[Commlist] CfP: The Automated Condition. Manifestations and Narratives in Art, Literature and Culture

*CfP: The Automated Condition. Manifestations and Narratives in Art, 
Literature and Culture*

*Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at the Department of German, 
Princeton University (May 12-13, 2022) in cooperation with the Center 
for Cultural Studies, University of Graz.*

*Deadline: November 15, 2021**
*
Keynote by Joanna Zylinska, King's College London.

Driverless cars, social credit systems, or Twitter poetry bots: our 
increasingly technologically optimized and algorithmically organized 
existence informs an automated condition, a mode de vivre centuries in 
the making, in which spontaneity, ingenuity, and exceptionality are 
re-defined through the standardization of processes of labor, 
production, and consumption. Concomitantly, the flipside of the Fordian 
promise of total automation has become a bitter and unavoidable reality 
where automated systems upend the foundations of social interaction and 
artistic production alike. That this is the inevitable fate and triumph 
of the animal laborans would be the argument posited by Hannah Arendt, 
who warns in The Human Condition, like many others, how such 
advancements in automation, spearheaded by the industrial revolution and 
invention the steam engine, could result “in the deadliest, most sterile 
passivity history has ever known” (Arendt 1958). Moving within a variety 
of manifestations and narratives, this interdisciplinary graduate 
conference wishes to both connect and cross-pollinate historical case 
studies on automation with theoretical perspectives on the conditions it 
produces. Collectively, literature, art, and culture can provide vital 
points of entry into the interrogation of life in the automated 
condition, question whether it is truly a fatal form of passivity, and 
offer a nuanced and holistic understanding of its promises and its 
possibilities.

Even before the Renaissance, the discourse on “automatically” produced, 
“accidental”, “natural” or “self-emerging” imagery manifested. It most 
often refers to image-generating techniques that bridge nature and art, 
such as castings and nature prints (Felfe 2015/2019) or photographic 
processes (Geimer 2011, Wolf 2013). Especially the 19th century is ripe 
with responses to this hitherto unknown possibility of automation: Take 
E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman (1816) for example, the story of the 
uncanny robot Olimpia, who imitates human music-making and dance with an 
exactitude commensurate with her cold and lifeless physique and her lack 
of emotion, wit, and personality. Various vanguard thinkers and 
producers explored the creative potential of such automated techniques 
early on (Talbot 1844-46, Ernst 1926), while others, especially in the 
first half of the 20th century, criticized the loss of human autonomy as 
unartistic (Baudelaire 1859, Benjamin 1935, Bazin 1945). What has been 
part and parcel of this historical development of automation is the 
continuous, and perhaps even inevitable, transfer of tasks, services, 
and other menial labor from subaltern human actors such as servants and 
scribes to electronic devices (Krajewski 2018) as well as the emergence 
of digital information and communication networks (Ludovico 2012).

These paradigmatic shifts and transformations inevitably led to ever-new 
forms of academic and artistic reflection on human and mechanical 
agency, as with the case of Vilém Flusser concerning the rise of 
technical images (Flusser 1983) which Jonathan Beller applied to the 
networked camera as a “vast automaton” that converts “all social 
(mediological) process into a feedback mechanism” (Beller 2017). More 
recently, artists have begun to reflect on the agency of apparatuses 
from theoretical vantage points. A wide range of responses emerge from 
the conceptual art of the 1960s and 70s up until post-internet practices 
informed by digital technology and networks (Kelsey 2012, Weiberg 2015). 
Today, AI-driven art (Zylinska 2020), algorithmic poetry (Zhou 2021), 
and computational music (Dean/McLean 2018) challenge anthropocentric 
understandings of ingenuity and originality. How are we to define a 
notion of technology that can anticipate as well as encapsulate the 
immense creative potential of computational artistry under the aegis of 
the automated condition?

Contributions can address, but are not limited to the following topics:

-    historical, sociological, philosophical, psychological, or 
theoretical perspectives on automation
-    automation in literature: forms, motifs, techniques
-    automation in media and technology: manuscripts and scribes, 
printing and typography, circuitry and the electronic text
-    automation in music: experimental music of the 1960s, 
live-electronics, indeterminacy, aleatory music, stochastic music, 
AI-driven music
-    automation and the art history canon: surrealism, abstract 
expressionism, Dada, concept art of the 1960s/70s, AI-driven art
-    automated art techniques: natural casting and impression, frottage, 
action painting, photographic processes, 3-D rendering/printing, GAN
-    notions and manifestations of the aleatory, the unconscious, or 
chance in the context of automation
-    demystification of the promise of automation through 
socio-political issues (gender, class, race, accessibility etc.), 
intersectional analyses of automation
-    critical accounts of translation software, speech recognition, 
text-to-speech programs, and probabilistic inference as well as 
automatic alternative text, image recognition and tracking
-    machine learning as a tool for imaginaries/creative writing/music, 
also in the form of artistic or experimental interventions such as 
lecture-performances, videos screenings, and others

This conference, held in English, is a collaboration between graduate 
students of the Department of German, Princeton University and the 
FWF-project “Co-operative Art Techniques” at the Center for Cultural 
Studies, University of Graz. The first conference will take place in 
Princeton on May 12-13, 2021. A second conference is envisioned to take 
place in Graz in the Winter Semester 2022/2023.

Despite the unpredictability of pandemic conditions, any and all 
attempts will be made to have an in-person conference in Princeton. 
Should conditions not allow to go forward due to international travel 
restrictions in place, a hybrid or online format will be pursued. The 
keynote and other components of the conference will be live-streamed and 
made available online either way. A publication of the proceedings is 
planned.

*To apply, please send an abstract of no more than 300 words with a 
provisionary paper title, and a short bio in English to Dennis Schäfer 
((dennis.schaefer /at/ princeton.edu)) and Mona Schubert 
((mona.schubert /at/ uni-graz.at)) by November 15, 2021. Presenters will be 
notified by December 15, 2021.*


Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 
2018. [1958]

Baudelaire, Charles. “The Salon of 1859: The Modern Public and 
Photography,” In Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, edited 
by Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison, 19-22. New York: Routledge, 1982.

Bazin, André. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” in Film 
Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1960 [1945]): 4-9.

Beller, Jonathan. “The Camera As Vast Automaton,” in The Programmable 
Image, Still Searching…- Blog, Fotomuseum Winterthur, 05.05.2017. Link.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical 
Reproduction.” in ibid., Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited 
by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 217-252.  New York: Schocken 
Books, 1969. [1935]
McLean, Alex, and Roger T. Dean, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Algorithmic 
Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Ernst, Max. Histoire Naturelle. Paris: Galerie J. Bucher, 1926.

Felfe, Robert. “Vom künstlichen Leben niederer Tiere: Eine vergessene 
Ökologie mitten im Europa der frühen Neuzeit.” In Andere Ökologien. 
Transformationen von Mensch und Tier, 135-160, edited by Iris Därmann, 
and Stephan Zandt. Munich: Wilhelm Fink 2017.

Felfe, Robert. “‘Naer het leven’: Between Image-Generating Techniques 
and Aesthetic Mediation.” In  Ad Vivum? Visual materials and the 
vocabulary of life-likeness in Europe before 1800 (= Intersections 61), 
edited byThomas Balfe et al, 44-88. Leiden: Brill, 2019.

Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. London: Reaktion 
Books, 2000. [1983]

Geimer, Peter. “Von selbst entstandene Bilder. Zerstreuung der 
Autorschaft.” In Ludi naturae: Spiele der Natur in Kunst und 
Wissenschaft, edited by Adamowsky, Natascha, Böhme, Hartmut, and Robert 
Felfe, 285–297. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2011.

Hoffmann, E.T.A. The Golden Pot and Other Tales. Translated by Richie 
Robertson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Kelsey, Robin. “Playing Hooky/Simulating Work: The Random Generation of 
John Baldessari”, in Critical Inquiry 38, no. 4, [= Agency and 
Automatism. Photography as Art Since the Sixties, edited by Diarmud 
Costello, Margaret Iversen, and Joel Snyder], (Summer 2012), 746-775

Krajewski, Markus. The Server. A Media History from the Present to the 
Baroque. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018.

Ludovico, Alessandro. Post-Digital Print. The Mutation Of Publishing 
Since 1894. Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2012.

Talbot, William Henry Fox. The Pencil of Nature. London: Longman, Brown, 
Green & Longmans, 1844-46.

Weiberg, Birk. “Post-Internet as Post-Apparatus.” In Studia culturae no. 
23 (2015): 141-154.

Wolf, Herta. “Nature as a Drawing Mistress.” In William Henry Fox 
Talbot. Beyond Photography [= Studies in British Art 23], edited by 
Mirjam Brusius, Katrina Dean und Chitra Ramalingam, 119-142. New 
Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2013.

Zhou, Emily Alison. “Digging and Sinking and Drifting: Allison Parrish’s 
Machine Poetics”, e-flux, Journal #117 April 2021. Link.

Zylinska, Joanna. AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams. London: 
Open Humanities Press CIC, 2020.

---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------