 26-27 October 2020.

About Digital Existence III

Digital Existence III (DE III) follows on from the Digital Existence 
conferences, but assumes the character of a two-day symposium by 
invitation. It is the first in a series of three planned symposia 
entitled “New Directions in Existential Media Studies” as part of the 
project “BioMe: Existential Challenges and Ethical Imperatives of 
Biometric AI in Everyday Lifeworlds” (2020-2024), headed by Amanda 
Lagerkvist.

Invited speakers include N. Katherine Hayles, Benjamin Peters, Joanna 
Zylinska, Kelly Gates, Sun-ha Hong, Amanda Lagerkvist, Matilda Tudor, 
Jacek Smolicki, Jenny Eriksson-Lundström, Charles M. Ess, Zach Blas.

Call for engagement papers

During our symposium there will be a slot for engagement papers by 
younger scholars (PhD students and postdocs). These papers should engage 
the young field of existential media studies in the timely contexts of 
biometric artificial intelligence. Please submit an abstract of 500 
words to Matilda Tudor ((matilda.tudor /at/ im.uu.se)), no later than April 30, 
2020. Notification of acceptance: June 1.

For complete cfp: 
https://www.im.uu.se/digitalAssets/859/c_859916-l_1-k_digital-existence-iii-living-with-automation-cfp.pdf 


DIGMEX members

The conference will also be open for DIGMEX network members without 
papers, at their own expenses. This will depend on availability. Please 
sign up for this by e-mailing Matilda Tudor at (matilda.tudor /at/ im.uu.se)


The conference is free of charge, but contact the Sigtuna Foundation 
directly for information about room prices and bookings. 
https://sigtunastiftelsen.se/en/

Important dates

30 April 2020: Deadline abstract submission

1 June 2020: Notification of acceptance of abstract

26-27 October 2020: Conference dates


Description

*Description *

AI (artificial intelligence) is mounting on the human horizon, evoking 
both hopes and fears. Mapping itself onto almost every conceivable realm 
of human life and experience, AI is however not only a concern for the 
future: it is already here, at our fingertips.As AI is part of our most 
intimate lives, quantified self-imaginings, embodied perceptions, and 
our emergent practices of care and of law enforcement – especially via 
biometrics/– /our lives are increasingly ‘on automatic.’ But where did 
this world stem from – historically and ideologically? What founds it 
philosophically? How can it be (re)conceived, theoretically and 
artistically, in order for us to responsibly craft AI to serve human 
kind? What can we learn from attending to how we already live with 
automation – about risks and possibilities – and from how we have lived 
with its imaginaries on our horizon throughout history, in fiction and 
techno-progressivist discourse and practice? What are the existential 
needs and necessities that face us anew with AI? And can we now harness, 
as scholars in the humanities, those rich sources of insight and wisdom 
about the human condition, that remain our footing, while mobilising 
them creatively and critically for a new era with ‘responsible AI’ 
(Dignum 2019)?


This symposium is motivated by the fact that in increasingly conspicuous 
ways, leading AI alignment collaborations to develop philosophically 
robust notions of “benign AI”, are almost entirely absent of any 
in-depth engagement with humanistic knowledge, whether philosophical, 
historical, artistic or anthropological. Because these automated 
technologies provoke immediate questions about privacy infringement, 
ethics and security, questions about/human value, well-being, 
trustworthiness and ethics///in AI design are simultaneously raised 
globally. The European Commission for example recently proposed an 
approach “that places people at the centre of the development of AI 
(/human-centric/ AI)." To address these major transformations and broad 
global concerns the symposium “Digital Existence III: Living with 
Automation*” *will place the qualitative, philosophical and artistic 
modes of interpreting, creating, co-designing, critiquingand engaging 
the emergent automatedworld equally centrally. AI must be placed in 
historical sociopolitical contexts, yet their many exigencies and 
meanings also require looking backward to our history as scholars in the 
humanities, as much as looking forward and beyond its classic 
trajectories, to find novel and pertinent framings.


 From the perspective of existential media studies (EMS), which 
revisits classic questions and themes in existential philosophy about 
‘what it means to be human’ – while upgrading them to our contemporary 
technologized culture in conversation with posthumanist and new 
materialist debates – the stakes are foremost existential/. 
/Technologies define and redefine the human condition. Hence, automated 
data services are conceived as everyday “mundane data;” they 
co-condition our world and media are our material infrastructures of 
being//(Peters 2015). Yet, automation is simultaneously theorized as a 
fresh source for embodied///disharmony, friction, vulnerability and 
social injustice//. /Not only do we use technologies; our lives are 
increasingly digitally “thrown”, to draw on the language of Martin 
Heidegger, into a highly connected, fast changing technological world 
that uses us, threatening to leave us displaced and ever more vulnerable 
(Lagerkvist 2016, 2017, 2019). In EMS human existence is consequently 
conceived as an ongoing///moral project////(/Kierkegaard 1849/1989; 
Sartre 1956), stretched out in an anticipatory mode towards horizons of 
the possible, the contingent and the imperative. EMS thus maintains 
that/the towering existential and ethical task of our time is to reflect 
upon, and take responsibility for, the media technologies that we 
develop, use and embrace, and how that embrace simultaneously raises (as 
in de Beauvoir’s ‘ethics of ambiguity’, 1947) new affordances and 
limits; the new resources and risks of modern human life. This 
conference will thus take existential media studies in new directions, 
prompting a necessary interrogation of AI and biometrics from creative, 
imaginary, artistic, philosophical and historical angles, while 
anthropologically centring on experiences of living with automation in 
today’s world./

/
/

The contributions to the symposium will be published in a themed issue 
of a peer reviewed journal. The symposium is an activity within the 
project “BioMe: Existential Challenges and Ethical Imperatives of 
Biometric AI in Everyday Lifeworlds” (2020-2024), headed by Dr. Amanda 
Lagerkvist (based in the Uppsala Informatics and Media Hub for Digital 
Existence: http://www.im.uu.se/research/hub-for-digtal-existence) and 
hosted by the Department of Informatics and Media at Uppsala University. 
This event is the first in a series of three planned symposia entitled 
“New Directions in Existential Media Studies”. It follows on from two 
conferences organized by DIGMEX (a network initiated by Amanda 
Lagerkvist in October 2014) in collaboration with the Sigtuna 
Foundation: “Digital Existence: Memory, Meaning, Vulnerability” (2015) 
and “Digital Existence II: Precarious Media Life” (2017). BioMe is part 
of the national research program WASP-HS: Wallenberg AI, Autonomous 
Systems Software Program – Humanities and Society: https://wasp-hs.org 
<https://wasp-hs.org/> (2020-2030) financed by the Marianne and Marcus 
Wallenberg Foundation (MMW) and the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg 
Foundation (MAW). The conference is co-organized by the DIGMEX network 
and the Sigtuna Foundation, and co-funded by MMW, MAW, Uppsala 
University and the Sigtuna Foundation.


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