[Commlist] Fiction Machines IV - Call for Proposals

_CALL FOR PROPOSALS_

/The Material: Art & Technology Research Group presents///

//

*/Fiction Machines/**//**/IV/*

**

**

*One-Day Symposium: *

Thursday July 20th 2023

Locksbrook Road Campus,

Bath, BA1 3EL

For this iteration of Fiction Machines we are interested in methods of 
fiction and personification within art practice research to engage with, 
and give voice to, more-than-human lifeforms and materials.

The novelist Amitav Ghosh, in his non-fiction work /The Nutmeg’s Curse/ 
(2021) draws connections between histories of colonialism, capitalism 
and real fictions of the land. He describes the mechanistic worldview 
that has supported colonial violence and extraction, nature viewed as 
‘inert repository of resources, which in order to be ‘improved’ needs to 
be expropriated.’ (37) What this view has suppressed, he argues, is 
thinking the universe as living organism, ‘animated by many kinds of 
unseen forces.’ (37) It is through myths, stories and voices that we can 
rethink perceptions and agencies of the non-human.

Ghosh describes the story of the volcano Budj Bim, for example, in 
Australia’s Victoria State. For the Gunditjmara, the Indigenous people 
of the region, the volcano as giant being with lava teeth is a founding 
ancestor. Budj Bim’s creation myth, passed down through generations, 
bears witness to a volcanic eruption 30,000 years ago and played a major 
part in the community’s reclamation of some of their ancestral lands in 
2007. Philosopher Elizabeth Povinelli in /Geontologies/ (2016) describes 
a 2013 legal case in Northern Australia between mining company OM 
Manganese and the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority. The dispute 
centres around the status of sacred rock formation Two Women Sitting 
Down, asking what it means for the rock to listen, and to have voice as 
a political subject, ultimately as a power struggle over what counts as 
life and nonlife, ‘rocks extrude into their environment, changing wind 
patterns and leaving soil deposits, and they ingest the living that 
changes their geochemical imprint.’ (72)

What such examples show is how fictions and personifications of the 
more-than-human environment are bound up with law, agencies, 
philosophies and science of the earth, politics of extraction, 
narratives of colonial modernity and postcolonial resistance. This is 
increasingly relevant with the current urgency of climate crisis. 
Tuvalu, an island atoll in the South Pacific, for example, is forecast 
to disappear completely by the end of the century due to rising sea 
levels. One proposal for retaining its status and ownership of its 
maritime zones is through a fictional version of itself in the 
metaverse, passing on stories digitally for future generations.


We are interested in fiction as method within art practice in such a 
context, ‘Far from being an escape from the world’, as Shaws and 
Reeves-Evison have argued, ‘fiction takes us to its symbolic centre and 
might allow us to establish some leverage within the tangled 
contingencies and hidden conventions that lie there.’ (2017: 7).

In the symposium we ask: How have artists worked with voices entangled 
with the earth and materials, our technologies, instruments and waste? 
Beyond data, what rituals, affinities and subjectivities are emerging 
for relating to climate? How are non-human collaborations and 
speculative machines re-imagining the human and planetary? And what is 
at stake in personification and voicing – who is speaking for whom and 
is anyone or anything listening?

*_Symposium Strands:_*

Each strand may include though is not limited to the following suggested 
topics._


_

  * *Agencies of land as material*: soil as material evidence; toxicity;
    underground life, plants, fungi and communication networks; nuclear
    waste and e-waste; mythology, extraction and colonialism; animated
    lands; agropoetics; food ecologies.

  * *Climate rituals: *critical sensing;  non-data based approaches to
    climate justice, communication or measurement; personifications or
    invocations of climate;  human/more-than-human affinities; bodies,
    desire and ecoqueer practices.

  * *Machine futurisms: * giving voice to speculative forms of machine
    that re-imagine technological relations with human and non-humans;
    speculative subjectifications; sci-fi and alien weirdness;
    non-western and postcolonial futurisms.


  * *Personification and voicing as method: *ventriloquism; critical
    reflections on speaking for/as/with/through other things; noise; AI;
    deep listening; indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies;
    narratives of resistance. **


*_Proposal Submission:_*

(i)_Papers & Performances_- We are interested in submissions from 
interdisciplinary researchers including artists, filmmakers, writers and 
theorists whose work responds to a particular strand of the symposium. 
We encourage practice based presentations, traditional and fictional 
papers as well as performances. The duration for each ppresentationwill 
be 20 minutes.

(ii)_Artist’s moving image works_–We are also looking for artist’s 
moving image works which connect with a particular strand of the 
symposium (up to 15 minutes) we will select a set of works for a 
screening taking place throughout the event.

Please send proposals (200 words) for all papers/performances – 
outlining their aim and form – along with a short biography. For moving 
image submissions please provide an online screening link along with a 
short synopsis and biography.

Please email all proposals to the symposium coordinators: Dr Charlie 
Tweed ((c.tweed /at/ bathspa.ac.uk) <mailto:(c.tweed /at/ bathspa.ac.uk)>) and Dr Andy 
Weir ((a.weir /at/ arts.ac.uk) <mailto:(a.weir /at/ arts.ac.uk)>)by no later than 
*Friday May 12th, 2023*.

*Please note the event is _in person only_ and not online.

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