ABSTRACT. This talk develops a “Critical/Constructivist Platform Studies” reading of the Unreal Engine, its history, and its various co-productive practices through hermeneutic interpretations of Unreal’s interface, functionality, & generated code. In particular, I will examine raytracing graphical generation methods and the Unreal Engine’s Physically Based Rendering (PBR) materials and lighting system. PBR is a method for calculating the appearance of light, color, texture, and reflection/refraction that privileges “process” over “product;” i.e., PBR assumes that more visually pleasing-graphics can be created through remediating universal physical processes of light, surface roughness, and lens distortion, rather than remediating more hand-crafted interpretations of light, such as pigment blending, impressionistic techniques, and three-point lighting design. The shift from hand-crafted remediation to PBR, made possible through a combination of more efficient algorithmic processes and through the modularization of Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) apart from central processing, participates in a reconstruction of the epistemic subjectivities (Knorr Cetina 1999) of artists and technicians who use Unreal. I will argue that Unreal Engine’s PBR techniques highlight the holographic intersections of software, hardware, color, culture, and the human body, and that the process of developing and refining PBR illustrates the synthesis of cybernetic, rational-based computing and affective and emotional phenomenological experiences. I will also demonstrate how PBR is being constructed as a technique for creating “unreal” experiences grounded in reality by reverse-engineering truth claims from archival media—in this talk, through the reflection of light and color off of skin and through a reconstruction of the US Moon Landing. PBR and the Unreal Engine each complicate the analytic divide of rational/affective, objective/subjective, and masculine/feminine vision while also serving as a narrative for a collective imagination of the role visual effects play in the construction of truth.

ABSTRACT. This presentation explores the confluence of alternative and accessible interfaces, DIY design practices, and disability studies by investigating and intervening on the capacities of the NES Hands Free, the first commercially available controller designed for quadriplegic players. Announced in the “New Products” section of the Winter 1987 issue of Nintendo Fun Club News, the Hands Free consists of a sip n’ puff sensor which replaces the ‘A’ and ‘B’ buttons of the NES-004 and a chin- or mouth-controlled joystick for ‘UP’, ‘DOWN’, ‘LEFT’, and ‘RIGHT.’ Spearheaded by Nintendo of America in Redmond, Washington the same year that the National Council on Disability first recommended the adoption of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the device was play tested at the Children’s Hospital in Seattle by Todd Stabelfeldt, an eight-year old with C4 quadriplegia. Now known as “the Quadfather,” Stabelfeldt later became a disability activist, public speaker, and founder of a medical technology nonprofit in Seattle. Whether playing videogames with Nintendo’s Hands Free or Fred Davison’s Quadstick, Mary Flanagan’s [giantJoystick] or Patrick LeMieux’s new Octopad, the embodied, analog experience of play radically transforms the ways in which digital mechanisms move. From some of the first accessible design by corporations in the 1990s to alternative controllers built by artists in the 2010s, this microhistory of metagaming makes one thing clear: change the controller, change the game.

ABSTRACT. Similar to how the biological structures of the brain enable thought and how silicon wafers enable computation, artificial intelligence can enable adaptivity in games where the decisions of players have impacts on nearly every aspect of gameplay. This presentation covers the potential and current state of research in making artificial intelligence the substrate of computer role-playing games. This genre is known for well-crafted linear narratives, combinations of detailed gameplay systems, character-driven gameplay, and requiring dozens of hours to finish. Each of these aspects presents challenges for AI-driven design. Making narratives responsive to the player’s actions results in an explosion of possible story paths. While each of the gameplay systems is reactive to the player (e.g. crafting items, navigation, combat), they are islands of that are not meaningfully connected. Managing characters that are central to the game experience needs to match the nuance and contextualization that human authors provide. Additionally, these challenges have to be met over to total play times that can reach 100 hours. By rising to these challenges, we create technologies and design patterns that enable entirely new spaces of playable experiences and push forward the boundaries of what we can do with computational media.

ABSTRACT. This presentation discusses the process of designing and testing experimental non-digital games for high school classrooms which teach history through a Black feminist lens. We already know that games in the classroom increase student engagement and have a unique power to reach underperforming students. AZ is exploring what happens when games are introduced to the classroom which immerse players non-digitally--ditching the screen in favor of eye contact, face-to-face conversations, touch, and smell. The first in this collection of games is Tracking Ida, an immersive, educational game about the work of investigative journalist and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells. The game teaches media literacy, collaboration, connecting the past to the present, and the importance of writing your own page in history. Players uncover Wells’ crusade against lynching and use her strategies to investigate police killings in their neighborhood. Along the way, they solve puzzles, decode messages through a phonograph, and interview members of their community. Since launching the pilot in 2017, AZ has begun new experiments exploring other historical moments. In this talk, she'll discuss the process of designing and testing these experiments, as well as their results.

ABSTRACT. In Constructions of Neoliberal Reason, Jamie Peck frames the neoliberal project of the 1970s as an experiment in public policy, urban planning, and economics. Insisting upon the liberatory potential of deregulation, the free market, and the privatization of space, this experiment would, in the following decades, reproduce itself in emergent forms of “common sense” thinking throughout most of the Western world. As the political theorist Wendy Brown has argued, neoliberalism depends upon a rationale in which individuals prioritize neoliberal principles of profit and efficiency, thereby giving rise to a new species of the human: homo oeconomicus. Embodying this ethos, individuals pursue public policy that intensifies inequality by locating wealth in the private sector and depleting the public sector of funds and public spaces that are vital to the poor and to communities of color. This paper addresses the complexities of this neoliberal rationale through a discussion of Sean Baker’s film The Florida Project (2017), which presents complicated renderings of urban environments that have been depleted of public spaces and which contain the unwanted refuse of neoliberalism. Living transiently in motels outside of Disney World, the characters in Baker’s film are those individuals who have been left out of the uneven growth produced by neoliberalism. Baker’s protagonists continually make “bad decisions”—impelled by the impossible circumstances in which they find themselves—that complicate our efforts to sympathize with them, thereby challenging viewers to unknowingly adopt a neoliberal rationale in our condemnation of their behavior. Viewers, I argue in this essay, are interpellated into the position of homo oeconomicus as they confront the “failures” of Baker’s characters. By adopting experimental narrative postures that invite viewers into these reflexive subject positions, Baker’s film requires viewers to explore the psychological dissonance produced by neoliberal rationale as it shapes our thinking and behavior.

ABSTRACT. Karan Mahajan’s novel Association of Small Bombs (2016) tells the story of a terrorist bombing situated in a crowded marketplace in Delhi, India. The bombing causes a subsequent temporal shift, one that pushes against the typical narrative structure of post 9/11 literature that often participates in the aestheticization of violence. Instead, Mahajan portrays a fragmented, polluted, and dying natural landscape that slowly consumes each of its characters. At the moment of the bomb’s detonation, time is fragmented within the bodies of its victims. Inspired by Jean Beaudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism, this essay seeks to understand how acts of terror engage their unwitting audiences into unparalleled spatiotemporal performances. I offer that these performances are the juxtaposition of instantaneous symbolic violence with a more insidious form of life-ending “slow violence” that stems from hyperindustrialization. To enact this linkage, I look Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor to connect industrial capitalism with the “geographical and temporal outsourcing” that have assured financial profit for the West and severe environmental consequences for the “Third World.” This analysis is intended to make an intervention in Critical Terror Studies, deviating from foundational collections like Randall Law’s The Routledge History of Terrorism and Peter Herman’s Terrorism and Literature that situate Jihadists within a Western linear historical construction, thereby assuming terrorists to be always already subsumed by hegemonic power and ignoring the role of global capitalism in fomenting extremism around the world. My argument will ultimately propose that Mahajan’s novel join a broadening division of post 9/11 literature written outside the United States that proposed alternative ways of looking at the interconnecting realties of global capitalism, extremism, and ecological demise.

ABSTRACT. As crypto-rich investors relocate to Puerto Rico to build a new crypto-utopia called “Sol” (formally, “Puertopia” which translated into “Eternal Boy Playground” in Latin), how can contemporary artists consider their utopian vision within the larger historical context of colonialism and exploitation on the island? This talk explores Eternal Boy Playground, a new experimental media art and research project by Anxious to Make – the artist collective comprised of Liat Berdugo and Emily Martinez. Eternal Boy Playground explores the cultural tropes surrounding cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, particularly as they relate to the utopian ideals of the new “crypto-paradise” that a growing group of self-proclaimed “Puertopians” have moved to Puerto Rico to realize after Hurricane Maria. The work addresses technological rituals, disaster capitalism, crypto-colonialism, whiteness, maleness and Western perceptions of tropical landscapes as sites of luxury and indulgence. The work asks, what does it mean to re-colonize Puerto Rico in the image of a crypto-based, techno-utopian fantasy? Using speculative practices, this project tackles the reigning ideals of crypto-utopias in the United States. It features: an experimentally designed Bitcoin ATM that prints “crypto-prophecies,” as if it were a fortune telling machine; a video piece documenting the influx of digital wealth into disaster-strewn areas, with text drawn from online YouTube comment-thread arguments over the consequences of entrusting rebuilding processes to newly minted cryptocurrency millionaires; and a series of sixty commissioned drawings from cloudworkers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, who were asked to draw their responses to questions such as, “How do cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin work?” As a whole, the project Eternal Boy Playground employes experimental artistic and research practices to unpack the intersections of colonialism, technology, wealth culture, race, gender, economics, altruism, and exploitation through the lens of neoliberalism and crypto-utopian ideologies.

ABSTRACT. "If you're looking for a reckoning, a reckoning is what you'll find… You sleep on the broken bodies of the ones who were here before you… You paid them for this land with lead, and I'll pay you back in full!” — It is fitting that the last words of narrative designer Lee Sizemore of Westworld are those of reckoning and repayment, words taken from a narrative written for host Hector, before he goes out in a hail of bullets and fulfills his own story of redemptive heroism. Narrativity, debt, and redemption have cropped up as themes in recent TV, the circuitous format of these series both resisting and reaffirming narrative as it structures individual character and collective history, and all of them reflexive of this tension. I want to think about Westworld (2016–18), Black Mirror’s “Bandersnatch” (2018), and Russian Doll (2019), which take place in the mid-80s into the undefined future, within the logic of the debt economy and it’s the erosion of individual credibility as formed by linear narrative, and perhaps of credit’s redemptive power. Though the narrativization of credit reports in the 18th-19th century bears a relationship to realist characterization and thus how we become socially legible to each other, changes in the credit economy in the late 20th-21st century have wrought changes in narrative’s function in the present that these series seem to register. The increasing generalization of indebtedness, with no chance at repayment, tears at the link between morality and credit and the kind of subjectivity produced by debt in which one must carry out an already-acquired future. Drawing on texts by McClanahan, Wang, Lazzarato, Graeber, and Federici, I demonstrate the ways these series grapple with reckoning as repayment, agency conditioned by an absent future, and debt’s destruction of communal solidarity in this historical moment.

ABSTRACT. This project reimagines feminist science studies through an intervention in new materialist feminist storytelling and an elaboration of a feminist materialism’s potential for expanding archives and practices of feminist sciences. By modifying “materialism” with feminist, and making it plural, rather than modifying “feminism” with materialist, weI reconfigure the epistemic valences of materiality to invite invention, disunity, and new forms of accountability. The material consequences of the imperialist conflation of materialism and positivism demand a feminist materialist science studies committed to knowledge-politics and production as necessarily co-imbricated, and always implicated in larger worlding projects.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores how plants acquired the puritanical categories of western sexuality. It explores how plants came to mirror the “sexual” lives of Victorian gentlemen and ladies, with demure brides, virile grooms and florid marital beds. This history allows us to understand how plant reproductive biology came to be saddled by an archaic conceptual framework of binary sex and masculinity and femininity. It develops an intersectional analysis to explore the racialization of plants and how sex and race came together as botany emerged as a colonial science. The talk then moves to explore the vivacious and vibrant world of plant sexuality that emerges from a study of reproductive biology, one that utterly exceeds the possibilities of a binary sex/gender/sexuality system. It traces the possibilities of other schemes of sexuality, sensuality and sociality in the histories of plant biology and how these might provide new models to retheorize sexuality in plants (and perhaps in humans)

ABSTRACT. I use feminist, decolonial theories to define feminist tinkering as an explicitly politically motivated “playing” with the epistemic power of Science. While play has become a central facet of the DIY biology tinkerer movement, it has also figured prominently in feminist theorizing about methodologies and epistemologies. I draw specifically on Lugones’ (1987) work on playfulness and world-traveling and bring it into conversation with Deboleena Roy’s (2012) proposal of a feminist science methodology of “feeling around” which she describes as a way to add “an element of playfulness” to Patti Lather’s (2012) methodology of “getting lost” (Roy 2012, p. 17).

ABSTRACT. I argue in this paper that Emily Dickinson’s poetry imagines an alternative way of seeing futurity through the fungal spore. Against the background of her frequent and vertiginous shifts between the micro and the macro, and framed by anthropologist Anna Tsing’s articulation of fungus as a wild companion species that challenges the human as “autonomously self-maintaining, ” my argument will focus on a reading of Dickinson’s poem “The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants - ,” which locates fungal rebellion against “Nature” in the incredible speed of its growth from invisible “Germ” to fruiting body. Within Dickinson’s larger project of personifying “Nature”—a form of anthropomorphism that I argue, using Jane Bennett and Timothy Morton’s discussions of personification, can work “against anthropocentricism”—the mushroom is unique. The fungal spore’s quicksilver scale-shifting characterizes an “Apostate” to the maternal and legislative functions, attached to 19th century sentimental figures of “Mother Nature,” and constitutes an act of what Tsing calls “noticing at the seams” or the “unruly edges” of a monocultural system of agriculture linked to state and capital control. If, following Dipesh Chakrabarty, climate change requires us to think of “human agency over multiple and incommensurable scales,” both as “geophysical force and as…political agent,” this paper will ask how Dickinson’s rebellious spores ask us to rethink human time and futurity through other scales and modes of being.

ABSTRACT. This talk describes the ongoing collaborations of Mercedes Villalba, Anuj Vaidya, and Stephanie Maroney and our interdisciplinary engagements in radical futures with fungus. Inspired by the feminist speculative fiction of Octavia Butler, the anthropological experiments of Anna Tsing, and the playful interderminacies of artist John Cage and many others, we present our process of creating a storytelling game of mycelial futures. The game is situated in an earthly future after bioremediation efforts to repair the planet have gone awry. It asks myco-bards and myco-tects to collaboratively create characters and objects in a speculative world of human and fungal co-mingling. Players then tell a story with these characters and objects, which over time, coalesce to tell the history of this future present. In this talk, we will share experiences of creating the game, playing it with different audiences, and further developing it with a class of UC Davis undergraduates. Through this example, we illustrate how the magical world of mushrooms provides generative inspiration and substrate to shape our present entanglements and imagine different futures.

ABSTRACT. This talk examines how the practices and rhetoric of natural childbirth advocates are changing in response to human microbiome research, as scientists increasingly recognize the diversity of symbiotic microorganisms essential to human life. Through a close textual analysis of birth blogs, handbooks, and the 2014 documentary Microbirth, I show how the natural birth community recruits microbiome research into arguments against the use of antibiotics and Cesarean delivery in labor. I focus in particular on this community’s emphasis on the nascent practice of vaginal seeding, in which C-section-delivered babies are swabbed with their mothers’ vaginal fluids in an effort to “restore” the microbial diversity not acquired in transit through the birth canal. Vaginal swabbing remains a controversial and scientifically-unproven procedure. Nevertheless, natural childbirth advocates frequently insist upon it as a mother’s moral obligation, often using strongly normative framings that equate C-section with maternal failure or inattention—sins that can only be atoned for through the baptism of vaginal seeding.

My talk outlines the rhetorical maneuvers through which natural childbirth advocates misrepresent and exaggerate the risks of surgical birth. I show how these embody a speculative intervention in bringing projected future threats or promises to bear on decisions made in the moment of birth. In doing so, it constrains women's reproductive choices by saddling them with the obligation to inoculate and to safeguard their newborns’ as-yet-undeveloped microbiomes

ABSTRACT. In the ongoing creative research project Umwelt Microbiana, we approach the multitudes of microbes that inhabit our world as key participants in the unfolding of planetary life. Thanks to recent developments in metagenomics and information technologies that have given researchers insight and appreciation for complex ecological networks of microbes, our project joins others in viewing the microbial world through a lens of affective bonds and appreciation, in two phases. In the first phase, we encourage a perspectival shift to microbes as sentient individuals in hypothesized scenarios of historical significance in which we feature microbes as the agents of perception. In a series of cabinet of curiosity styled installations, elements including microbial spray, documentation of experiments, and printed stories build a microbial worldview. These cabinets also exhibit our journeys to sites where microbial life is held sacred or as repository of environmental memory. In the next phase, we hunt for the microbial ‘sage’ - a ‘totemic’ microbe who may influence planetary systems such as the formation of clouds, precipitation, and ice. In workshops done across Canada, the United States, and Mexico, we invited participants to join in the search for an Aeolian microbe by helping to build payloads for weather balloons and kites. We conducted metagenomic sequencing of collected samples to catalog the constituents of the microbial communities in these various locations. While searching for transitional microbes that may transfer across biomes, we suggested sites of exchange and modes of transport that microbes use to access these sites, while encompassing metaphors of environmental disruptions and microbial solutions on a global scale.

ABSTRACT. “Capitalism will fall / then we will have a ball” - Chant from Oakland Teachers Strike, 2019

The chant from the recent wave of teacher strikes across the United States lends itself to imaging what a ball, in the queer sense of the word, might look like after capitalism. What can we craft from the debris and damage of our current economic system and what can queer cultures afford us in this process of imagining new worlds? How can we rework ideas of the nature/culture binary to sustain not only life but life as a queer affect? How does death and dying factor into this process of reimagining “the art of living on a damaged” as proposed by anthropologist Anna Tsing? Our presentations will explore common (and uncommon ground) between our interdisciplinary practices. Non-humans- including mugwort, oysters, rocking horses and kelp couture - become allies in thinking about how resistance to historical and contemporary disasters have posited possibilities for a post-capitalist future. The panel will not only speculate on what queer aesthetics have to offer a post-capitalist imaginary, but also look at ways in which queering the very idea of a singular apocalypse is necessary for understanding the end of days as an ongoing event felt differently across identities, class, geographic locations and species.

Individual Abstract:

Tracing the ways in which queer ball culture has been a response to conditions of scarcity and precarity through the work of scholars such as Marlon Bailey and Lucas Hilderbrand, this presentation will go on to explore how these queer strategies of world making can help us respond to the escalating climate crisis. How can “bad

ABSTRACT. Why do we ask about the future of work, when we could instead ask, when will work end? In this paper, I look at the phenomenon of pearl parties on Facebook Live to examine how artifice and style form a subculture that is against the dominant neoliberal ideology of hard work. In pearl parties, hostesses draw on a combination of nostalgia and campiness to open oysters that contain pearls for a live audience. These hostesses are typically in geographic peripheries, with a concentration of hostesses in states such as North Dakota, Iowa and Wyoming, leading pearl parties as a source of necessary, extra income. The pearl oysters themselves are a form of high camp: the pearls originally grow in a larger oyster, the pearls are then implanted into these smaller oysters, and then the smaller oysters are vacuum sealed and then shipped to the US from China. I draw upon Dick Hebdige and Stuart Hall's work on subcultures to examine how this type of informal work has created its own subculture enshrined in refusal, how pearl party culture articulates the jubilant failures of neoliberalism and the difficult contours of representing the actually existing working class. It is through this subculture that we might understand one path for failure and refusal as a way to counter and put an end to work as we know it.

ABSTRACT. To accompany her only known sculptural work, Homo Rodans, a winged human skeleton with a wheel emerging from its pelvis in the place of legs, Remedios Varo wrote a fabulist fiction, first translated and published in 2018, which re-imagines both Darwin’s theory of evolution and the origin of myth itself in order to posit—with a sense of play and absurdity—that the figure depicted in her sculpture was humans’ first, hermaphroditic ancestor. In her fiction, Leonora Carrington figures universes in which rocking horses are alive and fathers are wooden, in which animacy and agency are temporary and contingent. Varo and Carrington, both exiles to Mexico City from fascist Europe in the 1930s, created so closely together that authorship of some of their works has been discovered to be mixed-up. My presentation looks at their collaborative authorship as a response to European fascism, and considers how fascist times create a need to reimagine origin stories, to reimagine agency as plural, and to reconsider what is alive. The presentation will end with a piece of my own speculative reimagining of evolutionary history.

ABSTRACT. Yomogi, or Japanese mugwort, was brought to Steveston, British Columbia by Japanese immigrants at the beginning of the twentieth century, where it grew in their backyard gardens and quickly overflowed them, becoming rhizomatically entangled with surrounding invasive and indigenous species that make up the setter colonial landscape (Tsuzuku 36). The scent of yomogicha—mugwort tea—lingers in the stories of Japanese Canadian survivors of internment, just as yomogi plants continue to haunt the spaces from which Japanese Canadians were forcefully removed for internment during the Second World War. By tracing yomogi as both rhizomatic plant and spectral figure, this paper reveals the racialized constitution of some species as “invasive,” predatory biosecurity threats and reads these encodings as analogous to the racialization, exploitation, and dispossession of certain human subjects that serves as the foundation of white European settler colonialism. I read the multivalence of yomogi’s spectrality in biosecurity and conservation discourse, Japanese Canadian history, and literature to make clear the intimate relations between species, hauntings, and regimes of (in)visibility that mark the persistent presence of inter-species entanglements and their dialectical relationship to the technologies of settler colonial governance. The hermeneutics of spectrality and intimate relations make clear the temporal, visual, and specific dimensions of settler colonial logics that constitute yomogi and bind together Indigenous, Asian Canadian, immigrant, and poor struggles in Steveston and beyond. The potentialities of these relations are found in the spectrality—as in specere, “to look”— of “invasive species” that shape and reshape North American land and the lives of those who inhabit it.

ABSTRACT. As a chemist Fritz Haber worked to develop fertilizer and pesticides, facilitating the uses of chlorine gas and Zyklon-B by Germany in the world wars. Vern Thiessen’s 2003 play Einstein’s Gift dramatizes the movement from theory to experiment to knowledge to revised practice, staging a conflict between Haber as a practical scientist and a nationalist and Albert Einstein as a theorist and a pacifist, the one indirectly responsible for gas warfare and genocide, the other indirectly responsible for nuclear weaponry in all its uses and potentials. Played from the vantage of Einstein’s experiences in 1945, the memory play stages a significantly-fictional Haber biography toward testing chlorine gas at Ypres in act one and toward not only the death camps and the atomic bomb but also the founding of modern Israel in act two. Considering the gifts each man offers, asks for, and receives (and that Gift is German for poison), I will be exploring the loss of belief emphasized in Einstein’s opening monologue as a re-formation of faith in science, nation, and religion. Thiessen offers scientific practice and religious practice as figures for the praxis embodied in human lives. The interactions of these often-fundamental identifications—science, nation, and religion—are productive of tensions at the shift from theory to practice, doubly so in the variable timescape produced by the presence of Einstein’s older self and his changed perceptions throughout the play. Professing science, citizenship, and religious identity—that is, professing belief—sets the stage for sets of practices that lead both characters to more intimate knowledges of death and to substantially revised professions as the play comes to a close, professions that I argue stage both men for a new set of different experiments in living.

ABSTRACT. We’ve officially done it! Anthropogenic minerals are now a thing. In 2017, a paper called “On the mineralogy of the Anthropocene Epoch” identified 208 new minerals that are distinctly different from the over 5,000 previously catalogued. The minerals identified as “Anthropogenic” are the direct result of human intervention in the earth, e.g. new compounds formed at mining sites or inside nuclear reactors. They are not the result of intentional action, but evolve via proximity, entanglement, or chance encounter. Consequently, these minerals are young, on average 300 years old, a massive gap between the majority of minerals that came into being roughly two billion years ago with the oxygenation of the planet. Not coincidently, roughly 300 years ago marks the start of the industrial revolution and rapid acceleration of technologies. The automation of weaving looms and the invention of the Jacquard loom (often credited as precursor to the computer) were two significant drivers during this period. The act of weaving is central to my creative practice. Loom time creates a space for negotiations to unfold regarding the differences in time scales between objects (rocks, cacti, cities, humans, etc). While weaving, human time slows, advancing thread upon thread, as an image, object, and world is built. I create vernacular textiles (flags, rugs, banners) as a gesture toward an object to begin a conversation with something larger than the human. The resulting object has the potential to function as a bridge— to facilitate time travel. This paper will discuss the overlap between the birth of Anthropogenic minerals and textiles’ role in the industrial revolution: a case study for the ongoing dialogue between human geologic relations proposed more broadly within my practice.

ABSTRACT. The Orthogonal project is motivated by two converging forces - the ongoing extermination of indigenous Pacific seafaring, navigation and naval architecture traditions, and the survival pressures of pacific island communities in the face of climate change. Orthogonal seeks to develop a novel sailcraft for interisland travel, trade and fishing, based on indigenous designs but leveraging modern (sustainable) materials. Orthogonal is a unique hybrid design with asymmetric twin hulls over 30’ (10m) long. It is designed with the potential to be built on a beach with no special facilities or power tools. As a design project, it has followed a materially engaged path more reminiscent of artistic practices, with constant sensitivity to emergent possibilities and constraints as they reveal themselves in the process of realisation. It has been built on campus with student helpers over four years, primarily of plywood, fiberglass and epoxy resin, with aluminum stainless steel and other materials. Components are almost entirley custom fabricated, often utilising recycled materials. Orthogonal is about to be launched, but due to its unique solutions to sailing dynamics and structural issues, no-one knows how to sail it. A tour of Orthogonal and the Orthogonal Works (a short walk from the conference center) will follow the session.

ABSTRACT. In 1997, David Cope’s algorithmic system, “Experiments in Musical Intelligence” (EMI), defeated J.S. Bach in a competition of musical composition. Alongside a third human competitor, their contest was to compose a piece of two-part counterpoint for a blinded audience, who listened and attributed each work to either man, machine, or Bach. The audience’s predictions, however, were flawed: Bach was misidentified as the man, while EMI was mistaken for the German master. Following the competition, the philosopher Daniel Dennett hailed EMI’s victory as evidence of the functionalist mind; by algorithmically emulating Bach’s style, he believed that EMI had recreated Bach’s cognition. Dennett explained, “J.S. Bach was prolific, but not as prolific as [EMI]—but then, Bach was running on a much slower architecture, using old-fashioned technology.” This paper complicates EMI’s functionalist legacy by considering how the “musical intelligence” modeled by EMI differs from the symbolic intelligence of traditional AI. Although early AI portrayed the brain as an information-processor, critics denounced these inflexible systems for modeling an intelligence reduced to symbolic logic and inductive reasoning. EMI, for example, treated music symbolically by deducing grammatical rules for melody, harmony, and form from an individual composer’s oeuvre. Yet, while the functionalists attributed EMI’s success to superior symbolic processing, I argue that its computational treatment of music was neutralized by audiences’ sentimental expectations of the concert hall, expectations that associate a composer’s aesthetic competence not with the thinking mind but the feeling soul. Infused with the Romantic expectations of the werktreue—the conviction that a musical work offers an immediate impression of the composer’s will (Goehr, 1992)—listeners invested EMI’s digital intelligence with analogic depth, endowing its actions with an affective resonance normally impossible for computer processing. EMI’s musical intelligence, then, conjured a Romantic subjectivity that audiences could hear in human terms.

ABSTRACT. AI systems are currently built in a way that reflects engineering concerns of optimisation and seamlessness, which service capitalist processes of commodification and marchandisation. For example, AI-enabled voice assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri schedule meetings, check the weather, sell subscription services, etc. They are also the regular targets of intimate, amorous, and sexual requests, allowing the verbalization of the larger tendencies of the libidinal economy underpinning capitalism (Major 2009). Despite the mundane tasks and interactions these systems have been designed to facilitate, these affective verbal interactions serve as a literal illustration of the fact that libido is seized and fixed by technê, by an artefactualization of the bios (Stiegler 2006). In this work, I propose an alternative model of human-computer interaction design that treats desire as a form of renewable psychic and political energy, as opposed to a resource that needs to be seized by marketing and mined for profit. This model will be developed from the perspective of Foucault’s notion of ethopoetic techniques, i.e., practices that create (poein) the self and its mode of being (ethos). Ethopoetic technologies offer a productive framework to rethink voice assistants as interfaces that can foster “interpretative engagement” (Drucker 2013) rather than perpetuating the logic of user-friendliness and naturalization which characterizes the current economy. To explore this alternative model of voice interfaces, I will repurpose a Google AIY – a do-it-yourself, Google Assistant-enabled speaker – and create an intervention that seeks to renew libidinal energy instead of exhausting it through the channeling of desire into consumer pulsion. By opening up the intimate and affective exchanges with voice assistants to more poethic opportunities, this intervention will serve as a starting point to further discuss what is at stake in the interweaving of economy, technology, and desire.

ABSTRACT. Machine learning provides today’s computer scientists with a powerful framework to transpose a wide range of theories of grammar, syntax, and language onto a computational substrate. One literary form has however resisted researchers’ attempts to develop a holistic model of language while remaining one of machine learning’s longest-lasting objects of fascination: poetry. From Warren McCulloch’s “castles in the air” (1959) to Seymour Papert’s “science sisters” (1988), many AI researchers have resorted to metaphors, and poetry more broadly, to account for newly theorized models of cognition. Conversely, a growing community of computer scientists now use poetry to reduce the number of examples needed to train machine learning systems at fulfilling natural language processing tasks (Vapnik et al. 2009, Zhang & Lapata 2014). In that context, this paper will investigate the persistence of poetry in machine learning research by engaging with both the poetry produced by AI researchers and the use of poetry to train AI systems. While scholars across fields have framed poetry as supporting an embodied model of cognition and information processing (Kay 2001, Varela et al. 1991), this paper will rather examine the reformulation of poetry as a stand-in for some yet-to-be-known model of language that can nevertheless be operationalized. As it will be argued, poetry endows machine learning with a cultural meaning that not only resists scientific explanation, but also rebukes the need for explanation altogether. That way, machine learning research reframes the opacity of poetry as some kind of linguistic excess that can be operationalized without being formalized, thus positing machine learning’s own opacity as a sign of the computability of language. To conclude, this paper will contend that poetry provides a key entry point into the larger reformulation of forms of human knowledge by their encounter with the medium of machine learning.

ABSTRACT. In April of 2019, a group of artificial intelligence researchers laid out, in an essay in Nature, an interdisciplinary vision for future work in AI. These researchers argued that, as AI increasingly comes to mediate our social, cultural, economic, and political interactions, AI research demands corresponding collaborations across the academy. Notably absent from the collaborations they envisioned are the arts and humanities. In this talk, I argue that the perspectives offered by the humanities are vital even at the most technical levels of AI. To that end, I examine the history of AI's use of interactive fiction games as testbeds for scientific research. In the wake of recent high profile successes with Jeopardy, Go, and Atari, major research laboratories, including Microsoft and Facebook, have turned to text-based interactive fiction games as the next frontier of AI research. I read these recent developments against the history of a similar moment, in the 1960s, when successes with checkers and chess caused researchers at MIT to turn to the same genre of electronic literature as the next frontier of AI. Connecting these two moments is a fitful history of efforts to make the study of text-based games scientific by reframing them as simulations of reality on which to experiment rather than as texts requiring interpretation. Lost in this translation, I contend, is an attentiveness to the ways in which gamic and literary conventions mediate our relationship to the realities they appear to reveal. The allure of literature as the perpetual next frontier of AI, coupled with the taboo against interpretive work in the sciences, I believe calls for an interpretive intervention long at the margins of AI, and I draw on media, literary, and game studies in thinking about what kinds of lessons our literature can impart to our machines.

ABSTRACT. This brief analysis of Georges Perec’s “Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four” (1974) explores an instance of literary listmaking from the standpoint of autism poetics. Drawn from the presenter’s recently published Autistic Disturbances (University of Michigan Press, 2018), this talk looks at autism’s devotion to taxonomy as interpretive and curatorial, challenging interpretive approaches that regard list and catalog writing as vacant and mechanical. Perec’s “Inventory” seems designed to contain, suggesting purely materialist or economic concerns. At a glance, the “Inventory” offers an illusory logic, consumed items roughly grouped into like categories, cheeses, for instance, or pies and tarts. There are all the noodles in submissive companionship: “Four pasta, three noodles, one fettucine with cream, one macaroni cheese, one macaroni, fifteen fresh noodles, three rigatoni, two ravioli, four spaghetti, one tortellini, five tagliatelle verde” (90). But anything beyond superficial encounter with the text brings the reader into a state of confusion and conflict. Amid this neat docility, categorical disturbances abound. For what reason are “One blini, one empanada, one dried beef. Three snails” brought together in their own modest little paragraph (87)? Part of the duplicity of the list as genre emerges within this painfully enforced structure. The disassembling of regular structure means that language elements are made available piece by piece, each fragment its own unit. And the aesthetic that treats words and phrases as discrete modules, that plays with the thingness of language, that elevates the interstices—silences and punctuation—becomes remarkable not only for the ways in which it disharmoniously discomposes, but also for the ways in which it opens language for new and imaginative recomposition.

ABSTRACT. This presentation places Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) and “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams” (1968) within a tradition of autobiographically-based fiction about psychiatric disability in American literature. It begins with a brief discussion of Mary Jane Ward’s blockbuster book The Snake Pit (1946) and its companion feature film, which were part of a larger change in the discourse of mental illness in the US post-war. Ward’s book, and her later advocacy work, helped to make the hidden world of asylum life more visible to the public and helped to foster empathy for the experiences of people disabled by mental illness. Ward’s narrative, which Plath read, established literary conventions of asylum fiction that are later reflected in Plath’s The Bell Jar and “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams.” These works reveal how writers with lived experience of mental illness respond to the “spoiled identity” of the asylum patient (Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of a Spoiled Identity [1963]). Both writers work to hide these stigmatized identities: Ward conceals her autobiography by presenting her work as a novel and by using a fictional character, Virginia Cunningham, to describe her asylum experience; and Plath both uses a fictional character, Esther Greenwood, and publishes under a pseudonym, Victoria Lucas. The form and content of their works also dismantle the permeable boundaries between sane/insane, provider/patient, and free/incarcerated. Reading Ward’s and Plath’s work together from a feminist disability studies perspective reveals the writers’ common concerns and similar strategies for critiquing psychiatric care and writing against the perceived lack of rhetorical authority for psychiatric patients.

ABSTRACT. This paper proposes a mathematical model of communication based on David Antin's talk poem, "Tuning." Antin likens interpersonal interactions to prisoners digging toward each other, who must communicate via scratches and knocks. Each prisoner represents a person's internal state, while the cell walls which separate them correspond to the physical world. For Antin, the tunnels never actually connect, though, because we cannot perfectly know another person's internal state. Despite this, we can "tune" with others by adapting our knocks to match theirs.

I model Antin's situation as an exponential function: S(t) = de^[-t/m]

The function's height, S(t), approximates how many symbols one person needs to send a message to another, provided the pair has been tuning for some amount of time, t. The exponent's base, d, corresponds to the wall's width, and the exponential coefficient, m, is roughly analogous to the wall's material. Larger values for d and m make the tuning process take longer. And just as Antin's wall is never completely penetrated, the exponential function asymptotically approaches zero as t increases, but never actually reaches that limit.

My model has notable similarities to Claude Shannon's logarithmic definition of "channel capacity." I draw inspiration from Suzette Haden Elgin's cybernetic definition of "syntonics," as well as Stuart Hall's "encoding/decoding" model, because both discuss the role of learning another person's code. Through these sources, along with Judith Butler's theories on performativity, I develop a cell/shell model of people, which compares and contrasts with the "onion model" from social penetration theory, as delineated by Irwin Altman and Dalmas Taylor.

My autism, and the resultant difficulties of navigating a neurotypical world, are why I am developing this experimental model of interpersonal engagement.

ABSTRACT. In the Broken Places obsesses with wounds, with breaks, with borderlands. Slow violence, shock, solastalgia: survivors of the (un)natural disasters of anthropogenic changes often experience “the distress and isolation caused by the gradual [or rapid] removal of solace from the present state of one’s home environment” (Albrecht). Described as ecological grief, solastalgia is melancholy over the loss of environment, ecosystems, and place, and identities created through relationship to place. Like phantom limbs, these places—washed away by hurricanes and floods, burned by fires—still exist in our minds, in our bodies, our experience. Yet, they are gone. We are homesick for the place that visits us when we dream, when we wake forgetful, till we remember. We cannot escape the impact of anthropogenic change. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Post-Traumatic Growth. PTG is a theory that explains psychological transformation following trauma: a response to extreme weather events characterized by increased empathy, compassion, altruism, and emotional resilience (Tedeschi & Calhoun). In A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit describes the positive psychological response that can emerge in disaster: “that sense of immersion in the moment and solidarity with others caused by the rupture in everyday life, an emotion graver than happiness but deeply positive. We don’t even have a language for this emotion, in which the wonderful comes wrapped in the terrible, joy in sorrow, courage in fear. We cannot welcome disaster, but we can value the responses, both practical and psychological.” We suffer, we survive—individuals, entire communities—and sometimes we thrive. In the Broken Places shares the sleeplessness, the study of fire, the symptoms of survival, a poetics of process, PTSD, PTG. Written in experimental form, guided by the practice of climate lyricism, this text turns toward the fire. A sly activist,

ABSTRACT. This essay looks at the connection between debility, time, and game design. I combine disability studies, queer studies, and anti-capitalism to look at the views of duration impact the design and experience of videogames. I argue that the majority of commercial videogames are designed to perpetuate a cycle of frustration and satisfaction, of work and reward, in order to bring out addictive behaviour in players. These games are often are more than 60 hours, designed to be played straight through, uninterrupted by other life duties. In order to subvert this expectation, I turn to the mundane, the daily, and the ritualistic as sites of life-sustaining and life-building habits, just as they can be for life-draining work. Due to their durational possibilities, videogames may offer a throughway into the mundanity of debility, which can then be refigured to be oriented towards reparative practices.

Puar’s conceptualization of debility informs this paper’s understanding of affect associated with the massification of mental illness, and the ways in which technology regulates emotion. This debilitation happens over time; it grows in the mundane and everyday. This is connected to ‘crip time’, the ways in which disability changes one’s experience of and expectations around time. Debility breeds not in distinct, traumatic events such as time-framed singular phenomena but in day-to-day living. The temporality of the mundane is commonly ignored and taken for granted, yet is a site of potential for healing. Videogames have a particular “in” for affective art that activates in the mundane everyday, and certain design practices can be utilized to sustain life rather than drain it. I theorize Reparative Game Design, a research creation based method of making games about and for debility.

ABSTRACT. Within the last few years, there has been a marked increase in video games that take BDSM on as a topic and consent as a mechanic. Designers such as Mattie Brice and scholars such Bo Ruberg have argued for the value in looking towards versions of affirmative consent taken from BDSM as models of ethical design practice. This discourse, while generative, has been limited in its scope. Scholars and designers have by and large failed to engage with a significant body of queer theoretical literature critical of deployments of consent within normative BDSM practice and have not sufficiently interrogated whether such models of consent are fitting for the social, political, and informatic contexts of video games. In this paper, I look to open up and reframe the understandings of consent applied by queer game scholars and designers. Moving away from models of affirmative consent popular within normative sex positive discourse, I turn towards Magot Weiss’s and Robin Bauer’s ethnographic work on queer BDSM practitioners. I describe consent not just as a contractual agreement, but as an ongoing collaboration that is fundamentally speculative. I then read Robert Yang’s Hurt Me Plenty alongside Paul Preciado’s Countersexual Manifesto and argue that negotiation and consent in Yang’s game functions as a form of world-building. I find that Preciado and Yang both share a fundamental interest in the formal, pedagogical, and mechanical tools that enable people to make informed decisions and co-determine their experience. Drawing on Joseph Fischel’s critique of consent language as obscuring other important values for sexual politics, I argue that rather than drawing on normative BDSM theorizations and practices for models of affirmative consent, scholars and designers should take consent’s speculative project seriously and center an adjacent set of concerns around autonomy, access, and care.

ABSTRACT. This paper looks at the text, criticism, and studio response surrounding the downloadable content (DLC) Legacy of the First Blade for Ubisoft’s 2018 game Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey follows a titular assassin adventuring through ancient Grecian islands, world-saving quests, and options for pursuing romances with certain non-player characters, including queer relationships. However, the three-chapter DLC for Legacy of the First Blade included a non-optional birth of a child through a heterosexual encounter with another character in its third chapter -- ensuring future game releases. This non-optional child negates players’ queer identities and relationships, formed through previous play. Following feedback from fans, Ubisoft edited the DLC post-release, complicating the relationship between LGBT players, queer representation, and actionable studio response. In the current landscape of videogames’ consumer culture, the relationship between players and developers has been increasingly back-and-forth. This phenomenon is compounded in evolving games, or games which continue to change over time through DLC, patch updates, or live in-game content. Using queer futurity as a framework (Edelman 2004, Munoz 2009, Sheldon 2016) and Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey as an example, this paper considers the role of LGBT representation in evolving, future-facing, games. In Lee Edelman’s now-famous indictment of reproductive futurity, No Future, he suggests that “we are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child” (11). For Edelman, it is queerness which exists outside the “absolute value of reproductive futurism” (3). Jose Munoz’s critique of Edelman’s position presents a more utopian vision -- one where queerness exists always in the future,

ABSTRACT. The aim of this presentation is to propose and discuss the concept of ‘ambient sentience’ – a derivative of ‘ambient intelligence/sapience’ – to speak about emotional AI systems and types of affect that emerge from the human-machine emotional interactions. The case study for this presentation will be “Loving AI” – a project by Hanson AI and Singularity Net that aims at creating compassionate and spiritually driven loving robots. By looking at their experiments, the presentation with try to see the interesting dynamics between anthropomorphic programming and the robot’s umwelt to dwell on the impact that human emotional systems have on AI and vice versa, that is, to see the possible effect of AI’s materiality on human emotional codes. With this, the presentation aims to revisit the notion of ‘uncanny valley’ and inquire after the possibilities of affect it induces. By separating ‘sentience’ from ‘intelligence,’ the presentation intends to examine the codification and datafication of feelings for the emotional programming. Moreover, it turns to the affective/emotional potential that robots may have as objects. Questions it will ask and address include: 1. why do we program machines emotionally? 2. what kind of emotions, feelings and responses do we program devices for/to? 3. what does it mean to impose the human emotional and sentient key on technological devices? 4. what kind of affect does anthropocentric programming generate? 5. what it is like to feel with the machine ? 6. how do the devices contribute to the human system of feelings?, and finally, 7. do machines have feelings? All those questions echo recent debate around technology and emotions, and reflect on the trajectories of the hopes we put into technological objects.

ABSTRACT. Multiplayer Online Games (MOGs) provide spaces for players to come together and engage in cooperative, competitive, and/or creative activities. Quite often, these games are repurposed by the players, bending the rules of the software to create new game mechanics and experiences. While these modifications to the game's play style and rules may enhance, redefine, or invent new play styles for mainstream players, for others they provide a way to use the established online space for intimate sexual communication and interaction. For these players, online games can provide expression and safety in ways other environments cannot. While these systems are often text, voice, or gesture based, haptic elements are sometimes added by the modding community in order to deepen the experience and integrate the sense of intimate touch. This presentation will cover a short history and various examples of players creating intimate haptic spaces and sub-games inside of MOGs, from the use and misuse of controller vibration (or "rumble") to the re-contextualization and "hapticization" of player healing as BDSM-adjacent power exchange (aka "Healslutting") in the game of Overwatch. This review will include my work creating these haptic game spaces, developing in conjunction with sex workers and marginalized communities to create new modes of intimate ludic interaction. An examination and critical analysis of the establishment of and communication in these spaces will follow, identifying common aspects of mechanics and system invented by otherwise disparate communities.

ABSTRACT. In 2002, Francesca Rosella and Ryan Genz designed the HugShirt, a machine to facilitate touchless embrace. Equipped with an array of sensors and actuators that allowed the wearable to capture, store, and transmit hugs via SMS, the Shirt promised to imbue distanced communication with a physical intimacy that it conspicuously lacked. The Shirt quickly captured the public’s imagination, receiving frequent praise in the popular press that included a mention in the Time “Best Inventions of 2006” list. In contrast to more robust and complex haptic interfaces that could accurately replicate a wider range of touch sensations, the Shirt used relatively simple touch cues to convey emotion, part of an emerging field termed ‘affective haptics.’ While its pragmatic approach to networked touch hinted at a lower manufacturing cost and price point that would have left the HugShirt poised for commercial success, Rosella and Genz never released the Shirt for sale. Consequently, a device that had been hailed as the future of wearable tech quickly faded from public consciousness, seeming to be a failed technology, like many instantiations of haptics before it. After the HugShirt’s disappearance, the narrative suggesting that intimate tactile experience is missing and impoverished in our digitally mediated culture persisted and intensified (see Richard Kearney’s “Losing Our Touch” [2014] and Paula Cocozza’s “No hugging: are we living through a crisis of touch?” [2018]). As if in response to such stories, a redesigned HugShift surfaced in 2014, with Rosella and Ganz featured in a CNN story where they announced the Shirt’s impending commercial release. Five years later, fascination with the Shirt has continued, but the device still has yet to be released for sale. In this paper, I use the HugShirt as a case study in affective haptics, showing how our persistent fascination with the Shirt can be

ABSTRACT. Video games have always engaged players’ bodies, from coin-operated game machines that use vibration and electric shock, to the buttons and joysticks of arcade and console games, to motion gaming interfaces and the vertiginous feeling of wearing virtual reality headsets. Moreover, games ask players to do things. Writing about the medium-specificity of games in 2006, Alex Galloway argued, “if photographs are images, and films are moving images, then video games are actions.” Because they demand action from players, often with players’ bodies, video games could be understood as an inherently haptic medium. This paper focuses on the haptic aesthetics of game controllers, particularly the work of independent queer and feminist game developers who explore gender, sexuality, and intimacy through the sense of touch. The question of how games make us feel is often framed as assessing their affective range: if video game narratives can make players cry, if virtual reality helps players empathize with others, and how video games might communicate a range of negative affects outside the imperative to design fun experiences. Independently-designed game controllers offer a different way in to this set of questions, showing how physical and affective touch exist together and in tension. From uses of conductive fabric and thread to explore intimacy and softness, to discussions about “queering game controls” and what I have elsewhere called “gaming’s porn parodies,” independent, often unique, tactile game interfaces complicate current conversations about the ways video games touch audiences.

ABSTRACT. This paper articulates the concept of radical slowness, a deliberate failure to ‘keep up’ with the ever-accelerating rhythm of capitalist society as a political act. When discussing speed, many have considered the consequences of a society that valorizes efficiency and acceleration. Received wisdom teaches us that speed is a violence, whether we are speaking of military campaigns (Virilio 1977), the nature of work (Crary 2013), class struggle (Sharma 2014), technological advancement (Michael 2006), the algorithms that codify us (Noble 2018, Gillespie et al 2014), or the very erasure of time for leisure (De Certeau 1980) and play (Chess 2017) in everyday life. However, by using the word to refer only to rapidity, such work forgets that slowness is a ‘speed’ as well. While some (Parkins and Craig 2006) have attempted to ‘reclaim’ slowness in the face of this hegemonic acceleration, Sharma observes that such social movements privilege those who can ‘afford’ to save time, however I do not believe that this robs slowness of its emancipatory potential. Queer poet and artist Lora Mathis coined the term “radical softness” to argue for the revolutionary potential of failure (Halberstam 2011), in this case the failure to hide one’s emotions in a society that frames any show of feeling as weakness (Mathis 2015). In a similar vein, this paper argues that slowness, too, can be radical. This paper situates the discussion in the virtual worlds of videogames since these spaces are ideal environments for the playful exploration of failure (Juul 2013) that mitigate one’s lived precarity. I look to instances of players deploying radical slowness in their videogame play as a means to argue that radical slowness can be a critical act, a refusal of labour enacted by individuals in the face of systems of control much larger than themselves.

ABSTRACT. From the barren permafrost of the Norwegian island of Svalbard, about 700 miles from the North Pole and well within the arctic circle, rises an otherworldly structure: the Global Seed Bank, also known as the Doomsday Vault. Founded in 2008 by agriculturalist Cary Fowler, the Seed Vault currently houses just under a million varieties of crop samples, boasting the most diverse collection of seeds in the world. The Vault’s purpose is to provide a backup storage facility for emergency replenishment and replacement of agricultural gene banks across the globe. In the face of the current climate crisis, its function is vitally necessary: extreme threats to agrobiodiversity demand nothing short of an ice fortress to safeguard against disaster. The Seed Vault operates at a nexus of global infrastructure and speculative design, and as such it embodies a radical contradiction: the Vault is both a crucial cog in the agro-capitalist complex, and an ark that promises to outlast said complex. At the same time, the practice of storing seeds in the arctic elides the fundamental agricultural traditions and intricate knowledge systems that sustained the seeds in the first place. Reframing the Global Seed Bank as a transdisciplinary archive, this paper develops a formulation of seeds as media to offer an experimental methodology for engaging the urgent conversation on climate change. Many scholars have argued that the climate crisis is also a crisis of representation, culture, and imagination, and that as a result, media forms in both fiction and reality have failed adequately to communicate the urgency of this critical subject. I suggest that locating media in the environment as such—and in seeds specifically—offers an alternative mode that conveys the gravity of climate disasters, addresses the problem of scale, and resolves the human/nature binary in the context of environmental crisis.

ABSTRACT. Non-sequiturs, paradox and tautology APPEAR dissipative. Yet they are highly productive in reticular and fractal ways. Suffice it to look at the philosophical tautology of Parmenides’s kind, which suggests that being “is”; at the practice of the koan, which collapses dualistic thinking by way of incompatible propositions, such as “the Eastern hill keeps running on the water”; at logical paradoxes in which the operative logic is sabotaged by its own means, as in Hempel’s paradox; at absurdist dramatic texts in which protagonists record empty time in order to mark the emptiness of the time they are recording, as in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape; or at paradoxical games like Maciunas’s Prepared Table Tennis played with paddles that have huge holes in them.

In all of these examples, the existence-apprehending processes occur via unexpected itineraries, in vacant but nevertheless enunciative codes, in seemingly futile, yet calibrating performances, and in a temporality that is the cumulative time’s “other.” They catapult the mind into the realm of the meta-experiential or they transfigure it through a series of reticular iterations.

This paper sketches a cartography of fractal and reticular thinking-making by bringing together four strands : a) the legacy of the (neo) avant-garde ; b) the Derridian destinerrance; c) the Deleuzian folding ; and d) the iterative structuring of transcendence that does not pre-exist immanence but is its residue and consequence. The paper then re-positions historical fractal and reticular practices in the current epoch and cognitive landscape. It further examines it through the lens of accelerationsim (Land) smooth aesthetics (Han) and object-oriented ontology (Harman).

ABSTRACT. I wonder about metabolism and waste. I begin the inquiry considering metabolism and waste as exchanges within an economy, and move forward with a literalization of Karl Marx’s concept of “social metabolism” informed by John Bellamy Foster’s metabolic rift theory. These moves broaden the idea of an economy to a multidimensional surface comprised of metabolic exchanges: caloric transfer, economy in its most basic form. With these premises, I use three pieces of literature that include meditations on waste, specifically organic, bodily waste: Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, Italo Calvino’s Wind in a City, and Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage. These texts demonstrate that what is considered waste is an essential medium of metabolic exchange. I loop back through the economic model and the texts in search of waste that is not recovered and does not participate in the ongoing metabolic exchanges. From here there arise at least two kinds of waste aside from biological waste. The first kind I address briefly: it is waste that cannot be metabolized, what I term rift waste, waste that creates both macro and micro metabolic rifts. The other kind of waste I discover in these text is a metabolic expenditure of energy for no purpose: wandering, aimless motion, superfluous gesture. From this new conception of metabolic waste, I re-imagine the science of animal tracking to construct a method of trac[k]ing the superfluous gestures of organisms. I conclude with a series of wonders about the utopian possibilities of ethics, aesthetics, and epistemologies of superfluous gesture.

ABSTRACT. Collage is a powerful mode of creation in many media, and also a productive theoretical lens with which to view all sorts of things. I’ve developed a comprehensive theory of collage that depends on three specific concepts. They are the gap, the seam and contested space. The first collage, on this planet at least, was likely the creation of a new type of single-celled organism about 3.5 billion years ago called eukaryotes. The currently accepted theory of Lynn Margulis from the 1960's, posited that organelles in eukaryotes such as mitochondria exists because one cell was engulfed by a larger one, or was invaded by a smaller one. Both cells then together survived and thrived in the challenging environment of that period. This theory is called symbiogenesis, and it has all the hallmarks of the three criteria of collage: gaps, seams and contested space. As biologist Jan Sapp writes “Symbiosis is at the core of all eukaryotic life. The DNA in our cell nucleus is also chimeric.” He adds: “A new understanding of life is emerging today, one in which organisms are conceived of as multigenomic entities, comprising many species living together. We are genetic and physiological chimeras. We did not just evolve from bacteria, we have evolved with them....” After reviewing research on the human microbiome and its relevance to collage I turn to the 1982 film Videodrome written and directed by David Cronenberg, and discuss the concepts of embodied cognition and embodied psychology.

ABSTRACT. “All I suggest is that we compare consciousness with spirochete microbial ecology.” Thus ends Lynn Margulis’s essay “Speculation on Speculation” (1980). Spirochetes are the corkscrew-shaped phylum that thrive in cow rumen, mudflats, and in the human body as syphilis and Lyme disease. Margulis speculates that our neurons descended from spirochetes and that our synapses are the gaps between neurons (née spirochetes) reaching for one another. This still-unsanctioned theory is part of Margulis’s broader (sanctioned) endosymbiotic theory, which explains that eukaryotic cells developed when one bacterium ingested, but did not digest a smaller bacterium—which evolved into the organelles (chloroplasts, mitochondria) of eukaryotic cells. Margulis explains that “symbiotic partnerships merge sensibilities and metabolisms…” (225).

She began accruing evidence for her spirochete theory before she passed away, but decades before then she invited readers to participate in world-building. I place her work in the context of Indigenous cosmology and the Buddhist theory of the no-self, which similarly challenge idealized notions of self. Rhetoric and persuasion in these traditions are not just cultural and linguistic processes, but environmental processes. Margulis makes little distinction between human society and cell theory: “Whether we are discussing the disappearing membranes of endosymbiotic bacteria on their way to becoming organelles or the breakdown within the global human socius of the Berlin Wall, we must revise the rectilinear notion of self, of the bounded I. Alan Watts pejoratively referred to it as ‘the skin-encapsulated ego’…”(17). And: “Much of our would-be agency, which we perceive to issue smoothly from the ego, will, or ‘I’ […] appears to owe much to heretofore-undetected symbiogenetic actors” (218). Gabriela Rìos argues that western culture relies upon a “dichotomous philosophy that [separates] environment/human/ mind,” but that “Indigenous philosophies and rhetorics have always resisted such dichotomies”

ABSTRACT. I am interested in presenting bacteria as an inherently social substance that transforms bodies through sharing. Sharing here is understood as an intentional act of exchange that moves bacteria from one person to another, with attention to their respective states of lacking and having. "change me" is a performance where I ask friends to give me samples of their nose, ear, mouth and/or vaginal bacteria, which I then insert into my own nose, ear, etc., as we sit together in front of an audience. This performance opens my body to sickness, relief, slight physical shifts, and also the uneventfulness of not knowing or feeling internal change. I am interested in how performance art can use the language of “modeling” or demonstration, while simultaneously challenging our desire for bodies to “show up” both medically and performatively. The viewer can watch, but they can’t see. Bacterial sharing in this non-medical context denies the usual modes of knowing through seeing like logs, records, explanation, certainty, conviction, or event. Performance is uniquely suited to addressing the fears and projections evoked by both the hygiene, anti-germ philosophy and the current increased interest in probiotics and “good bacteria.” Both rely on a sterilization of bacteria and microorganisms, by killing the “bad” or isolating and ingesting the “good.” The potential for transformation through damage is denied, and replaced with a focus on a good/bad dichotomy. This attempt to master the risk of interacting with bacteria seems linked to the difficulty of bearing sociality in general. Performance offers a chance to re-socialize bacteria. I am chronically sick, and chronic illness is rapidly increasing. We are all experiencing the disintegration of our climate, as is reflected in the alteration of our internal body ecosystem, leading to illness and also slightly altered states of

ABSTRACT. Food borne diseases caused by bacteria and viruses have become the plague of the modern food industry. Despite multiple food recall warnings, the World Health Organization has estimated that 1 in 10 people fall ill from food-borne diseases and 420,000 die every year. The growth of food supply chains beyond national borders has merely aggravated the problem. Most organizations and government efforts have revolved around recommending hygienic practices both in the production of meat, dairy and seafood in particular, but also in the preparation and consumption of food. But what can be said about the fact that nearly all the deaths through food-borne diseases affect the most vulnerable populations with compromised immunity? On the one hand, the economical, mechanical and social apparatus of the industry at large produces spaces for the bacteria to fester and on the other, creates an endless loop of mechanisms and technologies to mitigate the problems it has created. This calls for a critical intervention. This paper suggests that the machines of the slaughter house, the spaces where bacteria fester, provides a critical entry-point into unravelling the condition of the food industry. I will explore how the economic and structural invisibility that the industry strives toward is brought into question by the seemingly “invisible” bacteria. Although such a structural invisibility has become a necessary condition of being “situated in a technological universe” (Ellul 312), it is precisely the invisible world of micro-organisms that lays bare the frailty of our systems. Finally, this paper will suggest alternative ways of consumption that micro-organisms have prompted us toward. Working with Derrida’s notion of “eating well”, I argue that microbes have called us to question our current constructions of “carno-phallogocentric”(Derrida) subjectivity at a fundamental level.

ABSTRACT. I recently completed a manuscript, Bookishness: The Afterlife of Books in Twenty-first Century Culture, wherein I examine contemporary literary culture’s obsession with books. From cell-phone covers crafted to look like books to decorative pillows printed with beloved book covers, from furniture made out of old books to jewelry comprised of miniature books, books are everywhere. I use the term “bookishness” to describe the cultural phenomenon and aesthetic practice wherein, in the moment of the book’s foretold obsolescence due to digital technologies, we see the proliferation of creative acts that fetishize the book as artifact. In the book, I explore a variety of bookish objects, but in this talk, I instead consider how these objects found me. Through search engine algorithms and cookie-conspired advertising in social media, hyperlinked images of texts and bookishness travelled through invisible networks of connection that I cannot see, let alone read.

Digitally-coded literary objects find us online, rather than the other way around. A “smart” network of proprietary algorithms and social media functions, omnipresent cloud computing and machine learning has changed the ecology of literary production, distribution, and reception has changed. Literary research has changed and so too, I argue, must literary criticism. Rather than trace and explain this situation—how the digital network operates—this talk explores the implications of recognizing the contemporary digital condition for literary studies. Literary criticism is changing; it must change. What such change mean for the discipline is, as yet, uncertain and is the subject of my talk.

ABSTRACT. Incorporating the Digital into Creative Writing Classrooms and Practice Peruse descriptions of MFA Creative Writing programs and you’ll read about students having the opportunity to hone their creative writing skills or become professional working artists. Most of these programs focus solely on traditional writing. In what ways has creative writing changed that are not reflected in creative writing programs? How should these programs adapt to the digital literary ecology? What could result from MFA programs evaluating their learning objectives and incorporating the digital into the creative writing classroom and workshop? As a recent graduate of an MFA program, I use this talk to present reflections on the unique opportunity MFA programs have to address and prepare students for the digital literary world. While in my own rather traditional MFA program, I encountered digital literature and the Digital Humanities--though, importantly, not in an MFA classroom--and was changed. While I taught myself tools and created independent studies, I am deeply aware of how transdisciplinary digital studies can benefit traditional MFA writing programs. I’ll share ideas relating to the advantages of studying multimedia storytelling and experimenting with multimedia creation in classroom environments. Finally, I’ll discuss takeaways from creating a digital novella and how the process affected (indeed, transformed) my perspective on creating and analyzing art.

ABSTRACT. The past few years have seen increased interest in computer science instruction for artists and humanities majors. Courses, with titles like Computer Science for Artists, offer an introduction to the art of programming and meet general education requirements in a non-threatening environment. The formulation implies a hierarchy. But where is Critical Theory for Computer Scientists or Humanities for Programmers? And what would a more fully integrated version of these courses look like? What would it mean to teach a computer science course informed by humanities methods? For over a decade, I have been writing and presenting papers on Critical Code Studies, particularly at SLSA conferences, and this incipient field has begun to demonstrate ways the hermeneutics of the humanities can illuminate the study of code, particularly in the areas of cultural and ethical approaches. Whether through discussions of aesthetics, culture, rhetoric, or ethics, as in the recent algorithmic accountability movement, Critical Code Studies can enrich discussions of code. Therefore, without reifying C.P. Snow’s two cultures divide, against a backdrop of excursions into the humanistic study of code, I would like to consider what a humanities-inflected computer science curriculum would look like. What would it mean to inflect computer science curriculum with more approaches from the humanities? What does it mean to engage students interested in building and job training with the critical methods of continental philosophy? In this paper, I will examine how computer science and humanities faculty could combine forces to extend computer science instruction through an engagement critical code studies, along with software studies, platform studies, and media archaeology. I will discuss how these transgressions across disciplines have led to my own

ABSTRACT. As an arts research practice, how we can use the alternative critical thinking from the visual arts to participate in the ethics of algorithms discourse, rather than assuming this will remain with the computer and social sciences? Recent developments in machine learning algorithms use a new paradigm of computing that is inherently complex, obfuscated, and opportunistic, whilst simultaneously exercising increasing influence in socially sensitive contexts. Humans are becoming increasingly incapable of comprehending computation in its speed, scale, and structure, however, it is more necessary than ever before to engage with this process of autonomous decision-making, in order to make choices about how we want to live with it. How can we incorporate practices of representation, simulation, contextualization, and speculation from the history of art for an expanded approach to building knowledge and making decisions? How can we contrast computational intelligence with other types of intelligences, those that emerge from sensual, spatial, conceptual, emotional, or aesthetic practices? Machine learning offers a new computational approach that is predisposed to a form of associative intelligence, of patterns and textures, of intensities of information and sensations, that uniquely give themselves to arts thinking, expanding on the tradition of symbolic logic that has so far driven computation and the development of knowledge. Instead of assimilating with scientific method, artists have an opportunity to bring their aesthetic, connective, and interpretive processes to this domain.

ABSTRACT. In 2018, Mira Fertility launched as “the world’s smartest clinically-proven ovulation and fertility tracker.” Mira is an AI-enabled biometric tracker that measures luteinizing hormone levels and predicts fertility surges. It is the most advanced biometric tracking, or “biohacking,” technology that is designed exclusively “for women.” While scholarly research on the emergent area of biohacking is lacking in general, research on gendered biohacking is even more uncommon, with the exception of queer theorists like Hilary Malatino who invokes Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” to argue that biohacking must be understood through its “gendered consequences.” Still, Malatino’s understanding of biohacking through queer theory does not specifically contend with reproductive control of queer and feminine bodies with ovaries and uteruses.

This paper addresses “gendered consequences” of Mira as a reproductive biohacking technology; specifically, how does Mira work as an onto-epistemological tool in which the user understands their gendered self through hormonal measures? And, to what end does Mira reinforce production and (sexual) reproduction of gendered value? Using the Mira tracker and mobile app, and the author’s own fertility data tracked with Mira as primary texts, the author presents an autoethnographic analysis of Mira through the intersections of queer-feminist and biopolitical theories such as those in Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” and Malatino’s response. This inductive autoethnographic approach allows for the “down-and-dirty” important work of embodied scholarship.

Ultimately, Mira functions to reinforce the importance of female reproduction in capitalist biopolitics and it participates in a commercial erasure of non-binary and queer bodies as it presupposes hormonal tracking’s primary importance is fertility. Thus, the onto-epistemological subject of Mira (i.e., the user), can only know their self through their inclusion/exclusion in these capitalist biopolitical systems.

ABSTRACT. George Miller’s 2015 Mad Max: Fury Road is a story told in bodies. While critically well-received, it is not a film that is well understood, perhaps because of the literacies that must be brought to bear to appreciate the film’s logic of embodiment. Some things are prominent: the perverse genius of Immortan Joe’s deployment of biopower on the level of the individual body and the population, for instance. This presentation will look at the film through the lenses of disability studies as well as Christian sacramental embodiment and eschatology to reveal the film’s oppositional possibility. It is through the non-normative body of Imperator Furiosa, marked by her distinctive prosthesis, that the film destabilizes a eugenic myth of ability enshrined in perfect bodies. Furiosa is a figure of trauma and struggle who, while lacking a left forearm, is anything but disabled. Like the bodies of Christ and the saints, Furiosa’s is ultimately a social, collective body in which the bodies of the “wretched” (the film’s term for the broken survivors of end times) are united. While Furiosa lacks a left hand, she manifestly does not lack bodily wholeness, and it is in the profusion of her “hands” (her prosthesis, the "war rig," etc) and other stigmata that the sacramental, sacrificial nature of Furiosa’s embodiment must be understood. While the antichrist figure of Immortan Joe and his Trump-esque sons seek without success the elusive sign of a body “perfect in every way,” it is precisely through those bodies dismissed as tainted, imperfect, and incomplete that the possibility for redemption is created.

ABSTRACT. Marianne Apostolides’ 2017 memoir of abortion, Deep Salt Water, is a moving meditation on the connections between reproductive loss and environmental destruction, mixing together the author’s experience of abortion with imagery of the sea. Using both poetry and prose, image and text, and simultaneously tackling the topics of abortion and climate change, the book questions “how we arrive at our ethical selves through an awareness of the consequences of our actions” (Apostolides & Maroney 2018). Although Deep Salt Water has been praised as unique in bringing together what appear to be disparate topics in this textual and ethical engagement, my presentation will begin with the premise that abortion and environmental change are intimately linked, in that they both draw attention to the problematic of who, or what, we consider alive and living, and which communities we include under the banner of “reproductive rights.” That is, I do not think it is accidental that Apostolides’ desire to explore the ethical consequences of our actions, as individuals and as a culture, encompasses an examination of reproductive and environmental politics, as both test the limits of our ethical obligations to differing forms of life. As Apostolides herself explains in a recent interview, “quite simply, abortion and climate change exist at the limit of human understanding. … Ultimately, they draw us toward the horizon of meaning; this is where a different kind of seeking must begin” (Apostolides & Maroney 2018). Indeed, one of the central claims of my presentation will be that Deep Salt Water provides an important vantage point to not only discuss abortion differently, but also to begin this different kind of seeking. My presentation, therefore, will take up the CFP’s goal of focusing on the potential of experimental engagements by claiming that

ABSTRACT. In her seminal 1980 manifesto The Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde declared that “women with mastectomies must become visible to each other.” From poet Deena Metzger’s iconic “Tree Poster” and model Matuschka’s 1993 New York Times magazine cover, “Beauty Out of Damage,” to fashion photographer David Jay’s more recent portrait series The Scar Project, post-mastectomy images have circulated in service of this visibility. Over the past several years, breast cancer patients have taken to more the ordinary and accessible fora of social media to share their own post-mastectomy photos—a development that sparked a 2013 censorship debate. For some breast cancer patients, social media outlets have afforded a space for community building and resistance to the corporate “pinkwashing” of breast cancer; a search for the hashtag #mastectomy yields images of scars, tattoos, and surgical reconstruction made available for public consumption. At the same time, this search also yields photos by and of transgender men who elect to share visual documentation of gender affirmation surgery. This paper examines how cisgender women and transgender men are using shared digital spaces—specifically, the image-sharing platform Instagram—for experimental engagements in visibility, publicity, and gender expression. Analyzing the ways in which images of mastectomy scars are presented as public (and often highly stylized) evidence of confrontations with—and at triumphs over—biomedicine, it shows how the scar is made to signify both a site of invasive “damage” and a reparative site of gender affirmation. As social media has provided a way for cisgender women with mastectomies to realize Lorde’s objective of becoming visible, it has also extended this visibility to transmasculine people whose disclosure carries both different meanings and different stakes. This paper advocates for a feminist politics of visibility that recognizes and attends to this multiplicity.

ABSTRACT. Tired of nationalistic feuds and military conflict but alert to the increasing global interactions, H. G. Wells, the sci-fi pioneer and visionary, wrote extensively on the development of world commonwealth and world community. In their investigation of Wells’s extensive thoughts on world government, scholars such as W. Warren Wagar and John S. Partington highlight the influence of Wells’s studies in biological sciences. This is not surprising, given that in his scientific essays and non-fictional works, Wells explicitly identifies biological sciences as a representative study of change and variation, which are essential elements in the organic development of his world community. In remaining consistent with Wells’s reasoning, Wagar and Partington marginalize the significance of logic, which Wells criticizes for its basis on dogmatic classification. In this paper, I contest this marginalization of logic (and mathematics) and I reassess the role of logic in Wells’s conception of the world commonwealth. In particular, I examine his philosophy of the Unique—the belief in the uniqueness of individual entities—which dictates his criticism of not just class in logic but also the abstraction of numbers, arithmetic procedures, and geometric forms. It is also foundational to the construction of the cosmopolitan community in A Modern Utopia. This paper seeks to argue that rather than restricting the role of logic, the philosophy of the Unique leads us to recognize the significance of logic in the formation of world community, because logic gives us the tool to define the relationship between communal unity and individual diversity in the unity. The world commonwealth is an experimental project for Wells, in the sense that it is a theory yet to be enacted and a scheme that relies on empirical scientific experiments for its development. It is time to add another dimension to Wells’s experiment—the experimental engagement with mathematics.

ABSTRACT. The language and methods of topology can be adapted into the practice of writing fiction as a way of bringing ideas from a mathematics discipline to a non-specialised audience. Topology approaches space and its relationships radically different than geometry, which focuses on measurable, quantitative properties. Topology is instead concerned with properties that are maintained when a space undergoes a continuous transformation, such as closeness, connectedness and continuousness. If we approach relationships between bodies and environments according to the practice of topology, new modes of thinking about these relationships be engendered. In a world facing climate crisis and increasing social and economic conservatism, we can map homeomorphisms to understand what equivalences seemingly different objects and structures may have. These ideas can be demonstrated in visual mediums up to a point, but can be taken much further in speculative fiction, where the non-real is presented as real, and non-intuitive spaces need not be physically demonstrated. Topology is not a new concept in literature, but its use is primarily limited to metaphor and analogy. By moving beyond superficial usage and embedding topological methods into the practice of writing fiction, we can expand our notions about what is possible and re-examine relationships and forms considered to be static. A topology is implemented by constructing a series of rules and applying it to a bare space, where an element of that space can be anything. One space can contain multiple topologies, multiple sets of rules to describe and understand its structure. The practice of developing speculative topological writing involves imagining a world where homeomorphic transformations are material, imagining what these transformations would look like, and imagining what happens when they interact. The result of this process is the generation of novel ways to talk about communities and the bodies that inhabit them.

ABSTRACT. In this talk, I introduce design theory as a way to negotiate the relationship between the experimental apparatus in quantum physics and the wider socio-political sphere. The talk begins by laying out two histories of the famous Stern-Gerlach “cigar experiment.” Both stories attempt to demonstrate the ways in which measurement in the scientific apparatus is not limited to purely scientific objects, but instead, extends far beyond typical technoscientific tools to include elements of the social. However, I argue that Bretislav Friedrich and Dudley Herschbach’s retelling of the history behind the experiment (Physics Today, 2003), perpetuates the notion that experimentation is epistemologically representational, while Karen Barad’s treatment of the cigar experiment (Meeting the Universe Halfway, 2007) exemplifies scientific experimentation in the performative mode. This theorization of experimentation as performative radically extends not only the limits, but also the nature, of the scientific apparatus itself. Barad effectively obscures the boundaries between science and the social, thereby catalyzing a plethora of practical and theoretical questions for the practice of designing experiments: how far do the limits of the measurement apparatus extend? By what methods do we incur such limits? And what are the ontological dimensions produced by varying inclusions and exclusions from the apparatus? This talk concludes not by answering any of these questions, but rather, by reframing such questions. Taking its cues from design theory, this talk reframes encounters with the scientific apparatus in terms as a speculative design practice.

ABSTRACT. When Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges became director of the National Library, he was already nearly blind. For Borges, who imagined Paradise as a type of library, his life had taken a sudden turn to paradox. Yet he went on to direct the National Library for eighteen years and continued composing what amounts to about a fourth of his literary work. This presentation reflects on how Borges experimented with his state of blindness to gradually rebalance as a person and as a writer, and how this remodeling of his life is expressed in his work.

Drawing on brief examples from his later works, from The Gold of the Tigers and The Book of Sand to The Cipher and The Confederates (Los Conjurados), I examine how playfulness was a key disposition that helped Borges tinker creatively, remodel his condition, and go on composing as a blind writer. My approach to the ludic/playfulness relies on Jean Piaget, Brian Sutton-Smith, Johan Huizinga, and MIT Media Lab’s Mitchel Resnick. My approach to models and remodeling relies mainly on Rodolfo Llinás, neuroscientist at NYU.

The rebalancing that Borges experienced led to new personal practices of social engagement that shaped his later work. To illustrate, I argue that his gravestone in Geneva can be imagined as his final work done in partnership with María Kodama. Here I turn briefly to Kodama’s Homenaje a Borges to help understand this final creative phase. By way of conclusion, I observe how a persistent and constructive playful stance, coupled with a renewed sense of partnership, provides a creative response to radical change.

ABSTRACT. Storytelling is a fundamental human technology. Narrative is a data structure that people use to organize and convey information drawn from both lived experience and imagined possibility. While there are many diverse narrative traditions, the basic functions of story allow us to translate our understandings across different cultural and interpersonal divides. Stories perform an important social function, due to their ability to represent highly specific points of view via universal structures. Digital interactive media has extended storytelling, providing engaging platforms for people to experience different cultural perspectives. In participatory digital narratives the reader is empowered to materially reflect their own understandings and perspective within the text. Most work in interactive storytelling has historically been designed from a western perspective. Challenging this norm, we have created Shiva’s Rangoli, a tangible and interactive storytelling system that has been designed with a set of non-western cultural assumptions underlying its functional and semantic elements. Shiva’s Rangoli is an interactive storytelling installation that uses a physical-digital interface to bridge the gap between the real world and fictional world. Shiva’s Rangoli enables readers to compose the emotional context of the stories by shaping the ambient settings of their environment (light, sound, music, and ambient video) through a tangible interface. The tangible interface is rooted in Indian culture as it depicts a traditional art-form called Rangoli Making. Rangolis are elaborate colorful patterns that are made during festivals. The stories are works of fiction inspired by mythology and they highlight the morals that are emphasized in Indian mythos. Through this work, we bring Indian traditions and myths into a technological, tangible, and narrative space. In Shiva’s Rangoli we explore how designing from a highly particular standpoint can yield a meaningful experience by encoding culturally-specific values into the interactional semantics of a digital media experience.

ABSTRACT. In the short story “The Other” (1972) by Jorge Luis Borges, the narrator meets his double - himself from the distant past. Eager to establish the identity they share across time, the narrator presents different forms of verbal autobiography, but the process of confirming their shared identity leaves both characters distraught. Such interactions may one day be possible between humans and our digital doubles. The growing availability of personal natural language datasets from social media and improving machine learning models of memory and natural language generation can create chatbots (conversational computer programs) that recall biographical memories and mirror personal idiosyncrasies sourced from existing individuals. This paper explores the horror expressed by Borges’ narrator and its potential replication in human subjects interacting with anthropomorphic chatbots whose identities intersect closely with their own. Using psychological models of human memory and personal identity, the paper discusses issues surrounding anthropomorphic memory and psychological distress in human-machine interaction.

ABSTRACT. Complex systems theory has come to occupy a prominent place in the cognitive sciences, serving as a segue between computational models of mind and more connectionist perspectives; however, its relationship with literary studies remains largely unexplored, due in part to a lack of dialogue between these fields. My paper addresses a particular aspect of complex systems theory—the Haken-Kelso-Bunz (HKB) model of cogitation—and explores the parallels between this influential experimental model of cognition and similar metapatterns in the fiction of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Franz Kafka. The HKB model describes mental processes through a form of metastability, whereby two seemingly irreconcilable cognitive processes interact to overcome a preset threshold and thus give rise to more complex, higher-order cognitive functions. My paper is the first to draw this influential model from complex systems theory into conversation with literary studies. In Consciousness Explained, philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett likens the neural processes that give rise to mind to a “Joycean machine,” a recognition of the ways Joyce’s Ulysses explores modalities of thought in ways that confront and confound its literary predecessors. Following Dennett, I argue that Joyce—contemporaneously with Kafka and prefiguring Beckett—represents consciousness through patterns that approximate both the HKB model and Gregory Bateson’s theory of the double bind. In addition, I situate these three authors within the broader project of Modernism as inherently empirical, aimed at excavating the mechanisms of cognition through literary experimentation rather than by deferring to scientific models of mind. As a result, one might recognize Modernism as not only an aesthetically experimental movement, but also one explicitly engaged in hypotheses testing and data collection—activities more characteristic of Baconian science than of literature proper. As

ABSTRACT. As digitization splinters analog wholes into the all or nothing of digital bits, there can be no mistaking how the metaphor of coding things “black and white,” speaks twice: to the racist (and sexist, classist, ablist, etc.) classification schemes that undergird AI’s algorithms, and simultaneously to the grey-scaled desaturation of cultural difference that is suppressed when these taxing taxonomies are applied systematically across the uneven real. To divide, ignorance ignores difference, keeping non-normativity at bay. In other words, not only dividing, but filtering—which is to say selective ignoring—is constitutive for digital systems. In Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious, Kate Hayles draws on contemporary neuroscience to show that the kind of cognition machines are best at is functionally analogous not to lofty ideals of human intelligence, but to low-level nonconscious cognition in humans. That is to say, so-called “intelligent” machines really replicate the most non-erudite type of cognitive processes—the most ignorant kind. What is more, in “intelligent” humans, nonconscious cognition also exists for the sake of filtering, in other words, ignoring. This filtering capacity, or “ignorant ignoring,” is common to both human and technical systems, so the “intelligence” of consciousness need not be a goal for developing technical cognizing systems; such systems are always already “interpenetrated” with the intelligence of human consciousness. Humans may participate not as volitional users in the conventional conception, but as interactive mechanisms and energy sources who serve to maintain systemic operativity—often precisely by shutting off their conscious processes, as when AI-enabled interactions script humans into ignorance. Intelligence and volition may become attachments we relinquish, in favor of agencies that exceed us, as humans and nonhumans are redefined and redistributed in ecologies of artificial ignorance.

ABSTRACT. Faced with mounting pressures and repeated, very public crises, social media firms have taken a new tack since 2017: to respond to criticism of all kinds and from numerous quarters (regulators, civil society advocates, journalists, academics and others) by acknowledging their human gatekeeping workforce: commercial content moderators. These acknowledgments have often come alongside announcements of plans for exponential increases to that workforce, which now represents a global network of laborers – in distinct geographic, cultural, political, economic, labor and industrial circumstances – conservatively estimated in the several tens of thousands. Seemingly paradoxically, the aspirational specter of artificial intelligence, or AI, solutions is also often tacitly or overtly invoked in relation to commercial content moderation challenges, controversy and negative impact. Despite these aspirations, those internal to these firms and their products are also well aware that algorithms, ML tools, and computational means alone cannot fix the ongoing need for intervention, mediation and adjudication of content; at best, a human-computational hybrid will always be required. In fact, the introduction of these tools and mechanisms is, in many cases, creating more material that is under review. The introduction of AI tools at scale for the purpose of commercial content moderation has also led increased fracturing of a variety of activities that now provide a logic for this increased hiring and decision-making workforce, and a rupture with real-time moderation. More human workers are being hired to undertake ML data set classifying, tagging, vetting, with recent mergers and acquisitions by third-party firms suggest a healthy future expected in this portion of the market. In the context of this panel on Artificial Ignorance, I will discuss these discursive and operational maneuvers, their implications and the limits of the logics that undergird human-machine interaction in the context of content moderation online.

ABSTRACT. In the last several years, a rash of ethically dubious academic studies and creepy commercial technologies have led commenters from across disciplinary and professional spectrums to claim that contemporary digital technologies are reviving the specter of two pseudosciences long considered dead and buried: phrenology and physiognomy. Popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries, these knowledge systems claimed to “read” the character of a human based on physically evident characteristics like the shape of a forehead or the curve of a hip. Current iterations have tended to use machine learning to, for instance, identify someone’s sexuality or criminality from a facial photo. These developments are ethically unsound, but an alternative reading of phrenology and physiognomy’s supposed demise shows that the current crop of contenders for the disgraced crown are participating in a very clear biometric continuum from colonial practices to the present. It, in other words, is impossible to distinguish contemporary systems of reading the body to discover the soul from techniques of measurement that have long deployed race, sex, gender and class markers to organize the bureaucratic efficiency of organizing and distributing populations for circulation through sites of labor, incarceration, and hospitalization. This paper will track some of those connections in order to make the claim that the real threat of the “new” phrenology doesn’t come from specific instances of bad actors, but the interfaces between humans and institutions in the context of a technocapitalist "carceral surround."

ABSTRACT. As media objects, videogames are imbued with values held by their makers. This is done intentionally by serious games practitioners (Laff, 2007) but also occurs independently of design goals (Nissenbaum and Flanagan, 2014). One of the more problematic manifestations of ‘values at play’ is playbour, a putting-to-work of play that recalls Agamben’s mourning the loss of ‘menuchah’, an inoperativity that is more than a means to prepare one for more work (Kücklich, 2005; Agamben, 2011). But is there a way to rescue leisure from its subservience to labour? Or, if not, is there a way to make the work done through play operate against the logics of late capitalism? If such emancipation exists, then it cannot come “from a theoretical articulation” alone (Hardt and Negri, 2000, p.206). Nor do I believe that answers can come from the proceduralist school of game studies, for whom, problematically, the designer is the arbiter of meaning. Instead, I situate these questions within work that examines both how players interact critically with games regardless of authorial intent (Schleiner 2017; Ruberg 2019) as well as work that accounts for the relationship between player and game (Taylor 2009; Voorhees 2013). To unite these conversations, I develop two concepts: legibility, or the degree to which a system can account for the actions of those operating within it, and literacy, a measure of an actor’s understanding of the methods through which a system understands their movements. Through the use of gameplay examples from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Nintendo 1998), I use these concepts to galvanize play into a force for laying bare a game’s operational logics so that they may be subject to our scrutiny, a working on and at play that interrogates not only videogame machines, but the larger machines of ideology that drive them.

ABSTRACT. This paper will consider four recent video games interested in ideas of migration and statelessness to develop a comparative analysis of how positionality impacts empathetic play. I will start by looking at two recent games by Lucas Pope—Papers, Please and The Return of the Obra Dinn. While Papers, Please explicitly considers questions of migration and citizenship, it places its empathy in morally and ethically gray areas, guiding the player to sympathize with border agents and be suspicious of migrants. Dinn, in its heterotopic ship setting, requires the player to rely upon stereotype in its deductive reasoning as the player attempts to narrativize the plight of the ship’s various migrants. To contrast Pope’s games, I will look to Playdius’s Bury me, my love and Abdullah Karam’s Path Out as games that refocus the direction of empathy in creating narratives about migration. In this analysis, I want to argue for the ways in which the differing modes of interaction—of the gameplay itself—impacts each game’s differing narrative goals, and fundamentally alters the experience of empathy as a consequence of play. Both rely on nontraditional modes of digital narration to achieve these goals—Bury via what is essentially an interactive version of a WhatsApp chat, and Path Out by way of Karam’s direct interjection of his own commentary into the game itself. In doing so, I hope to consider how recent games on these topics have made use of different narrative techniques to direct the empathy of the player.

ABSTRACT. Current game studies scholarship often assumes the obfuscation or blackboxing of the game’s functioning, thus requiring the critic to delve deeper and explore the software and hardware levels of the game with an already acquired technical knowledge of computation. While this may very well be the case for most games, this paper considers a “critical hacking” genre of video games in which, far from hidden, code and other computational infrastructures appear front and center on the screen itself. What do we, as critics, do with games that forefront their software infrastructures and actively teach the player (assumed to have no technical knowledge) how to understand and reconfigure the game's code? Rather than following the impetus toward harder and deeper materialities, what might we find at the level of the screen–-no longer the screen of “screen essentialism,” but that of an infrastructural overlap of code and content? This paper exhibits an array of critical hacking games and explores the theoretical implications and potential politics of games that open up their own infrastructures, tactically disrupting the tendency of commercial video games toward fantasy worlds of distraction and passivity through meta-ludic techniques that provoke participation in the critical building and reconfiguration of our digital worlds.

ABSTRACT. Global environmental change and its associated socioecological consequences are altering, and sometimes even precluding, the very preconditions for play itself--a stable climate, infrastructure and power supplies, and the raw materials out of which we fashion everything from chess sets to smartphones. Already, many scholars have problematized established notions that play must be unproductive and separate from ordinary life. Not only is play sometimes ugly and deadly serious, but the “magic circle” is also always permeable to considerations ranging from misogyny and racism to global warming and disaster capitalism. Even now, sea levels are rising to consume coastal golf courses, soaring temperatures have tested ice arenas and jeopardized athletes and spectators in open-air stadiums, and relentless planetary-scale warming is predicted to stymie the ability of all but a few cities to host international sporting events like the Winter Olympics, Paralympics, and FIFA World Cup. It is increasingly clear that our celebrated acts of play, which themselves rely on a kind of experimental indeterminacy, may falter in the face of radical environmental indeterminacy. From sporting games that traditionally take place on ice or snow to digital games that draw on scientific research to more realistically model environmental states and behaviors, this presentation explores a narrowing of the conditions of play, even as the rise of environmental civil disobedience sustained by school-age children suggests that one answer to systemic and institutional failure is truancy--a kind of ludic disrespect for the status quo.

ABSTRACT. The most ubiquitous robotic assistant (SRA) on the market, the da Vinci Surgical System directly modifies what it means for the hands to act as healing agents, not only by removing them from direct contact with the patient but also by anesthetizing the felt epistemologies of operating on a patient. With the heat, resistance, and tackiness of the patient’s body removed, what remains for the surgeon to touch are the control side grips of a slave robot. Grips which glide easily, control for tremors, provide haptic feedback about the position of robotic arms, but give little indication of the body being manipulated. Surgical robotic assistants created for human-robot interaction (HRI) constitute an important focal point for understanding the co-construction of touch and technology. The development of SRAs shapes ideas and practices of human and machine touch in medical settings. The values and meanings associated with these systems orient around their haptic materiality, shifting touch practices, and the associations of touch that arise with their development, use, and reception. In this paper I interrogate the many ways touch is actively co-constructed with the da Vinci by drawing on data from interviews and observations with robotic surgeons, and documents and interviews from da Vinci engineers. The most profound impacts on notions of surgical touch are shaped with the grips of the robotic surgical assistant but it is the more mundane practices of touch associated with the device that reveal the scope of its influence. The alteration of surgical touch through the grips and the mundane shifts in touch practices around the robot co-construct surgical touch in affective ways as both controlling and caring, not through the healing hands of the surgeon, but through the guiding grips of a robotic surgical assistant.

ABSTRACT. The artist talk will present Playing Along, part of an ongoing collaboration between Carlin Wing and John Dieterich that explores the affective possibilities and material politics of physical play. We are interested in the ways players train and learn principles of play. Players learn how to see, how to translate, how to improvise, how to make sense of the smallest gestures and patterns, how to turn on a dime. They try to be ready for any eventuality. But they really don’t know exactly what will happen during any given performance. But they trust themselves to be instruments of improvisation. Playing Along consists of a series of improvisational musical performances created using the live television broadcast of FIFA Men’s and Women’s World Cup games as scores and video works made from the resulting performances. Of all sports, soccer has the best claim to being a global game. You can find soccer fields in almost every corner of the world—in stadiums, public and private parks, prisons and schools, on military bases, attached to factory complexes, corporate campuses, and youth detention centers. FIFA was founded in 1904 and the first World Cup competition was held in Uruguay in 1930. The 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup final between the United States and Japan was the most-watched soccer match in U.S. history. At the 2018 FIFA Mens’ World Cup, thirty-three TV cameras were stationed around the stadium. And the World Cup is the global media spectacle. Billions of people train their eyes on the broadcast of these games, learning ways of seeing, creating ways of watching. The live broadcast operates as

ABSTRACT. Although the classic nineteenth century experiments on the psychophysics of sensation excluded those with disabilities or sensory impairments, there is a rich history of technologies in the mid to late twentieth century which attempted to compensate for sensory impairments. Industrial research laboratories including Bell Labs and the Smith-Kettlewell Institute pioneered so-called sensory substitution devices (SSDs), systems premised on the assumption of cortical and sensory plasticity. This paper starts by discussing the surprisingly long history of the concept of sensory substitution, before exploring two case studies from the mid twentieth century. First, ‘Project Felix’ was an experiment in vibrotactile communication by means of ‘hearing gloves’ for the deaf at Norbert Wiener’s laboratory at MIT, demonstrated to Helen Keller in 1950. Second, the tactile-visual sensory substitution (TVSS) system for the blind pioneered by Paul Bach-y-Rita from 1968. The paper traces an early discussion of ‘plasticity’ in psychological literature from William James, acknowledged by Wiener, but explicitly taken up and developed by Bach-y-Rita and his collaborators. Consequently I argue that the roots of the ‘neuroplastic subject’ lie in experimental communication equipment designed specifically for the use of those with sensory disabilities.

ABSTRACT. You may have done this: been invited to taste two seemingly similar things, and been asked which you liked better, or which one was different. This little action, part of a larger industry of extracting knowledge from bodies, relies on an approach of disconnecting the products of sensation from the bodies that sense in pursuit of a larger, aggregate truth about the ways that molecules interact with perceiving bodies. These sensory experiments shape how industrial food systems pattern their product design and invention. They are useful precisely in their ability to transform taste or smell into numbers that allow the creation of products destined for the market. What happens when we disrupt those interactions? When we run sensory experiments as a form of ethnographic inquiry, rather than a form of market making? This art/science talk and performative intervention first provides historical background for thinking about how the work of sensing is shaped, bounded, and obfuscated by the structures of the twentieth century industrial food complex and then invites participants to take part in making a space for sensory labor and then disrupting it. In the process we will collaboratively explore creating a new space where information deemed economically useless by its very existence outside of industrial or academic knowledge structures is made useful for investigating what experiences hide in our own olfactory or gustatory shadows

ABSTRACT. In 1962, Frank Kacmarcik, commissioned Marcel Breuer to design a home sited on a bluff over the Mississippi in St. Paul, MN. Breuer’s design used humble materials that merge the interior of the house with exterior living spaces. While Breuer was a sculptural architect, Chris Larson’s sculptural installation and film practice has long used architecture as inspiration. For Celebration, Love, Loss, Larson focused on the functionalist elegance of Breuer’s design. He constructed a full-scale replica of the Kacmarcik house in wood and cardboard from Breuer’s plans in part to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the house’s construction, moved it to downtown Saint Paul, and burned it down as part of Northern Spark 2013. After Celebration, Love, Loss passed, Larson was invited by Michael Kimpur of the Daylight Center and School in Kapenguria, Kenya to reconstruct the Kacmarcik house for use as a regional medical clinic. Kimpur and Larson have employed local builders to construct the Breuer structure in humble, local materials, in keeping with the spirit of Breuer’s work if not his materials: earthen brick, made on site serves as the walls of the structure. Larson visited and monitors progress to gather footage for a film that will bring this ongoing project to a wider audience. I will examine the evolution of Larson’s Breuer projects to analyze them in terms of the shifting communities this building plan has been made to serve and what we can gain from the capacity of art and architecture to foster experiments in international community building and material exploration.

ABSTRACT. This paper will discuss two musical networks, separated in time by a half century, whose vital experimentation is undertaken against a backdrop of repressive economic constraints. Both are invested in experimentalism, a musical experimentation that undertakes actions, methods, techniques and combinations without direct aim or end in mind. Both the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and for the members of Catalytic Sound, share is an affinity for improvisation, which embraces experimentation to reveal what is possible, and as such, the in/compatibility (combinatory effects) of musicians and sounds that are only ascertained by experience. The AACM was formed, on the south side of Chicago, in parallel to the social movements of the 1960s, and during the twilight of Fordism. These musicians created a network to foster individualism, self-realization and a creative atmosphere, all which can be read as a social critique of capitalism. Fifty years later, Catalytic Sound attempts to foster the creation, distribution and stabilization of creative music within a global network. Founded under a different socio-political milieu, Catalytic Sound’s activities are better described by the artistic critique of Boltanski and Chiapello’s New Spirit of Capitalism. This critique is levied at the barriers to self-realization imposed by neoliberal labor practices. Both communities aspire to an autonomous experimentalism, yet they have faced different historical conditions, and as such function differently. Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory offers a tool to describe these creative communities. As Latour claims in Reassembling the Social, “…when we speak of an actor we should always add the large network of attachments making it act. As to emancipation, it does not mean ‘freed from [social] bonds, but [being] well attached.” (RAS 217-18) These communities responded to both the enabling and repressive conditions to preserve an ongoing space of experimentation.

ABSTRACT. The website thispersondoesnotexist.com offers a refreshable, seductively realistic, series of images of exactly that: amalgamations of fictional people. Built from an unknown number of photographs gleaned from the open archives of the internet, these photographically hyper-realistic images enjoy the appearance of veristic “truth,” yet are framed their own irony as synthetic products generated by “Artificial Intelligence.” Like other images generated using Artificial Intelligence algorithms called General Adversarial Networks, or GANs, thispersondoesnotexist is known as a “DeepFake” generator. Sites and applications such as thispersondoesnotexist, FakeApp, DeepFaceLab, DeepDream, Lyrebird, among a proliferation of others, create images (and even videos) so seemingly realistic using an archive of materials that they hardly – if at all - can be distinguished from actual footage and/or photographs of people. As such, this technology prompts us to re-examine what Florian Rötzer suggested in 1996 was “photography after photography,” or the medium’s departure from one of a part of its essence: its relationship to “truth.” In this paper, I will argue that digital photomontage is not a new approach to making photographic images, even if the use of Artificial Intelligence (human-generated algorithms) to make them is. Photography’s capacity for temporal complexity and multiple degrees of authenticity has been a condition of the medium since its invention. The emergence of digital media simply calls us to the task of addressing and articulating the complicated nature of the photographic medium’s ability to function as “data portraits” that can be synthesized independent from human agency.

ABSTRACT. Since 2012, there has been a well-chronicled (even overhyped) explosion of interest in the promises of machine learning and, in particular, neural nets. But counter to this effervescence, a small, yet vocal chorus of computer scientists are advocating that we must open “the black box” at the heart of neural networks and pursue methods of explainable and transparent artificial intelligence. Yet long before we were worried about the black boxes inside our computational machines, we were confronted by a very different kind of black box: our own bodies. In the intervening centuries, medical research has revealed much about our innermost workings, but for all these insights, further mysteries abound. One such frontier—which has lately received almost as much attention as advances in AI—are the microbiome communities in our guts: complex, interlocked systems of bacteria that live within us and influence almost every aspect of our health and well-being. In the spirit of this year’s theme, I would like to share my interdisciplinary, artistic research into the microbiotic “black box” that lies deep within our own bodies. I will detail my semester-long collaboration with a bioethicist and data visualization specialist and the ways in which we endeavored to make legible the hard-won data captured at a cutting-edge microbiome lab at Duke University. Much in the spirit of those working towards explainable AI, the project aimed to render the invisible internal operations of human digestion into an accessible (even interactive) format. At the same time, our work thematizes the vast swathes of terra incognita, the continued extent of our own ignorance. Thus, our creative, intellectual output was its own form of experimental engagement, spanning the margins and overlapping edges of a range of disciplines while simultaneously peering into the core of some of science’s most pressing questions.

ABSTRACT. In the ‘knowledge economies’ of the twenty-first century, the apparent supersession of the factory by the so-called ‘immaterial’ algorithm has resulted in a crisis of conceptual modeling such that alternatives to Marx’s labor theory of value have been proposed which are not easily distinguishable from subjective notions of price or affect. These affective theories correctly observe that human labor power, considered through Marx’s frameworks of absolute and relative surplus, can no longer fully represent contemporary value production; we must accept that non-human forms can also produce value. If the labor theory needs a replacement, however, we should be attentive to the utility of its groundedness in materiality, which provided the basis for a critique from outside the subjectivities produced by capital. I argue that any theory hoping to assume the analytic function the labor theory once provided should have continuity with its commitment to material conditions. This talk considers the extent to which digital and microbiological assemblages’ production of effects that are abstracted or differentiated from human labor trouble, on the one hand, the applicability of the labor theory, and on the other, the validity of the ‘immaterial’ or ‘affective’ theories that have sought to replace it. Special consideration is given to a comparison of ‘generative’ machine-learning operations to effects produced by microbial forms, each of which, I contend, constitutes value production beyond what is describable as ‘general intellect’ or ‘dead labor’. At the same time, the techno-utopic rhetoric surrounding such algorithms largely ignores their continuous reliance on material extraction. Fundamentally, the talk seeks to challenge the characterization of algorithms as ‘immaterial’ and recast them as ‘energetic’ in order to bring them into conceptual commensurability with value production by human and non-human lifeforms, and to situate computation within a framework of environmental cost.

ABSTRACT. This paper argues that the digital image has come into a new relationship with power with the advance of machine learning techniques of organizing time and space. A new economy of digital images gives rise to sovereign techniques that function through automating the signification of the human subject through its inclusion in big data sets. Here, digital images themselves become a productive technique for governing the future. These images are not apprehended visually, but rather organize our logics of perception, structuring what can and cannot be seen through the preemption of patterns. The digital image, ironically, authorizes techniques to make things disappear, or make you see things that quite literally do not exist-- it is often written off for excluding the human altogether. This talk will trouble the polarizing discourse on the opacity of machine learning and its assumed exclusion of the “human in the loop”. I will consider recent controversies around open source data sets ImageNet and DukeMTMC (Multi-Target Multi-Camera) through a technical analysis of Convolutional Neural Networks to extend a critique of what Louise Amoore calls a “politics of possibility,” a decisively financial logic of risk calculation that is concretized in machine learning algorithms. This is to nuance the shortcomings of arguments that emphasize the effects of bias within datasets, and to put forth the claim that machine learning exhibits patterning techniques that are incompatible with human reason.

ABSTRACT. SOMA is the performance project of the speculative audio-visual-bio-mimetic platform agency, GOVERNANCE INC, that uses custom electronic tools, signals, digital DNA, speculative philosophy, and genome sequencing to create hybrid soma-cyborganisms. Anabolic performance machines sequence genomes in order to propose more robust possible cell structures for digital organic life moving forward. SOMA mines ImageNet, a large-scale image database used for machine learning processes, to find its genomic origin and biosynthetic emergent forms. These cyborg cells all present different windows onto an unfolding future. SOMA is an engagement with performative knowledge production. It seeks to “shift the frame” away from the norms of scientific discourse to question the conditions of the production of knowledge itself. How does performing a discourse-- engaging with it visually, experimentally, or narratively-- allow new readings of the taxonomies contained within? How can performance, as a form of knowledge making, decode or change these taxonomies? We suggest that noise performance can stand in as a “proxy” for the performativity of knowledge production within computational machine learning and image recognition databases. Through rearranging, selecting and manipulating the material that machine learning systems metabolize to produce “truths”, we seek to produce different affective relationships with the archive. We suggest that the archive might be reproduced differently through experimental engagement. SOMA considers performance as proxy, or stand-in, for the computational algorithms that typically automate the processing of machine learning databases. It is suggested that engaging the body and activating the framework of experimental noise performance might allow a different expression of the database logic that increasingly undergirds and orders our aesthetic regime, visual culture, and social norms. What bioforms might emerge from the flesh of ImageNet when it becomes a performed object?

ABSTRACT. In this talk I explain that geologists have proposed the term Anthropocene to reflect the dramatic changes humans have made to the plaanet. While scientists pursue the reality of our current epoch, technology and media create an increasingly spectacular narrative surrounding environmental events. While these virtual engagements bring attention to climate change, they also feed into a growing level of apathy and detachment among viewers. I draw on the critical works of Guy Debord and the Situationist International among other theorists of networks and ecology in order to establish an environmental aesthetics capable of critiquing technological immersion even while making use of these very same technologies to reveal material and affective connections between humans and the environment. I outline moments of “ecological détournment” in literature such as Patrick Modiano's In the Cafe of Lost Youth and digital media projects such as Chasing Coral that encourage subjects to actively question their surroundings, especially in built and human-dominated environments.

ABSTRACT. The Anthropocene requires us to rethink the human as part of the more-than-human world, which is to think of us not within the world but of the world. The poetry of Jorie Graham (1950~) explores boundaries between the material world and the human subject, creating a sort of Karen Barad's material-discursive reality (Barad drew her insights from Neils Bohr's "complementarity principle" of Quantum phenomenon), in which the material and the human are considered to be emergent (not inherent) properties, coming into existence only through the "intra-action" between them. In Graham’s Materialism (1995), the material world appears to be hinged to the world of the human subject in such a way that what is taken to be matter includes the human and what is taken to be human includes the material. The lyric subjectivity in her poetry emerges being fully engaged with the material world, acquiring its own material existence, since materiality and the subject are co-constitutive of the emerging world. The awareness that no intentional action is ever outside this world of material-discursive emergences requires the contemporary lyric to heighten anthropocentric sensibility in the depleting world of the Anthropocene. What Graham has done in Sea Change (2008) is to paint the environmental plights in refreshing and newly imagined ways, so that people can truly feel what they think they already know. For Graham, "feeling" (or affect) is a way of engaging the reader with the ecological crisis. Poetry, in other words, should be experienced through our (material) body, where we come to know (discursive) that we are of the world, not in the world. Graham's lyric helps us redefine our sense of attachment and connection to a shared world. It enacts the transformation of our sensorial and perceptual

ABSTRACT. In "Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians" (1924) Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkála-Ša), describes the death of Ledcie Stechi, a seven-year-old Choctaw girl. This report to Congress, coauthored by Bonnin and two white men working on behalf of the Indian Defense Association and the Indian Rights Association, detailed the complicated system of graft, disenfranchisement, and fraud by which members of the “Five Civilized Tribes” (Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Muskogee, and Seminole) were divested of their oil-rich inherited lands by white capitalists. Among Bonnin’s depiction of the abuses to which Oklahoma’s Native inhabitants were subjected, the description of Ledcie’s death—the consequence of a life of abuse and neglect by her so-called "legal guardian"—stands out. Bonnin vividly describes her “little dead body—its baby mouth turned black, little fingernails turned black, and even the little breast all turned black.” By drawing attention to the blackness of Ledcie Stechi’s dead body, I argue, Bonnin recalls both the system of chattel slavery by which black bodies were made property and the blackness of crude oil itself. I argue that Gertrude Bonnin’s description of white graft positions Native bodies as property not by co-opting their labor but through positioning those bodies as the object of extractive practices themselves. In her work on the “white possessive,” Aileen Moreton-Robinson argues that “the existence of white supremacy…requires the possession of Indigenous lands as its proprietary anchor.” Rather than separating the Native body from Indigenous land, however, I argue that white capital treats these Native bodies as consumable natural resources in their own right. By shedding light on the legal mechanism through which the Indigenous body is disappeared from sites of both resource extraction and conservation, Bonnin’s report proves key to understanding the settler-colonial and white supremacist logics at the base of these seemingly incommensurate projects.

ABSTRACT. Since opening in 2010, OrangeTheory Fitness (OTF) has amassed more than 80,000 members, and over a billion dollars in profit. The “connected fitness program” asserts that it maximizes caloric burns by combining the increasingly popular high intensity interval training (HIIT) workout with heart rate monitors. Members cycle through weight lifting exercises, rowing machines, and treadmills, using screens to monitor and push their heart rates into the “orange zone,” or between 84-91% maximum heart rate. The creator of the “science-backed” workout, Ellen Latham claims the technology is essential to OTF’s “guaranteed results:” “Our technology allows our members in real time to see how their body is responding. What you do not measure you cannot achieve." This talk unpacks Lantham’s claim by locating OTF in the culture of self-quantification to explore the relationship between the connected fitness and bodily optimization. Through phenomenological analysis, I detail the relationship between the body, technology, and screen in a standard OTF class to explore how the program’s use of connected fitness encourages members project themselves onto the statistical information on screen, rendering their body a tool to increase their stats. This bodily displacement is supported through a combination of real-time numerical feedback in class and OTF’s rhetoric of science saturating the company’s branding techniques. OTF’s heart rate monitors claim to offer access to imperceptible changes in heart rate that members monitor and aim to control throughout class. The monitors and screens thus become lenses through which users understand their bodies and success. A study of OTF reveals the close proximity of modern discourse of health and wellness and life-hacking that has largely been connected to the neoliberal regime of the tech industry. Through technologically mediated self-quantification, OTF other connected fitness programs understand

ABSTRACT. This April, the Court of Arbitration in Sport decided to uphold the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF)’s regulations on “female eligibility” which requires athletes in certain middle distance track races to lower their testosterone below 5 nmols/liter in order to compete. The Court’s decision follows a long history of sex testing female athletes, which is always shaped by larger geopolitical shifts. The most recent court decision brings up important questions around sex and gender, race, athleticism, and what counts as credible or substantial scientific evidence. This paper will analyze the scientific research, which is cited in support of the IAAF’s policy. An experiment titled: “Serum androgen levels and their relation to performance in track and field,” published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, measured the testosterone levels of top athletes at the 2011 and 2013 track and field World Championships in order to illustrate the relationship between testosterone and athletic performance. While experts have criticized the statistical validity of the experiment itself, I ask: what happens when the sports arena becomes a laboratory? What can this experiment tell us about the practices of testing athletes and the extraction of biological data within this event space – a space that is both an international spectacle, and a form of labor for these athletes? I argue that athletes’ consent to participate in this experiment is constrained and deserves attention, while other aspects of the experiment reveal a new kind of gender essentialism.

ABSTRACT. The increasing convergence of fitness and media has resulted in a surge of exercise devices cum media platforms since 2017, including the Mirror and the Peloton Bike. Their built-in oversized screens and impressive sound systems allow users to stream live classes at home, performing every movement in step with an instructor’s mediated image. In this paper, I will explore the contradictions revealed by these hybrid devices. In an on-demand age, they conversely resurrect a desire for liveness. Amidst calls for digital detoxing, they offer a strange re-articulation of the screen as healthy—a means of counteracting the negative effects of technology on the body, and a way of becoming more present in the home with one’s family. And, in an age of privacy concerns, they find consumers who consent to surveillance for increased motivation, allowing built-in cameras and Bluetooth trackers to capture their images and biometric data, and a leaderboard to measure their performance against others. Furthermore, users are encouraged to share their progress via social media, a streamlined function embedded within the platforms. Mirror and Peloton’s profitability hinges not just on the sale of equipment, but their ability to retain subscribers who pay a monthly fee for access to their proprietary media content, thus inserting themselves into the booming subscription economy. But similar content can be found for free on existing platforms, such as Instagram and YouTube, where self-styled fitness coaches labor precariously, attempting to stitch together a livable wage from paid partnerships. Though the popular press lauds these hybrid devices as ground-breaking and new, I will attempt to de-exceptionalize them. By parsing out their filmic, televisual, video gaming, social networking, and augmented reality features, and tracing the genealogies of these forms, we can contextualize their convergence to better understand the way that these new devices both govern and liberate

ABSTRACT. In the introduction to Surface Encounters, Ron Broglio channels Thomas Nagel in his now-canonical essay “What is like to be a bat?”. There is, Broglio maintains, a “necessary lacuna” (p. xxvi) between the human and the animal. It is to the credit of artists, as distinct from philosophers, that they do not attempt to cross or bridge but, rather, mind this gap. In the late 1990s, the impossibility of understanding the nonhuman animal was one of the rallying cries of the subfield of Animal Studies. This paper picks up the question of what it is, and is not, possible to know as a human with human conceptual frames, with reference to experimental video games like Flower (2009) and Plague Inc. (2012). To what extent, the paper asks, do these games honor, or preserve, Broglio’s lacuna? And, to the extent that they do not, the extent that they encourage their players to identify not with but as the eponymous flower and plague, how do they unsettle our anthropocentrism? What medium-specific properties of video games enable us to inhabit the minds of nonhuman others, and, more, to what end? The paper focuses on in-game objectives and flow/immersion as defined by media theorists Lazaros Michailidis, Emili Balaguer-Ballester, and Xun He. It acknowledges that Flower and Plague Inc. are reductive; ultimately, however, it suggests that because of their objectives, and flow and immersion respectively, they allow players to experience what Giorgio Agamben refers to as the “captivation” of the nonhuman animal and “the emptiness within man” in turns. The paper concludes: the video game may not let us experience life as a flower or a plague, but it enables us to experience, and perhaps subsequently to quantify, the difference between the Agambenian open and the closed.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores the concept of vegetarian evolutionary progress and how it was mapped onto the globe in nineteenth-century British periodicals dedicated to vegetarianism. Examining the vegetarian appropriation of evolutionary theory, I argue that this rhetorical strategy offered vegetarians the unique means to align the evolutionary progress of the human species (from cannibals to vegetarians) with individual development (as a self-disciplined vegetarian). By reinventing vegetarianism as a biological imperative of human evolution and envisioning its diverse temporal stages scattered around the globe, this rhetoric placed the battle of humanity in England, where heroic individuals with humane feelings, a scientific mindset, and a strong sense of self-discipline fought at the vanguard of human evolution against the barbarism of social conventions. A subset of radical countercultures in nineteenth-century Britain, vegetarianism opposed the national dietary symbolism of British strength captured by roast beef. Vegetarians sought to overturn this myth by claiming the future as vegetarian; many of them believed in the march of humanity from cannibals to vegetarians, in which the British must play a leading role. While vegetarians imagined this progress in cultural terms, they also understood it as an evolutionary development, drawing evidence from comparative anatomy. Thus exploiting the unique physio-moral overlap in vegetarian discourse, Victorian vegetarians found ways to incorporate the element of individual human agency into the inhuman scale of evolutionary change, thereby humanizing human evolution. Vegetarian periodicals, while illustrating the gradual steps in this path of evolution as mapped onto regions around the globe by collecting tales of exotic dietary practices (cannibals still lurking in remote corners of the world, the blubber-eating “Esquimaux” in the Arctic, South Sea islanders going through an agricultural revolution, etc.), presented the temperate zone of England as the battleground for this supposed evolutionary progress; unlike

ABSTRACT. This paper examines the work of several artists and writers who have created speculative botanies, fictions in which an imaginary botanical system is elaborated in scientific terms, with accompanying visualizations. These projects are not primarily focused on extending what we know as botany through additional species but rather use an alternate taxonomy as a method of metaphysical investigation. At this moment in which we are experiencing an emerging nonhuman turn in the culture at large, such speculative taxonomies give insight into our relationship with the material world and help to mediate between an uncertain present and a feared future.

ABSTRACT. This presentation traces the origins of the interdisciplinary field of planetary science alongside genre science fiction to uncover a shared discourse about the ecology of imaginary worlds. In the years between 1950 and 1975, Icarus, the first dedicated journal for the new field of planetary science, co-emerged with the science fictional “puzzle planet” subgenre, in which narrative resolution is achieved by working out the speculative implications of an imaginary exoplanet. In this period, the idea of a planet as an object of inquiry was shaped by an interplay between science-fictional world building and the consensus-building of a nascent, interdisciplinary alliance of astrophysicists, geoscientists, atmospheric chemists, and astrobiologists. I draw on specific examples from publications in planetary science by Carl Sagan and others, as well as literary representations of imaginary worlds by SF authors such as Hal Clement, Jack Vance, and Ursula K. Le Guin. In their writing, certain ecological ideas became part of the planetary imaginary, while others were excluded from the genre of speculative planetology. I identify the profoundly colonial implications of these imagined planets, as seen through the speculative maneuvers made by both scientists and fiction writers in order to render these worlds habitable, or at least visit-able, by Earthlings. Using a feminist science studies lens, I conclude by demonstrating how these same colonialist assumptions continue to influence contemporary astrobiological discourse about exoplanets and the possibility of complex life. This is apparent not only in terms of the search for habitable planets, but also in the problematic ways that it negotiates the concept of otherness, such as in the figure of the naturalized “evolutionary technology tree.”

ABSTRACT. This presentation will explore the literary experiment of Sevim Burak, a Turkish writer known for her unorthodox attitude toward language, whose writing blends originality with repetition, incompleteness with esotericism. In the first part of the presentation Selvin Yaltır will discuss Burak’s mapping of memory through recurrent motifs in the short story “Afrika Dansı”. From a Deleuzoguattarian perspective, Yaltır will argue that Burak’s text is composed of “territorial” and “cosmic refrains” that at once serve to mark and elude a territory. Burak’s writing renders possible interaction among several levels of sensibility such as dreams, memories, history, unconscious rambling, lived experience, personal habits; in short it marks a being inbetween realms/realities/places/times, associated with a place, yet threatened by the unknown. This particular way of the aleatory captured through personal memory will be problematized as one of the possibilities of literary experimentation in which the personal and the collective merge. The second half of the presentation will address the question of staging such a text, an endeavor touched with the sense of the impossible. Emre Koyuncuoğlu will speak about her rendering of “Afrika Dansı”, a performance/exibition/installation/theatre event that aims to reconfigure Burak’s literary space through a multidisiplinary approach designed as an ongoing experiment with the audience and partakers. She will discuss her use of diverse elements on stage, their communication with one another so as to create a whole, and address the ways in which they become instrumental in re-mapping Burak’s literary space. This encounter between writing and performance shows us how both mediums, in engaging with real and fictional forces, offer us diverse ways of relating to topos.

ABSTRACT. The argument here is that certain theoretical positions are regarded as démodé, simply because their historical time has past, thereby ignoring still-prescient approaches. The example to be explored in this paper is that of Jean-François Lyotard’s thought: dumped in the trash-can along with the cultural postmodernism to which it owed little, and without a concern for its particular mode or manner of approach. Yet it is Lyotard’s experimental approach that is his most relevant for the theme of this conference, experimental in the sense of doing otherwise, never static, never ceasing for long enough to cohere, yet deliberately stalling the conventions of philosophy, of thought, informed by an experimental artistic, filmic and literary practice that dared to challenge. ‘Publish or perish!’ was the ironic rallying cry he penned with a knowing wink, always playing with the reader’s or interlocutor’s ideas and assertions. Yet he is also deadly serious: ‘One writes because one does not know what one has to say. But today’s slogan is: Publish or perish! If you are not public, you disappear; if you are not exposed as much as possible, you don’t exist’. This need for self-exposure, exacerbated in a time of social media, is questioned through Lyotard’s own exploratory role-playing as evinced in his dialogues, both imaginary and through interviews and debates, which take Diderot as their role model – slipping between the expected characterizations of what constitutes a permissible ‘position’. Drawing on research undertaken for a forthcoming volume of interviews and debates with Lyotard, this paper will enact the ‘stealth mode’ highlighted in the call for papers, arguing that Lyotard’s fifteen-years of militant experience, as a member of the radical, non-authoritarian Marxist groups Socialisme ou Barbarie and Pouvoir Ouvrier, left their mark on his philosophical practice.

ABSTRACT. This short film - based on found footage and scavenged sound - traces the origin of what is so often mistaken to be “our” thoughts, back to the beginning of the cosmos, and up to and including the overheated, mass-mediated mental climate changes of the present. In doing so it explores, in a speculative register, the raw state of mentality before even the evolution of minds. A narrative arc soon emerges, bending toward a near-future where "artificial ignorance" reigns supreme.

ABSTRACT. This short film - based on found footage and scavenged sound - traces the origin of what is so often mistaken to be “our” thoughts, back to the beginning of the cosmos, and up to and including the overheated, mass-mediated mental climate changes of the present. In doing so it explores, in a speculative register, the raw state of mentality before even the evolution of minds. A narrative arc soon emerges, bending toward a near-future where "artificial ignorance" reigns supreme.

ABSTRACT. In this talk, I will address some of the philosophical implications of a computer program being no longer constrained by the limits of human knowledge. I will understand this freedom from human knowledge as a form of autonomy from human abstraction. My case study will be contemporary artificial intelligence research in deep learning. Because of their successful results, deep learning techniques are today very popular. These techniques, however, operate in computational ways that are opaque and often illegible. Such a black-box character of deep learning, I will argue, is a technical condition that asks us to reconsider the abstractive nature of these technologies. In this presentation I will do so by entering debates about explainability in artificial intelligence, and thus considering the ways in which technoscience and technoculture are addressing the possibility to re-present algorithmic procedures of generalization and conceptualization to the human mind. I will then mobilize the notion of incommensurability (originally developed within debates in philosophy of science) in order to engage with the discrepancy between the abstractive choices of humans and those of computing machines.

ABSTRACT. From Amazon Alexa cackling, unprompted, in 2018 to Bob and Alice, Facebook chatbots who learned to communicate in a secret language opaque to their programmers: If the “intelligence” in “AI” emphasizes informational positivism, presence, comprehensiveness, and intelligibility, this paper hones in on moments like those above where AI appears to go rogue. I frame such moments not as intelligent, but as imaginative. Reversing the figure/ground of AI to highlight informational failure, gaps, misunderstanding and absence as structuring, defining and driving AI’s pathways (rather than as aberrant glitches in otherwise near-perfect systems), I think through the ways that failure, absences, gaps, etc., constitute AI’s very operational space. Mobilizing two concepts, “decision” (de: off; caedere: to cut between two in order to resolve) and “multiply” (multi: many, flourish; ply: fold, bend, failing, falling), I plumb their etymological richness to theorize artificial imagination as a system that patterns 1/0s, presence and absence, knowledge and ignorance in associative relation, looking specifically at its structure as recursive omissions. Drawing from theorists including Hayles, Keller, Chun and Flake, I attend to this hole inbuilt in algorithms’ very organizing logics, speculatively thinking through the reformatting of the agencies of imagination in such technocultural formations.

ABSTRACT. While play theorists agree that failure is an integral part of a play experience, there is little research on what players consider failure in video games. This study uses data-driven retrospective interviews to investigate how players think about and respond to failure in Cuphead, a notoriously challenging “run ’n gun” platformer video game. Emergent patterns show a range of ways that players experience failure beyond hardcoded failure such as losing health or dying: poor performance in a section already completed, lack of progress, or quitting. Further, while game metrics may indicate a player is giving up, follow-up shows they are optimizing learning opportunities. This shows that players shift their perspective to a slower learning process laden with setbacks that will eventually result in success. This research deepens our understanding of the role failure plays in one of our most pervasive media, developing our understanding of how players experience failure.

ABSTRACT. Unlike in formal learning environments (i.e., schools and clinics), many children with disabilities often rely on their parents to practice communication skills at home. Despite the increased adoption of conversational agents (e.g., Apple Siri, Google Assistant, etc.), commercial voice technologies are known for causing communication breakdowns that frustrate and disengage child users. Super Word is an Amazon Alexa quiz game that allows children with disabilities to participate in language activities using their voice. It is designed using multiple auditory and verbal prompts (e.g., sounds, rhymes, and oral definitions), vocabulary and sentence tasks in conventional language assessments, therapy activities from clinically intervention (e.g., storytelling), and best practices in voice interface design. This game seeks to mitigate communication breakdowns by creating a motivating and engaging voice user experience for children, and can be enabled in connected settings like home (via a smart speaker) and in the car (via a smartphone). Ongoing research in this area can address the feasibility of using play-based voice interaction in assistive technology tools for children with disabilities.

ABSTRACT. Super Smash Bros. Melee is a game that was not conceived by its publisher as a competitive esport, nor as a phenomenon that a dedicated player base would be engaged with 18 years after its release, nor as an online-capable experience. Yet its players have made it all of these things, in spite of Nintendo's detachment from the game. This talk discusses the Dolphin emulator's "netplay" mode of Melee as a mode of play that both operates outside of Nintendo's influence and connects players on a peer-to-peer basis that requires no central server (unlike virtually all other competitive online games). Unlike peer-server-peer connections that depend on the central authority of the server to observe game termporality and the state of play from moment to moment, the peer-to-peer model of netplay offers a shared temporality better aligned with the ethos of distributed networks. This computational and temporal interrelationship between players can be seen as both cause and consequence of Nintendo's abandonment of the competitive Melee community.

ABSTRACT. College esports programs across the country are slowly transitioning from invisible student-run clubs and groups to institutionally supported and touted organizations. Few researchers have outlined foundational characteristics of modern college esports programs in the united states, and none have suggested best practices for practitioners. My exploratory work examines a small sample of current programs recognized by the National Association of Collegiate Esports in order to develop research questions that warrant academic investigation. A secondary function of my work is to pinpoint and criticize common practices, providing suggestions for college and university practitioners seeking to develop esports programs at their home institutions. Early examinations of program literature reveal that modern programs vary significantly in their goals and functions across all sizes and types of institutions, but observations also show that the games which institutions support (industry-supported high visibility titles), the esports spaces built (PC bang style play spaces), and the types of content broadcasted (official games and skirmishes between schools), are commonalities among them.

ABSTRACT. Carol is a regular karaoke patron continuously harassed by Angelo, who aggressively seeks a duet with her. She is ultimately faced with two options: yield to Angelo and play the game his way, or break from the game and become both killjoy and spoilsport. In this paper I add to theoretical perspectives of the spoilsport and its relationship to the killjoy by evaluating a case study, of sorts, of social play through karaoke as recounted by Robert Drew in Karaoke Nights. Karaoke provides a unique lens for evaluating social engagements through performance play. Performance play is a form of mimicry, of play “as-if,” providing its players with opportunities to perform as “not me,” allowing a certain degree of protection against criticism. And yet this same protection has long been used by the patriarchy as a defense against the serious, against consequences for bad behavior, providing toxic masculinity with a shield, protecting those who make aggressive, unwanted advances in social play settings. In such situations, when the killjoy refuses to do “the done thing” and rejects patriarchal definitions of fun, she not only rejects patriarchal control, she rejects the play experience, becoming the spoilsport. And yet, in so doing, the killjoy also proves that the spoilsport can work as an agent of play, upholding the integrity of play itself by rejecting patriarchy in service of play. Rather than ruining play, the killjoy spoilsport is merely disrupting patriarchal control over play, revealing instead that it was the patriarchy that spoiled play in the first place.

ABSTRACT. There are strong similarities between the strategies used by high-frequency trading outfits (HFTs) and game ‘cheats’ (cheating behavior by gamers that is deemed acceptable). Like gamers, HFTs use special hardware, cheat codes, exploit glitches and software bugs to alter the rules for how a game is played. HFTs already depend on gaming computers that use Nvidia GPUs to power their speed-based trading strategies, but like gamers who employ special hardware devices such as Game Genie or Action Replay, HFTs often gain advantages by using devices that are not intended to be a part of the platforms they are trading on. HFT outfits have been known to use a series of laser beams or high-powered microwave radios to transmit their orders to buy and sell securities faster than the fiberoptic cable transmitting the orders of large institutional investors, for example mutual or pension fund managers. HFTs also use a strategies similar to cheat codes. Some trading platforms that cater to HFTs, often called ‘dark pools’, will have a system where HFTs can access order types that are not available to institutional investors. In some instances, these order types must be entered in a specific sequence, like video game cheats such as the infamous ‘Konami code’. Sometimes referred to as ‘special order types’, these orders allow buy and sell orders of HFTs to do things that other investors cannot, like advance forward in the order queue while remaining hidden to other traders. In a video game, this would be akin to invisibility or teleportation power-up. An understanding of these types of similarities may allow us to use insights from game studies to understand some behavior by HFTs, especially now that there is a generation of traders and financial service professionals that grew up playing video games.

ABSTRACT. Game studies needs to consider the voice. Employed first in the 1980s as an unusual supplement but now used far more frequently than unvoiced text, the growing use of the human voice has not been met by a corresponding growth in scholarship (with a few exceptions: see, e.g., Carter et al 2015, Voorhees 2016, and Ward 2010). Such study is necessary because the voice is burdened with complicated cultural connotations that are only intensified by a shifting relationship with the screen. When the acousmatic voice – the voice from off-screen – first captured Chion’s attention in the 1980s, it helped to refocus film studies from the visual to the acoustic. It might help game studies move away from the mechanical today. Single-player narrative videogames of course make routine use of acousmatic voices in the form of radio broadcasts, audio logs, time capsules, and the like, and these uses are sometimes potent in precisely the way that Chion explains: they can be anywhere, see anything, do anything. If the acousmatic voice can thereby connote divinity, magic, truth, or salvation (Dolar 2006), and if the voice plays an important role in establishing sexual difference (Silverman 1988), among other things, then scholars and critics need to pay particular attention to the female acousmêtre. Consider recent games in which girls’ and womens’ voices are heard with the hope that their speakers might finally be seen (e.g. Gone Home (2013), The Talos Principle (2014), Firewatch (2016)), or in which their voices are denied even though their bodies are clearly visible (e.g. Bastion (2011), Transistor (2014), Gris (2018)): designers bestow or withhold these bodies or voices to complicated effect. In these games, “the not-yet-seen voice” and “the body that has not-yet-spoken” (Chion 1999) have the power to unsettle players’ often masculinist presumptions about agency, sex, and

ABSTRACT. This paper will knot and unknot questions around the use of technologies for wildlife conservation, using the story of the American pika as its primary example. Specifically, it will move through a series of studies on pikas to complicate the relationships between technologically-driven research and environmental harm, and to demonstrate that even the most well-intentioned conservation efforts are inevitably complicit in ethical tangles. The American pika (Ochotona princeps) is a small relative of rabbits and hares found at high elevation in western North America, and is widely considered a climate change indicator species. Recent studies have revealed that pika populations are significantly declining at lower elevations, most likely in response to rising temperatures. Much of what is known about pikas’ ability to survive thermal stress was learned from scientific studies in the 1970s which involved embedding their bodies with radio-controlled sensors. Meanwhile, current attempts to understand pika climate stress involve testing their fecal samples for hormones using kits derived from the hormones of lesser-threatened species—sheep. Recent pika research also relies on satellite imagery, though the plumes of exhaust created by launching satellites into space may deplete the ozone layer, and the internet servers required to store and process satellite data contribute to global carbon emissions. The paper aims not to devalue conservation technologies, but rather to experiment with nuancing the dynamics between science, human-made technologies, and the environment. It is informed by the nine months I spent in the field and lab together with an evolutionary biologist, and features portions of a short film I produced footage from a steerable online camera that monitors pika habitats The paper demonstrates that (after Alexis Shotwell), no action is “pure,” but the impossibility of non-innocent actions cannot be cause for paralysis in the face of a rapidly changing climate.

ABSTRACT. This presentation will examine the formation of the code concept in the early development of computers. While the new calculating machines needed some system of control, it is only because of the historical particularities of our concept of language that this system of control appeared in a linguistic form. By close reading the early precursors of programming languages---from the code of the Harvard Mark I, to the EDVAC, up to the early development of Fortran---I will argue that code emerges as the attempt to absorb all aspects of calculative process and material into the signifier.

This attempt is perpetually inadequate, for while the representation constitutes the material on which the calculation works, a proper representation of calculation must remained fixed. The resulting anxious differentiation of code and state form the basic moving contradiction animating the history of programming languages.

ABSTRACT. In 1963's American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook James Boggs argued that introducing race into discussions of automation and cybernation not only "poses the questions of poverty and employment" but also "social" questions. This paper will discuss the ways that through an initial examination of racialization and automation technologies, James, and Grace Lee, Boggs developed a political ecological thought that made connections between technology, the racialized distributions of people, the production of waste, and environmental transformation, with a special focus on a multivalent concept of "land." In the American Revolution, and other writings, the Civil Rights era is conceptualized as a technological conjuncture; one that was potentially "liberating" but that was also producing new forms of "expendability." However, for James and Grace Lee Boggs automation and cybernation were not understood, as they were in the period by many others, to be simply new and future oriented, but were connected to a technological history in the United States dating to the cotton gin and farm mechanization. This was both a history of racialized dispossession as well as a transformation in the ways that people and nature were put to work and made value productive for capitalism. As they would write in 1980, "the mechanization of agriculture and the growth of agribusiness" was "destroying the soil and deepening our dependence upon declining supplies of fossil fuels" and "driving millions of Americans off the land into the inner cities." The Boggses anticipated contemporary work by, for example, Francoise Vergès on the "racial Capitalocene." In the context of a 21st-century world of accelerating technological change and forms of environmental and human dispossession, I will consider how James and Grace Lee Boggs offer ways of understanding how these are historically connected, as well as how urban-based civil

ABSTRACT. In the midst of rapid ecological changes, there arises a collective awareness among Earth’s inhabitants that the future is manifesting quite differently than previously imagined. A human-caused Sixth Extinction and it’s post-human aftermath has left the realm of fiction and is quickly becoming a feasible reality. The arts, sciences and literary fields of the Anthropocene are producing an abundance of cultural engagements that explore the theoretical and social aspects of existing in our current geological epoch; while providing thoughtful speculation regarding how life on a post-human Earth will exist despite the continued destruction. There is, however, little speculation regarding how the Afterlife - the living organisms existing on Earth in the Afterlight of the Sixth Extinction - will pick through the cultural remnants of the previous epoch, in search of something useful, functional and potentially collaborative. Utilizing the principles of interspecies engagement set forth by Donna Haraway in the book Staying with the Truth, as well as themes of Dark Ecology and contemporary artistic, anthropological, and scientific practices, the essay posits a method of artmaking that encourages active and participatory interspecies dialogue, which has the potential to transcend time and geological epochs. The approach highlights the importance of looking beyond contemporary aesthetic and theoretical concerns in favor of creating objects that will have a functional and potentially collaborative dialogue with the Afterlife. Additionally, the essay invites the reader to imagine how the remnants of our current cultural output may be interpreted by the Afterlife, utilizing several speculative artworks created by the author as examples. Artworks in the Age of Afterlight seeks to explore these collaborations, in a conversation about time and through time, by showing how the space between the ages is closer than we think.

ABSTRACT. For the past several years, I've immersed myself within two cross-border communities to engage participants in dialogue and art-making about crude oil – its extractive processes, controversial infrastructure, and air polluting components. The Canadian Pacific Railway physically links Estevan, Saskatchewan, a rural farming community whose lives are intertwined with crude oil extraction, and South End, Albany, New York, an environmental justice neighborhood, impacted by industrial activity, crude oil trains and diesel trucks. As an outsider to both communities, gaining invited entry for the long-durational project required the cultivation of friendship and trust to engage participants in critical reflection and dialogue about crude oil followed by art-making. Could this dialogue spread to the broader community through a public exhibition and to participants feeling empowered to lead that dialogue with their extended communities? This inquiry lead to experimenting with approaches and methods outside of art practice. The overall project had its successes and failures, bringing aesthetics and ethics, at times diametrically opposed, into the forefront. Often, it required working with local partners such as non-profits organizations, a public library, government agencies, and cultural institutions. The process continually raised uneasy questions for me as I navigated between the two communities and the 'experts' attending to them.

ABSTRACT. For decades, visual artist herman de vries has invested in a principle of reduction or what might be (mis)understood as an eco-mimetic worldview. Departing from his involvement with the neo-avant-garde ZERO group of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which focused on the ‘deconditioning’ of the viewer through the enhanced presentation of the ‘zero-point’, ‘open gate’, or ontological transparency of things, the former botanist turned to natural objects and materials and to phenomenological questions of perception, allowing him to explore alternative pathways to knowledge through a wide variety of gestures, assemblages, and installations. My paper explores this transition that occurred during the mid-1970s alongside shifts within environmental aesthetics and politics from then and now. Through a selection of works, I argue that de vries’s praxis establishes a tension with more recent critiques of ‘deep ecology’ and resonates with the materialist turn championed by Karen Barad and others. The intuitively experimental framings of ‘nature’ by the artist inhabit the same discourse of ‘reorientation’ shared by these theoretical positions. Accordingly, his oeuvre is analysed in relation to the nature/culture divide he strives to bridge by affirming its negation. While his adoption of a certain environmentalism engages the categories of ‘system’ and ‘field’ identified by Timothy Morton, it also connects with Maria Puig de la Bellacasa's interest in tactility and Frédéric Neyrat's articulation of wildness. I argue that the resulting objects and their exhibition histories also speak to what Diana Coole and Samantha Frost have identified as the first theme of New Materialism; namely, a post-humanism by which ‘matter itself’ is ‘a lively or exhibiting agency.’ The paper ultimately seeks to determine how de vries’s definition of ‘art’ continues to inform the challenges facing a human to non-human set of co-produced proximities and direct entanglements.

ABSTRACT. In the 1990s, archivists began to conceptualize 'the archival record' as an abstract set of relationships between creators, users, and collectors rather than as material objects. This turn towards the abstract has marginalized materiality as a resource at best (for understanding provenance), and a problem at worst (when objects decay, fade, decompose). Moving against this abstracting trend, my proposed talk will relay observations and ideas from an experiment I began in March 2019, when I placed a four-inch by six-inch photograph in a plastic planter in my backyard. In the company of a prickly pear cactus (Opuntia spp.), the photograph sits exposed to 'the elements' as an experiment in deriving meaning from decay and planning to forget. As I take notes on physical changes in the photograph, I turn to psychoanalysis and the writings of Georges Bataille to think through how the "self-excavation" of a material object in decay also prompts a self-excavation of the psyche. For instance, how do the affects and impulses which emerge as I watch the photo decay relate to the drives which Derrida argues underpin the archival enterprise? How do we keep our focus on a dissolving object despite a seeming push to decathect from the 'dying' object? Notably, these observations all take place outside of an archives. What would it mean for an archives to let objects 'die,' to facilitate forgetting and uncertainty rather than memory and evidence? In this presentation, I will share preliminary ideas gathering around these questions.

ABSTRACT. A growing body of microbiome research reveals a “world out of balance” in the gut ecologies of many living and laboring under conditions of late capitalism. Diets high in fat and low in fiber wreak havoc on the gut’s microbial species diversity, resulting in a myriad of health concerns, from obesity to heart disease to depression. The specialized labor of gut microbes, we are learning, is crucial to human health and vitality. This recognition not only fuels a new speculative sector of the bioeconomy, the so-called “global human biome market,” it also opens a new frontier in the governmentality of wellness. This paper traces the mobilization of the human gut microbiome as an emergent form of platform (bio)capitalism articulated to the biopolitical production of health, where technologies of responsibilization enjoin humans to actively participate in the maintenance, hacking, and rewilding of their “own” gut microbiomes. In particular, I seek to understand the forms of labor that coalesce under the bid to “put the microbiome to work.” Here labor operates at different scales, from what Les Beldo calls the “metabolic labor” of the gut microbiota itself to what Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby theorize as “clinical labor,” carried out by research subjects who contribute their fecal matter (ripe with data) for laboratory experimentation and who consent to randomized controlled clinical trials aimed at producing translational knowledge and other forms of biocapital. Finally, living labor commingles with the machinic in this context; I conclude by considering the implications of efforts to automate the experimental production process with technologies such as digital microfluidics: a microbiome “lab-on-a-chip.”

ABSTRACT. Hegel, in his Philosophy of Nature, refers to alimentation (i.e. ingestion, digestion, and excretion) as the first instance of externality going inward and returning—in a word, the “diremption” that makes appearance possible. Meditating on this philosophical interpretation of nourishment, my talk considers how the digestive capacities of microbiota afford a multiscale and multi-species conception of phenomenology. Specifically, I look at two intentionally cultivated microbiomes at opposite ends of the gut: yeast in a sourdough starter and the microbes sustained in a scientific laboratory’s fecal froth. In order to investigate the black box of the human gut microbiome (made all the more difficult because there is no all-encompassing human gut microbiome), researchers in the David Lab at Duke University have been creating many more black boxes from fecal samples. By monitoring how these sampled ecologies metabolize prebiotics—as opposed to identifying them via genetic sequencing techniques—the researchers establish an epistemic community à la Rheinberger’s “epistemic thing” out of these isolated microbiomes. Similarly, cultivating yeast in one’s own sourdough starter positions the little fungi as supports for building communities (through meal preparation and consumption) and other microbiomes (in the gut and kitchen air). As with the fecal froths, the domesticated microbes of a sourdough starter exist for humans in terms of inputs (flour, water, and mixing) and outputs (tang and carbon dioxide), while the communities they contribute to encompass the yeast colony from outside. Following Bachelard’s naming convention, what I call non-phenomenology rebases a classical phenomenology of consciousness on an always provisional understanding of cosmogenesis. Fecal froths and sourdough starters illustrate the fluctuating and variegated becoming of appearance, which spans irreducible yet dependent beings. Constituting process thereby manifests as a constituted relation such that the grounds of experience become open to experimentation.

ABSTRACT. My contribution is a response to the two panels entitled Microbe Futures 5-6: Duke's Speculative Sensation Lab, Part 1 and 2. In my response, I will take up broad strands that cross through the 5 papers and that explore the double function of the human body as a sensing, productive organism and as a site for other sensing and productive processes. In particular, I shall explore how the 5 papers engage the gut microbiome as a site for data-intensive computation, and shall compare the various ways in which the authors see such engagement as an opportunity for data to become creative. The response is intended to initiate a general discussion of the 5 papers and the central issues they cumulatively engage concerning the human body and the extensions of sensibility afforded by data-intensive computation.

ABSTRACT. This paper developed out of an ongoing interdisciplinary project on Unconscious Memory at UCSB, which addresses representations of and experiences related to memory from a variety of perspectives. As a result of this work, scholars both like and unlike myself have come to understand that between fields like neuroscience and literature, different forms of knowledge arise through intellectual pursuits of different scopes. While it is no doubt challenging to integrate the knowledge obtained from such vastly different fields (and to determine what makes such work in any way meaningful), it is clear that the poetic works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries offer us some kind of enduring truth about the nature of experience, while recent experiments in neuroscience offer basic biological grounding for those mental processes expressed through written form.

I thus began to construct a research question that might bring other disciplines to the literary work that interests me most. How do we conceive of the role and nature of memory in the formation of personal identity, particularly in relation to the Romantic period? Can a modern understanding of memory in the brain help to resolve some of the difficulties embodied in the Romantic conception of identity?

As the longest-living Romantic poet, William Wordsworth was able to uniquely contemplate many aspects of the human condition over time through his compositions. His poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798,” with its central themes of retreat into

ABSTRACT. During the last half-century, cognitive neuroscience has refined the understanding of memory by showing that declarative and non-declarative memory circuits in the brain can operate quite separately. Representational in nature and accessible to consciousness, declarative memories provide material that we turn into the stories we tell ourselves about our pasts and, as such, play an important role in the endless creation and recreation of our narratives of a unified self. Nondeclarative memory, however, is not necessarily narrative. Often perceived as more integral parts of our personalities than declarative memories, nondeclarative memories are not accessible to our conscious awareness yet deeply affect the ways we perceive both our selves and the world around us. This paper explores how this possibly non-narrative part of the human mind has been made sense of (and, in that process, narrativized) in neuroscientific discourse and in literary discourse. Focusing on the neuroscientific research conducted with the amnesiac patient H.M.—the man whose tragic memory loss due to brain surgery in 1953 made possible the scientific exploration of nondeclarative memory—I analyze how meaning has been produced through the use of metaphors in the design of cognitive experiments and how this process of meaning-making has structured our understanding of nondeclarative memory ever since. Contrasting this with Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable (1953), I investigate how Beckett’s formal experimentation lays bare the oppressive potential of the voice of a self and how his novel invites us to consider the limitations of a narrative understanding of our selves. This dual analysis investigates what kind of knowledge engagement with experimental forms of verbal art can provide regarding the life of the mind and how cognitive neuroscience can inform literary interpretation.

ABSTRACT. My research investigates how neuroscientific models of social cognition are enacted and maintained through routine laboratory practices, with a particular interest in how such models are taken up pragmatically through the design and staging of experiments. My theater-based approach aims to experimentally interrogate the narrative possibilities for subjects who participate in such experiments: how do experiments require and limit the participation of these subjects? What modes of expression do experiments afford for subjects, and how do subjects take these up to navigate their roles as, for example, a “child with autism” in the experimental performance space of the laboratory experiment? Years of making experimental theater taught me that everything—not only actors but the physical space, the lights, the particular confluence of people and their expectations—everything mattered for the evocation of experiences and meanings in performance. It was this experiential mode of theatrical knowing that oriented me to the dramaturgy of laboratory experiments, and which underlies my conviction that the seemingly incommensurable experimentality of theater and science can only be addressed through a practical, experimental involvement with both. While some of my work describes experimental laboratory practices, the majority of my “critical collaborative” work happens in dialogue with cognitive neuroscience. In this talk, I focus on practical experimentation in a recent project that takes an engaged, theatrical, collaborative approach to expand expressive possibilities in laboratory experiments on social cognition.

ABSTRACT. The issue of how gendered behavioral norms are enforced has been widely debated across humanities and social sciences, with Judith Butler approaching it through Foucauldian discourse analysis and Raewyn Connell analyzing it through psychoanalytic understandings of cathexis. However, these perspectives have not adequately addressed how the patriarchal regulation of gender conventions manipulates specific bodily capacities, leading to abstract accounts of gender’s embodiment. My paper addresses this issue by attending to how patriarchal constructions of masculinity leverage particular affordances of the bodily autonomic (automatic) nervous system, paying particular attention to how this system’s fear responses facilitate bodies’ internalization of and compliance with normatively masculine behaviors. Specifically, in my project, I will read recent psychological research on the autonomic nervous system (somatic psychology and polyvagal theory) through bell hooks’s discussions of masculinity, in order to show how the former opens up the latter to a more concrete account of how patriarchal masculinities are reinforced. I argue that attention to patriarchy’s exploitation of particular bodily capabilities offers a rarely acknowledged way to mediate between gender’s “social” and “biological” dimensions. In conclusion, this project, by cultivating lines of interchange between humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, sheds new light on the mechanisms which perpetuate patriarchal masculinities.

ABSTRACT. Between 1952 and 1974, University of Pennsylvania doctor and professor Albert Kligman performed skin and psychotropic experiments on the predominantly black captive population of Holmesburg Prison. Examining the intersections of laboratory life and social death, the paper interrogates postwar bioethics' imagined subject of experimental abuse by positioning contemporaneous prison narratives and abolitionist rhetoric as the founding gestures of an insurgent bioethical framework that can excavate the aggression internal to scientific rationality, and mobilize it for radical-ethical claims against the state. The divergent claims of postwar bioethics and abolition—the former centered around protection and prevention, and the latter around domestic warfare and armed resistance—signals a new understanding of the “vulnerable subject" and of the "human" more broadly, while also revealing logical and historical connections that would shape how early US biomedicine and its systems of regulation later entered the global stage.

ABSTRACT. This essay engages in a sustained examination of Leo Marx's foundational work of American technology studies (and American Studies in general). It looks at the role of slavery, first in Leo Marx’s own writing and then in the broader discourses he lays out, to ask the questions: why is the issue of slavery (as Louis Chude-Sokei once put it) such a “flabbergasting aporia” in The Machine in the Garden? How, in a study that famously references Huckleberry Finn, The Tempest, and the poetry of Roman aristocracy, does the issue of instrumentalized human labor never rise to the surface? The answer to these questions, this paper will argue, lies in a fundamental conflation of slavery and machines in early America. This conflation is occluded in Machine in the Garden — by Marx, yes, but mostly by the form of the pastoral itself. This paper (and the larger chapter from which it is adapted) reappraises many of Marx’s own sources — Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Hawthorne’s “Ethan Brand,” and Virgil’s first Eclogue — along with some lesser-read American works—particularly Poe’s “The Man That Was Used Up,” and a broad corpus of slave-narratives and contemporary essays on machine culture — to demonstrate and explicate the way the slave-machine trope circulated in early- to mid-nineteenth century America. The circulation of the slave-machine trope, I argue, ultimately sets the tone of American sociotechnical imaginaries from the nineteenth century onward and has more recently operated as an unacknowledged current in technology studies.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines the experimental subject at the center of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man in relation to the long history of medical experimentation on African Americans subjects performed without informed consent and the socioeconomic conditions of racially defined philanthropy in the first half of the twentieth century. Ellison uses the technology of electric medicine to provide the narrative preconditions for the protagonist’s invisibility and to present the African American novel as an experimental form. Electroshock therapy functions in the text as an experimental device that tests the limits of generic conventions and the human body. I consider this specific textual parallel between narrative and medical technologies in relation to the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, the longest running nontherapeutic experiment on human beings in medical history and the most dramatic example of systemic ethical failure in the American medical establishment. A charitable institution that funded the initial syphilis control demonstration and provided supplemental funding for the length of the study, the Rosenwald Fund, also provided Ellison with grant funding for writing Invisible Man. There are a number of historical connections between syphilis and shock therapy, in the context of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century theories of mental illness, that help us bridge the gap between the fictional and historical medical experiments, but these connections do not answer the question posed by the Rosenwald Fund itself. This paper asks why an experimental novel and a non-treatment experiment look like equally valid and equally fundable solutions to the Negro Problem in 1945.

ABSTRACT. Would Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) replace human beings for creating art? Or would it help us to hatch out and discover the new level of creativity? Is this a new question or a question that we have repeated throughout human history? Homer's Iliad describes a human being whose name was Ganymedes. He "was the loveliest born of the race of mortals, and therefore the gods caught him away to themselves" and "for the sake of his beauty, so he might be among the immortals." Now A.I. came to live among us, mortals, for the sake of its endless possibilities, even perhaps bringing in beauty and meaning to our lives. Kang presents her recent works that are created in an attempt of "collaboration" with Machine Learning algorithms. The neural networks, a kind of AI, generate their own artworks under supervision or assistance from human artist, Kang. Is it going to change our relationship with "machines"? Would it offer people who have been shunned from art creation because of their physical, financial, social, cultural limitations chances to explore the area of creativity?

ABSTRACT. Two Women is practice-based research which utilizes a hybridization of film, installation art, electroacoustic composition, algorithmic narrative, and kinetic machines. The piece thematically addresses a suicide issue in South Korea in a framework of fictional narrative and a database of historical news archives. Two Women attempts to depict multiple layers of imagination, memory, and history in a physical space. The research focuses on replicating the cinematic experience in the realm of installation art, by addressing the perceptual and physical experience of the moving image in space. With the use of algorithms and data sets, the storytelling becomes generative and evolves. The research involves the theoretical meaning of ‘the cinematic’, the history of embodiment and the senses, expanded cinema in the 1960s and 70s, contemporary cinematic art in the gallery as well as the theater, and the relationship between cinema and new media.

ABSTRACT. This talk discusses the artistic, historical, and critical design perspectives leading to my project “A Machine For Living In,” a digital media work using newly available computational and sensing tools to study the home as a site of intimate life. The title invokes Le Corbusier's framing of the home as a machine to interpret the promise of contemporary smart home technologies. I consider his idealization of the machine in the context of our parallel utopian imagination of the computer as master metaphor: a machine for living penetrating every aspect of intimate life, and guarantor of the promise of ubiquitous sensing, pervasive computing, and computational models of learning and perception.

ABSTRACT. Is meaning part of sound or is it arbitrarily associated with sound in a word in human language? Using the linguistic theory of sound and form and pseudo-scientific data of hand gestures, the project Mother (2012) investigates the relationship between between language and form. Mother is a series of generative sculptures that explore synesthetic connections between language and form by analyzing hand gestures that represent the participants’ interpretations of unfamiliar spoken words. The gestures of the participants were captured in 3D using a Kinect, interpreted with openFrameworks, and produced with 3D printers. The paper primarily discusses the project in regards to data visualization and human as well as machine-based translations which occurs within the work.

ABSTRACT. The project Aeolian Traces explores the potential for a systemic integration of sound, visual and physical computing elements. The project exists as a modular spatial sound experience uniquely synced with a data visualization and wind generated by small ventilators across a gallery space.

Artistic research here builds on the technical developments of the Ambisonic 3D sound-spatialization technologies, as well as in advanced 3D rendering and modeling for information visualization. As an artwork, it presents data related to human migration patterns as sound, visual and physical wind simultaneously, drawing a speculative link between the freely moving ebb and flow of wind pattern and a more politicized human mobility today.

ABSTRACT. This talk takes up the concept of “artificial ignorance” through the racial biases of drone warfare technology. Though drones are often touted as disembodied and omniscient, I argue that the purportedly disembodied eye of the drone, which holds the promise of omniscience and pure objectivity, is absolute impossibility and exceedingly dangerous fantasy, what Donna Haraway names “the god trick.” The eye of the drone, like all modes of seeing, is neither disembodied nor neutral nor omniscient, but rather replicates a specifically embodied and situated mode of seeing the world. As Haraway reminds us, seeing is always seeing from somewhere. And this somewhere is always shaped by specific embodiments, situated perspectives, and only ever partial knowledges. If seeing is always seeing from somewhere, seeing is also always not seeing from somewhere else. As my talk will detail, in part by examining early cybernetics research, the somewhere from which the military drone sees is a colonialist position that constructs and dehumanizes a racial other. In response to these violent epistemological limits, my talk will look to Édouard Glissant’s “right to opacity” to reorient drone technology and its production of information away from knowability and familiarity, and instead around the ineradicability of unrecognizability, difference, and unfamiliarity.

ABSTRACT. In this presentation, I continue to compare AI applications in contemporary art and industry by focusing on scholarly and media discussions about sexbots and other devices that support the possibilities of human-machine sex. My interest will be situated in the field of subject production: that is, what kind of subjects are meant to be produced by engaging with the sex machine. I will explore different “markets” and the audiences that art and industry think they serve. I show how willful ignorance and perpetuation of harm and injury become important components of produced sexualities and the unspoken contract of this growing niche.

ABSTRACT. Machine learning algorithms are used to automate the process of intelligence analysis. But machine learning does not detect threats: it only detects patterns. Mistakes in the data used to train a corpus will replicate erroneous judgments. Problems like overfitting, decontextualization, and epistemological and ontological assumptions about data impact machine learning dataveillance systems. These topics will be discussed via the artistic research project, the Crowd-Sourced Intelligence Agency, a partial replication of an Open Source Intelligence processing system. One of our main contributions to conversations about OSINT is a critique of machine learning in dataveillance practices. The CSIA features multiple Naïve Bayes supervised machine-learning classifiers that label tweets as suspicious or not. Naïve Bayes is commonly used by intelligence agencies because it assumes independence among features: analysts only need to know that something is a threat to include it in a naïve Bayes training corpus, they do not need to know why. Since intelligence agencies are usually working with incomplete information, naïve Bayes is an obvious choice. But not knowing why something might be a threat can produce problems like false-positives. The public does not have the computational capacity to quickly process and analyze Big Data or the time to develop the competencies to understand data analytics. In order for the public to question the use of statistical pattern recognition algorithms in place of human judgment, they need the technical literacy to understand how these systems work and the data they produce, as well as access to the data that intelligence agencies use to train their algorithms. By reproducing the types of problems inherent in the processing and displaying of Big Data for intelligence analysis, the CSIA fosters a critical awareness of some of the assumptions inherent in dataveillance technology.

ABSTRACT. The cameras in our phones are getting better through computational strategies that compensate for physical limitations like a small aperture, short focal length, and shaky human operator. Some algorithmic adjustments are invisible to users; but some are promoted as features. New autocapture modes can take your picture for you, at the moment people smile or kiss. And you can select portrait mode on some cameras to make any snapshot look special. Portrait mode works by mapping an image into planes of depth, identifying the plane that contains the subject, and sharpening that plane while proportionally blurring the others. This relies on machine learning algorithms that have been taught to identify which pixels of an image are a person’s face, and which other pixels are should count as part of that person. The algorithms of portrait mode promise to focus on what’s important, eliminating distractions. In practice this means people show up as what matters, unique individuals against a general backdrop, the world fading away around them. AI isn’t imposing this way of way of seeing and representing ourselves, it has extrapolated our preferences from pictures we share and circulate. But, when those preferences are baked into our tools, they become new kinds of constraints. Limits of focus and depth, traditional constraints of photographs, have been tools for conveying meaning. What might seem like technical decisions are also aesthetic, and aesthetics are never neutral. This talk will explain how AI intervenes to modulate aesthetics in some of the most common practices of everyday image-making, and explore why that might matter.

ABSTRACT. In his 1900 book, Ideal Physical Culture, professional strongman William Bankier (AKA 'Apollo') described a novel 'muscle developer' he had invented. It's unclear what this developer was exactly, and less clear whether it was ever actually built, but Bankier does provide some clue in his remarks: "It is a combination of electricity and light dumb-bell exercise at the same time". Speculating on what this developer might have been like, I disassembled a shock pen and connected it to an Arduino Gemma microcontroller outfitted to an arm-band. To think about its socio-cultural function, I have attached an Arduino accelerometer to a basic LED to count bicep curls. Though it might not have even existed, the machine's socio-cultural function suggests a great deal about the development of physical culture and masculinity at the turn of the century. Putting archival research and theories of gender and sexuality into the practice of critical making, my project investigates the rhetorical techniques of muscle-building and technological-making that have contributed to making notions of masculinity in the West.

ABSTRACT. This paper discusses the potential of using rhetorical terminology and concepts in enacting rhetorical handcrafting — a practice akin to critical making that incorporates traditional textile crafting techniques and focusses on the voices and presences of the objects that collaborate with us to produce handcrafted artefacts. As a focal point, I present “bombix • fusus”: a project combining silk cocoons, embroidery, and wearable technologies that investigates Timothy Morton’s observation from OOO that “rhetoric is a technique for contacting the strange stranger.” Silkworms and spindles, ancient textile technologies, collaborate with light and color sensors and human hands to produce a meditation on secrecy, animality, closeness and distance.

ABSTRACT. This presentation is organized around a meditation on mindfulness, temporality, and technology — all with the goal of constructing a non-dualistic perspective on their relationship. I call this non-dualistic perspective “digital mindfulness.” In teacher Daniel Ingram’s words, non-duality practices have to do with “eliminating or seeing through the sense that there is a fundamentally separate or continuous center-point, agent, watcher, doer, perceiver, subject, observer, or similar entity.” By taking a non-dualistic perspective, mindfulness calls attention to the interconnection of our mind with everything else in the Universe. In the context of technology, non-duality means not seeing a division between our experience as human beings, on the one hand; and our connection to technology, on the other. For instance, while social media has acted as a source of great anxiety for many people since the 2016 election, a non-dualistic perspective would embrace that anxiety as a window into a broader vision of reality. The goal of mindfulness practice, then, is not to eliminate technology in our lives but to change our relationship with it. The more experience we have with anxiety, the more opportunities we have to gain insight from our troubles. After a short presentation on mindfulness practices and their relationship to social and mobile technology, I will guide the audience in a 5-minute meditation based upon the emptiness practices of Rob Burbea. Afterwords, I ask them to reflect upon their connection with social media, with the purpose of inquiring into that relationship. Burbea sees emptiness as “the absence of this inherent existence that things appear to naturally and undeniably have.” Mindfulness practices have traditionally been

ABSTRACT. In an essay aptly entitled “On Weaving a Basket,” Tim Ingold suggests that “Since the artisan is involved in the same system as the material with which he works, so his activity does not transform that system but is – like the growth of plants and animals – part and parcel of the system’s transformation of itself.” Ingold ultimately asks for a revision of the word making, calling instead for a practice of weaving. Whereas making regards “the object as the expression of an idea,” weaving regards the object as the “embodiment of a rhythmic movement.” The result is an anti-platonic understanding of fabrication in which “the forms of objects are not imposed from above [e.g., by a rational, disembodied mind], but grow from the mutual involvement of people and materials in an environment.” This presentation looks at basket weaving as a critical making practice that first, calls attention to technological being as an inter-agential performance, and second, asks what continental philosophies such as Ingold’s might learn from Indigenous knowledge. Basket weaving as described in this presentation is a philosophical, erotic, and possibly ethical activity performed by individuals who understand their actions not as masters of nature, but as agents in a field of becoming. As a learning opportunity, basket weaving introduces students to the practices and politics of haptics, a form of knowing that challenges the predominant senses of seeing and hearing, – the so-called distant senses – which dominate Western education. As Laura

ABSTRACT. This paper interrogates how contemporary digital technologies, from robotic sex dolls like Frigid Farrah to mobile apps documenting consent like LegalFling, often reify deterministic constructions of sexual consent that impede a more just politics of sexual and bodily autonomy. Such digital technologies that facilitate fantasies of violating consent (robotic sex dolls) or fantasies of handling consent through purely computational means (apps documenting consent), for example, rehearse long-standing conceptions of consent itself as a kind of digital technology of social governance. In this way, consent is imagined through an unambiguous binary of either consenting and non-consenting at the complete discretion of free subjects. Consent conceived as such relies on the construction of the possessive individual of Western liberal humanism at the core of contract law. As feminist, intersectional, queer, and disability critiques (Catherine MacKinnon; Andrea Dworkin; Joseph Fischel; Michael Gill) demonstrate, however, not all subjects have equitable or just access to the autonomy and agency granted to the possessive individuality baked into contemporary understandings of consent. Moreover, as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun suggests, consent is itself a contextually constructed and situated technology that only exists in tension with technologies of control.

Extending this critical scholarship, this paper explores how feminist and queer games—such as Robert Yang’s "Hurt Me Plenty", Jimmy Andrews and Loren Schmidt’s "Realistic Kissing Simulator", and Naomi Clark’s "Consentacle"—propose and reimagine alternative understandings of consent as on-going cooperative negotiations of embodied intimacy in contrast to a contract between possessive individuals. Rather than treat consent as something deterministic that can be recorded or evaluated unambiguously through technological design, then, these games offer experimental engagements in mediating and maintaining consent as on-going and collaborative analog care work among partners.

ABSTRACT. When discussing melodrama as a popular narrative mode that transcends not only genre but distinct media as well, Linda Williams often evokes Henry James’ analogy of a “leaping fish”. Whether this “fish” can or does leap into the medium of the videogame--a medium typically on the margins of narrative production--is an open question. There is certainly no shortage of digital games whose narratives exemplify melodrama by sharply opposing the forces of good and evil, foregrounding the suffering of victims (usually women), and calling upon players to act with moral purpose (often violently). However, this project investigates a more profound space of convergence between games and melodramatic narrative. I position gaming’s kinetic legibility (its fundamentally diagrammatic organization of action and space) as an affective correlate to melodrama’s production of moral legibility. When the virtue of the innocent is recognized and protected in melodramatic action-hero narratives (e.g., our recent superhero blockbuster cycle), moral legibility can be said to underpin kinetic legibility in a dialectic of pathos and action. However, the moral stakes of gaming often seem less clear, especially during prolonged moments of embodied, affective engagement between narrative cutscenes.

The recent turn to affect theory in game studies--e.g., Anable (2018), Jagoda (2018)--has laid the groundwork for bridging kinetic and moral legibility within gaming’s complex assemblage of body, screen, image and code. This project tests the framework of melodrama on the margins of narration and embodiment and develops a theoretical model for discussing games as vital participants in our melodramatic mode’s current historical moment. Because of their narrative frames, long duration, and careful organization of game space, I focus my discussion on the popular “Metroidvania” genre of side-scrolling adventure and exploration games, such as Super Metroid (1994) and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997).

ABSTRACT. Nintendogs (Nintendo, 2004), a popular pet simulator for the Nintendo DS handheld console, seems like an unlikely site for exploring queerness in video games. The game includes no LGBTQ characters. Indeed, the world of Nintendogs is populated almost entirely by dogs--playful puppies whom the player purchases, cares for, and trains. However, there are a number of ways in which the narrative and gameplay elements of Nintendogs resonate with queer experience, specifically queer sex. Here, I look at how the game echoes two elements of queer subcultural sex practices: “puppy play,” a form of kink play that grows out of gay men’s leather communities, and cruising. Puppy play manifests in the game through the sensory and sensual interactions between players and their dogs. The Nintendo DS was the earliest mainstream console to integrate touch-screen and voice recognition features. Nintendogs, one of the console’s flagship titles, invites players to interact intimately with their pets by calling their names and literally touching them. This, I argue, represents an embodied and erotic form of play. One of Nintendogs’ core gameplay elements is the walk mechanic, in which players take their dogs for walks while stopping for “random encounters” with other dogs and their owners--all of whom are, strikingly, men. This mechanic is reminiscent of cruising, in which subjects seek their own random encounters for queer sex and, as Tommy Ting has argued, queer worldmaking. To unpack the resonances with queer sexual practices in Nintendogs, this paper draws from Cody Mejeur’s writing on the present absence of queerness in video games: queer elements that remain on the level of implication and potential without appearing on screen. Building from work by Braidon Schaufert and Jason Lajoie, this work also contributes to current conversations in the sub-field of

ABSTRACT. Sean Wejebe’s The Longest Couch is a queer experimental video game about two boys sitting on opposite ends of an impossibly long couch. Two players sit in front of one computer keyboard and press keys in order to scooch the boys toward one another so that they meet in the middle for a kiss. The keyboard inputs begin with players’ hands at opposite sides of the keyboard, but over time the inputs change: As the boys on the screen get closer to one another, the players of the game must also become more physically intimate to complete the prompts. The players’ hands must touch, overlap, and mingle over the surface of the keyboard, the seemingly nonsensical inputs translating into physical intimacies and proximities.

In this paper, I examine The Longest Couch alongside computer literacy documents from the 1980s that are housed in the US Department of Education. These documents define a standardization and institutionalization of bodies in front of the machine, with strict rules for what a solitary body should do, and how it should be positioned, in front of a keyboard: “arms almost motionless,” “using correct fingering,” “eyes steady, always on copy.” In putting this archive in contact with TLC, I examine how the game queers the keyboard and re-considers it as a queer space (Sara Ahmed). It asks us to re-center our experience of computers as a spatial relationship, not only between our body and the keyboard, but between our body and other bodies — imagining computers as networked processes that move beyond cable modems and into networks of feeling, intimacy, and embodiment between people and

ABSTRACT. Prior to his retrospective at the Menil Collection in 2015, the kinetic artist Takis had not had a solo exhibition outside of continental Europe in 45 years. Since then, he has been the subject of an additional retrospective at the Palais de Tokyo and, as of this summer, yet another at The Tate Modern. It seems that the “gai laboureur des champs magnetiques,” as he was once described by Duchamp, is experiencing something of a renaissance. Artistic engagements with science (of which Takis was a pioneer) have become increasingly popular in recent years, particularly among theorists who suggest that there is a potential role for such art in fostering New Materialist modalities. However, their position in these contexts is often reduced to either illustration or analogy, on the one hand, or “creative” iterations of functional practices, on the other. What these accounts have tended to omit are artistic practices like Takis’s, that adopt the posture of experimentation but have no pretense of contributing to scientific progress. I argue that Takis’s magnetic sculptures demonstrate a third role for art in the fostering of potential alternatives to the “folk theories” of scientific realism (among which George Lakoff and Mark Johnson include: the belief that reason is disembodied and that the world is naturally divided into pre-existing categories). His rudimentary experimentations with electromagnetism defy classical, “commonsense” ideas about the nature of reality and challenge the supposed inevitability of scientific realism more broadly. Furthermore, by materializing the effects of invisible, omnipresent forces, the insights offered by his practice become as “intuitive” as the ones they replace. Paige Hirschey, PhD candidate, History of Art, University of Toronto

ABSTRACT. Research and practice around interactive narrative has long been inspired by the dramatic arts. There is an ecology of participatory performance traditions that includes improvisational theater, interactive drama, machinima, tabletop roleplaying, live action role playing (larp), interactive dinner theater, immersive mixed reality theater, karaoke, and shadow casting (e.g.: the Rocky Horror Picture Show). In this paper we explore the value-propositions that are implicit in any participatory performance: why does an audience participate? What pleasure is the experience designed to produce? What are the assumptions and design commitments about the preferred interactor experience that motivate these kinds of participatory experiences? We contextualize this discussion within the context of several science-fictional visions of the future of participatory narrative including the Holodeck from Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek TNG, the Ractives of Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, and the 80’s Movie Challenge from Ernest Kline’s Ready Player One. We unpack the rhetorics of participatory narrative that these fictional visions articulate, and consider how the current landscape of participatory theater positions itself relative to that future. We argue that much contemporary exploration into participatory theater has been overly concerned with facilitating player authorship. It is all to common for designers of interactive narratives to focus on giving players the ability to determine how the events of a story will play-out. This approach often misses the more attainable pleasures of imaginative role-play, make believe, participation, transformation, and “playing along” with a work of fiction. We identify pleasures of participation and performance that do not rely upon authorial control, opening the door for new kinds of narrative experiences. We close with a discussion of ShadowCast: an active research prototype that we’re developing, motivated by these theories, that allows participants to perform in an immersive mixed reality karaoke version of their favorite musicals for a live audience.

ABSTRACT. One of the most challenging frontiers of virtual reality (VR) is the exploration of human emotions and behaviors as they relate to discrimination. Many reasons exist for this. For one, in a lab setting, the investigation of discrimination and prejudice is notoriously difficult. Additionally, most people are not aware of their biases or do not want to acknowledge their existence because it hurts their image in front of loved ones. VR and art are alternative realities where one can feel safe from judgment and free to act. Immersive experiential storytelling in VR, combined with the exciting advances in biometric data detection, contains the potential to explore and perhaps mitigate the human propensity for discrimination. By challenging multiple participants to act collaboratively in VR worlds, where they are transformed into digitally constructed identities to embody a different race and/or gender and live stories of micro-aggressions, I seek to investigate this frontier in unprecedented ways. I propose an art installation in which interactive narratives in VR stimulate people's self-awareness of discriminatory biases. Such cognitive process will be measured through the detection of psychophysiological signs (heat rate, brain waves and body thermal variations). This project’s innovation resides in the combination of a game-like artistic VR experience, that engages participants in a non-threatening manner, the use of telepresence, interactive narratives and biometric data. The long-term goal is to map each psychophysiological sign to an emotional state to better understand human behaviors and decision-making, and build an educational training tool that fosters an inclusive culture.

ABSTRACT. Let’s investigate what data is and is becoming, exploring data as becoming somatically important to interface and understand our relationship between our physical body and our data body as a whole self. Inspired by George H. Mead’s social theories, data needs interpretations and behaviors where the “I,” “you,” and “me” fall along the lines of our contemporary self a self that includes the data body and the coming of the digital somatic self. “Soma” or “somatic” refers to the body, and traditionally what happens at the barrier of cells, organs, and organisms that compose the body, is interactive and important as a primary means of sensing our realities, separate but connected to the mind. The soma operates as input and output of the actionable body that working in tandem with the mind, yet it has clear systems roles and functions of its own. This is important to explore the somas role within social self, particularly the gesture. The gesture is a concept which may be conceived in the mind but it is only expressed through the soma. The mind may create the information but the soma is the transmission line. These principals of the self, gesture, and soma help to define the foundation of this current research and the endeavors pursued within it. This theoretical framework helps us establish a beginning point for dealing with data: what data is, how to interpret it, and the methods of which to explore it through the gesture and soma that help form experience. My own explorations and artwork showcase data as a medium for art and theory, from means of collection to implementation with Augmented and Virtual Reality, Spatial Computing and some experiences I learned along the way. Particularly how the advent of Spatial computing will fundamentally change our relationship to experiential reality.

ABSTRACT. Contemporary theatre-makers can build on experimental work that formed in response to the “stealth revolution” by which neoliberal capitalism has remade our social world. In this paper I draw from a pair of recent British plays—Harold Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes and Caryl Churchill’s Far Away—to show how contemporary playwrights counter in their work the return of hierarchy and radical inequality ushered in by late phase capitalism. Writing not to tell a story, or to represent events in the “real” world, these playwrights instead address first causes through an embrace of paradox and tragic irony. I show how these playwrights draw on Beckett’s work to collide text, embodiment and stage space against each other in ways linked to autopoiesis. I examine how their techniques update age old connections between the spatial topology of the tragic stage and the preference toward disembodied abstraction characterizing Western thought since the Pre-Socratics. I next explore how contemporary forms of theatre practice deploy the present-absence of the offstage to inaugurate intensive dynamics by which the stage space—complete with its open and generative capacities— inexorably comes to “encompass” the audience as the play proceeds toward closure. The purpose of this approach , I argue, is to arrange the intensive topology of the stage to give rise to a subjective state marked by uncertainty and connective doubt. Inverting the neoliberal subject, I conclude, such work revives the possibility of utopic communitas.

ABSTRACT. Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán has spent most of his fifty-year career investigating, contemplating, and simply grappling with the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet that terrorized Chile from 1973 to 1990. The most well-known of his many documentaries about the dictatorship is The Battle of Chile, a three-part film released between 1975 to 1979. This four-and-a-half hour cinéma vérité film provides an in-depth and first-hand look at the causes of and responses to the dictatorship. Guzmán followed the trilogy with several more traditional documentaries about the dictatorship. After eight films, however, this was not enough for Guzmán. In 2010, he began a new line of inquiry considering the dictatorship obliquely through the lens of astronomy ("Nostalgia for the Light," 2010), the sea ("The Pearl Button," 2015), and mountains ("The Cordillera of Dreams," 2019). This paper considers how in "The Pearl Button" Guzmán utilizes Chile’s significant relationship with the sea, from pre-Columbian times to the present, as a means to understanding the horrors of the dictatorship, in contrast to the more historical and journalistic approaches of his earlier films. In particular, the paper employs the thinking of anthropologists Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philippe Descola to argue that Guzmán’s aesthetic and narrative techniques draw on animist ontologies, including those of Chile’s indigenous people, to conceptualize the sea as a social agent with its own perspective on Chilean history. The paper suggests that such animist-influenced approaches can provide alternative perspectives on ineffable tragedies than that which is offered by European-derived ontologies and epistemologies. It is often said that people ought to see things from another person’s perspective, but this paper suggests that that person need not always be human, especially in the most difficult scenarios, when truth is fleeting or under siege.

ABSTRACT. In 2011 Pablo Picasso’s 1943 oil on canvas painting Buste de Femme travelled from the Van Abbe Museum in Eidhoven to the International Art Academy of Palestine (IAAP) in Ramallah on loan for the first exhibition of this stature to take place in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Palestinian artist, curator, and director of the IAAP, Khaled Hourani, envisioned the project in 2009 during a visit to the Van Abbe Museum and dedicated two years of collaboration, negotiation, and overcoming bureaucratic procedures to bring the project into being. Hourani imagined what it would mean for Palestine as an unrecognized and occupied territory denied the right to exist to host an exhibition of high Modernist art. Picasso in Palestine thus exceeds conventional frameworks of the exhibitionary, realizing and performing the imaginary of a recognized Palestine, while defiantly asking: why not show a Picasso in Palestine? The question is of course a rhetorical one, but nonetheless evokes a series of questions and obstacles that complicate what would otherwise be a simple loan that museums in Europe and North America negotiate regularly. How does an exhibition take place in a non-place, in a state of exception? What permit does an iconic painting of high Modernist art require at the checkpoint? These questions arise from a tension exposed by the project that agitates the very foundations of constitutive modern nation-state and modern museum. The status of these institutions, and their capacity to endure as they are, come under contestation when faced with the question of Palestine, which was first posed by Edward Said in 1979 and remains unanswered. It is my intention to foreground a discussion of Picasso in Palestine within this framework as a disruptive force operating not only through an institutional critique of the Western museum and its

ABSTRACT. This paper compares two texts by Japan’s leading feminist novelist Tsushima Yuko (1947-2016) to highlight two different approaches to environmental catastrophe: the critique of biopolitics, on the one hand, and Deleuze-inflected environmental humanities, on the other. “Celebrating the Half Life” (Hangenki o iwatte, 2016) depicts a neo-fascist dystopia modeled on the real-life policies of Prime Minister Abe Shinzō. It is set thirty years in the future, when the language of governmentality has so successfully sutured over the reality of toxicity that the narrator can barely remember why the arrival of half-life of Cesium-137, now a cause for celebrating the resilience of the Yamato Race, once seemed insufficient for peace of mind. In this way, “Celebrating the Half Life” censures a Japanese populace happy to avert its gaze from the “bare life” of nuclear and other victims if distracted by nationalist pageantry like the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. In contrast, “Brown Bear’s Quiet Ocean” (Higuma no shizuka na umi, 2011) is more subtle. Here a woman fleeing radiation arrives at her government-issued temporary housing and finds solace in a growling, swimming bear she remembers from an old newspaper article. When the woman begins growling too, we realize it is her response to fear and intensity – her way of making audible forces that, like radiation, are as infinite as they are inchoate and silent. Channeling these forces as “affect” in Deleuze’s sense, she accepts fear as “the place where she lives,” and, unlike the bear, remains alive by not attempting to return to safety or a “time before.” In my reading, Tsushima is telling us that to address the political catastrophe depicted in the first text, we need both critique and the kind of innovation that, according to the second, we can only extract from the environment itself.

ABSTRACT. In a radio conversation with experimental poetry scholar Marjorie Perloff, philosopher Robert Pogue Harrison scolds avant-garde authors, accusing them of having a needlessly confrontational attitude towards the past. Both Perloff and Harrison agree that this contentious stance is a “young people’s thing”. However, if that is so, what do we make of the works of aging experimental authors, who keep trying to resist conformity through the last stage of life, traditionally seen as a time of recapitulation, resignation and reconciliation? My current project, “The Old Garde”, examines the recent work of experimental poets who position themselves against a poetics of summation, sobriety and depth, highlighting instead the importance of openness, discontinuity, scepticism and contingency for literary prospection and late life well-being. In this paper, I explore Lyn Hejinian’s The Unfollowing (2016), which puts a positive spin on the association of old age with childhood. Hejinian’s deceptively puerile descriptions of nature denote not so much a more mellow and conciliatory understanding of the world but rather a purposeful disregard for determinism and necessity. In the face of the inescapability of decline and death, the poet displays an obstinate faith in life’s fantastic potential for change and transformation. I will thus build upon Teresa Mangum’s insight that while old women are often infantilized in literature, they are simultaneously granted subversive magical powers. Another point of departure will be Catherine Malabou’s research on intelligence as an epigenetic concept, grounded in life’s adaptability. Drawing upon the recent literature on the late life development of giftedness in psychology and on nonstandard career paths in sociology, I will flesh out Hejinian’s optimistic take on old age, without ever forgetting the constraints nature forces us to contend with, a question the book highlights by making the limits of the form adopted throughout (the sonnet) a key topic

ABSTRACT. In 303 CE (commonly known as AD), Lucilla, a “mischief-making woman,” catalyzed a schism from Roman Christianity in Roman Carthage – she resisted criticism about her use of a martyr’s bone in her performance of faith during an early Christian mass. She then used her considerable wealth to support this break from the mainstream Christian church. My paper re-examines this moment, including other performances of faith by North African women, to engage with the ongoing conversations about Niklas Luhmann’s interpretation of systems theory and suggest that the paradigm shift involving relic veneration in early Christianity opens an inquiry into the relationship between social and psychic systems. In sum, the historical moment in which these Carthaginian women participate is a crucial test of Luhmann’s controversial—and unfinished--A Systems Theory of Religion (2013). Roman Carthage was the center for North African trade and existed as a complex economic system. Lucilla and other wealthy early Christian women staged the interpenetration of the economic system within the belief (psychic) system by creating a paradigm shift in their use of and veneration of saints’ relics. These women then catalyze a biopolitical communication rooted in the contingency of the body rather than in the formalized, abstracted medium of text. However, Luhmann, while recognizing that religious systems become more complex due to environmental complexity, overlooks the gendered biopolitics of these systems brought out by saints’ relics. This paper proposes that Luhmann’s work can be taken further by locating it within complex medieval society (specifically Roman Carthage) — a move that counters Luhmann’s repeated insistence that medieval society was never and could not be modern. I also leverage Luhmann’s argument that religion is the paradigm of a social system facing the contingency of uncertainty that is put in religious terms as the mystery of faith or belief.

ABSTRACT. This paper addresses central experiential meaning structures of what I am calling “psychedelic nonduality”: the phenomenon of nondual experiences brought about by psychedelic substances. Nondual experiences exemplify an altered state of consciousness in which the traditional dualisms that structures ordinary human experience are disrupted, characteristically resulting in experiences where the boundaries between the self and the world dissolve leading to experiences of merging with the world. Methodologically, I engaged with hermeneutic autophenomenology. Following the tradition of Max van Manen, I employed hermeneutic phenomenology as a reflexive, interpretive, and poeticizing project that attempts to glean meaningful insights into the potentials of human experience through the illumination of the lifeworld. I utilized autophenomenology to extend this poeticizing project to every step, drawing on my own embodied experiences to create rich descriptive data and relaying my findings in a way that seeks renewed contact with lived experience and goes beyond the individual. Three core structures emerged from my interpretation: the foregrounding of existential orientations, the permeability of identity, and the living of paradox; these primary themes are supported by a constellation of overlapping, mutually informing, and yet distinct thematic insights including experiences of experiential knowing and the world becoming alive, the loss of the body and effortless expansion of identity which inform an experiencing of the familiar as foreign, and finally experiences that disclose paradoxical encounters with relationality and the perception of space and time. This interpretive project yielded a multitude of thematic insights that resonate with existing literature and the poetic nuance this project has brought to bear on the phenomenon of psychedelic nonduality has illuminated novel insights that offer an opening to extend an existing body of phenomenological literature and push this body of work forward into exciting new frontiers.

ABSTRACT. While critical maker culture often engages with how technology, object, and design work together to construct material interventions (see Hertz 2012), there is a long tradition of those outside of such emergent worldviews whose practices similarly engage with and resist the notion of enforced disposability. This talk examines the rhetorical accretive function of the selvedge in weaving, stamp-making, and knitting as an intervention into mass accumulation and a permutation of the rhetorics of sufficiency (Princen). Selvedges, coming from “self-edge,” represent a moment in material making that is finite and finished: the final edge of a bolt of fabric that is both warp and weft that keeps it from fraying, the margins of stamps along the perforations that are discarded, the beginning and ending edges of knitting projects. While most often selvedges are thrown away, increasingly those who work with these materials are recognizing how selvedges can also function dually (or what I argue as accretively) as sites of material memory. Examining the differentiation of the selvedge from what is traditionally “usable” or productive from the ways that selvedges are gaining uptake in crafting and collecting communities, I position the selvedge as a possible mediation of thinking-with vibrant objects. Noting the ways that selvedges function rhetorically in providing information—manufacturers’ names, dye runs from light to dark known as color registrations (or more colloquially “traffic lights”)—I also highlight their purposes beyond intrinsic disposability by noting their stickier, affective functions: stabilization (as in the case of knitting), repurposing (as in the case of quilted projects using only selvedges), embellishment (as in the case of hems and ruffles). I argue that in the age of fast fashion and textile waste, selvedge projects rematerialize from the literal margins what is central to the life of the material.

ABSTRACT. This paper attends to the practice of “Crip Making” and the possibility of fostering inclusive interactions between humans and materials through collaborative maker experiments. Inspired by Matt Ratto’s concept of “critical making”, which combines self-reflexive critical thinking and material production techniques, Crip Making encourages participants to be open to the presence of different identities and lived experiences as well as the different ways that people experience their embodied connections with the material world. Crip Making mediates these embodied differences through collaborations that include disabled people as makers who engage in maker experiments. The term “crip” is derived from the word “cripple”. According to Eliza Chandler (2012), “crip” operates as an identifier and a verb, and the term illuminates the mutual desire among disabled and non-disabled people to “dwell with disability”. Being in the presence of diverse identities and lived experiences would allow makers to be open to the presence of individual differences while being aware of the interplay between materials and human action in the process of making things. The anthropologist Tim Ingold uses the term “textility” to describe the materials and forces that are accentuated through the movement and negotiation between material and human action. The “textility of making” emphasizes the embodied relations between human makers and materials. Yet, this creative process of making things is not necessarily iterative. Ingold distinguishes between “iterative” (exact replications) and “itinerative” (differences within rhythmic repetition) movements in the process of making (2010: 98). Makers who adopt an itinerative approach to making can “tune in” to the differences within the rhythmic repetition that characterizes the experimental engagements between material and human action. By mobilizing this itinerative approach to making, Crip Making reveals an analogous relationship between material differences and the presence of different identities

ABSTRACT. Many definitions of interface, such as those of Brenda Laurel, Branden Hookway, and Alexander Galloway, frame the interface as a guarantor of binary relation. In these definitions, the interface indicates a boundary between two entities, a formal relation by which an encounter between said entities can be managed. While many media poetic works play upon the interface's binary framing in their poetic strategies, what would it mean for a media poetic work to attempt to step outside of this relation? What kind of interface would one be interacting with, and what would it convey about the nature of interfacial relation? One would be working with a void interface, an interface which does one of two things: they present their users with either nothing to interact with save their constituent materials, or an absent interface which only affords interaction by constructing the interface through user engagement. I present an example of each type of void interface, the former represented by Jean Keller's The Black Book, an artist's book consisting of 740 pages of paper saturated in black ink; and the latter represented by Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse's Between Page and Screen, a book conventionally unreadable absent its encounter with a digital interface. Both frame interfacial relation as a mode of formal reduction, where the properties of both the interface's constituent materials and the human body are subsumed and identified with the interfacial form itself. Void interfaces counter this through a negative dialectics of interface, wherein its formal reduction is countered by a designed engagement with the materials of an incompletely constituted interface. These works thus counter the subsumption of interfacial components by interfacial form via differential modes of interaction, framing the user within an interfacial relation that affords both an observation and critique of said relation's subsumption process.

ABSTRACT. How do artists approach transformative thinking and new conceptual and sensorial spaces for investigation? As a vehicle for embodying multiple identities and laboratory for exploring with diverse subjects of inquiry, integrating the process of research with persona-building reconfigures the agency of an artist. Thinking through making, the operational presence of an artist-persona becomes a transversal lens for propelling alternative perspectives and methodologies to be taken into consideration in the practice of interdisciplinary research. With the agency of an artist in flux -- one that oscillates between fact and (non)fiction -- the destabilized state of an artist has the potential to facilitate the reinvention of creative practices and catalyze the development of new forms of expression to emerge. “Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs” (to be published on June 17, 2019, by Civil Coping Mechanisms / The Accomplices) is a collection of creative writings and speculative drawings on “blobs” that experiment with persona-building as an approach to practice-based research. Narrated from a so-called blobologist’s perspective, the book opens with a “Blobifesto” suggesting that blobs are the unsung, yet integral link in our language to build upon and describe ideas, culture, and knowledge. The common perspective of the blob is an amorphous form with an otherwise gooey texture, however, this is a gross undermining of the power of language and the vivacity of blobs. Fueled by the speculative ideology of blobs as both a theory and a practice, the book illustrates the moldable and transcendent use of “blob” as a lens to understand the spaces lurking between life and art. Blobs aren’t solely a physical form. But what is a blob if not just a physical thing? The force of a blob is simply irresistible.

ABSTRACT. This project profiles the word “jizz” and suggests applications for its productive use in multidisciplinary scholarship and pedagogy. A word of enigmatic etymology, “jizz” was arguably canonized in British birding vocabulary before being popularized as American sexual slang. In its original use, the term signifies a fast method of field identification implemented by skilled birdwatchers and naturalists. While analyzing the polysemic entity of “jizz,” I explore the discourse communities of citizen and professional scientists, and of oft-marginalized birding hobbyists. The Oxford English Dictionary offers only one definition of “jizz, n.”: “the characteristic impression given by an animal or plant,” and calls the etymology unknown. Folk etymologists and others have accused “jizz” of being a polysemic bastardization of an acronym, a backronym, and any one of a line-up of possible parent words. Some transcribe “jizz” birding as a variation of “GISS” birding, believing it to be an acronym for “General Impression of Shape and Size,” and a method for identifying passing aircrafts and avian species alike. “Often considered ‘birding by feel,’” blogger Nate Swift writes, “it’s difficult for a giss birder to even explain why a bird is identified as such because to them," since "a bird just feels right.” This idea that “a bird just feels right” requires affective attunement and embodied knowledge from accumulated experience, and is difficult to teach. Jizz is a messy, fluid, somewhat opaque concept, linked to embodied knowledge, and thus incredibly generative across diverse areas of intellectual inquiry and pedagogy. Linguistic evidence suggests but has never proven that the two main semantic identities of jizz might be simultaneously inhabitable and etymologically interchangeable, yet all lineage is uncertain. The extent to which this messiness, fluidity, and opacity permeates jizz at every level makes this term ripe for generating a full-bodied experimental investigation.

ABSTRACT. My talk will move at a fairly-low-stakes wander through several related topics which together constitute the background theories and considerations I bring to the study of machine learning and its emerging applications in computer animation. We will consider from a very high level the concepts of sample/sampling, narrative, and emotion in relation to the ongoing tension in media philosophy between the temporal frames of compression/encapsulation versus contingency/heterogenesis, along roughly what Alexander Galloway has referred to as the Digital and the Analog bifurcation. We will then situate a method of machinic analysis (following Guattari and Deleuze but only partially) as a means of playing with the above concerns through a brief – and in many ways reductive – literature review of prior media studies scholarship which focuses on particular machines and the durational logics into which they pivot their subjects and societies. We’ll move through machinic analyses such as Galloway’s study of internet protocol, Thomas LaMarre’s study of anime, Luciana Parisi and Beatrice Fazi’s studies of the algorithm, Vera Buhlmann’s study of coding, John Cheney Lippold’s study of data classification, and Florian Sprenger’s study of mobile networks. Lastly, we will encounter emerging machine learning workflows based in “latent space” and “latent space interpolations”. During our encounter, we’ll play nicely with some basic linear algebra and the wonderful mental exercise of conceptualizing manifolds and sub-manifolds. We will try to conceptualize both the diagrammatic character of this machine and its particular logics of duration.

ABSTRACT. On social media, beauty influencers and makeup artists constantly work to capture their own instant and instagrammable moments of beauty. By first considering media philosopher Bernard Stiegler's theorization of technics, or specifically the idea that technical objects constitute time, and media theorist Mark B.N. Hansen’s notion of temporal bodily fluxes, I propose that makeup worn on social media can be viewed as a technical grammar of the face. This grammar, in excess of the face and in direct relation with the cameras of our own ubiquitous handheld devices, aesthetically represents our own capturing of the present moment. In supporting this claim, I also briefly turn to popular cosmetics brands Revlon, L'oreal, and Wet n’ Wild that frequently employ the rhetoric of capturing the present, the “now” and the “instant” in their marketing campaigns as further evidence. However, in contrast to this rhetoric of the present, I ultimately identify what I see as emerging experimental forms of makeup art. Focusing mainly on the illusionary and blurring effects of social media makeup artist Dain Yoon’s “Illusion Series, Now” and “Illusion Series, Forever” visual work to the unsettling gooey and dripping eye looks of Instagram makeup artist Anita, I argue that these unique aesthetic visuals are not simply creative expressions or alternative presentations of makeup art, but are experimental engagements of temporal remixing that work to, in contrast to mainstream makeup visuals, instead obfuscate these captured moments of the present on social media. I ultimately claim that these experimental aesthetic engagements with makeup suggest a potential counter to surveillance and facial recognition technologies that seek to preside over our present moment.