ABSTRACT. Commercial wearable technologies traffic in the monitoring of bodily energy, with personal tracking devices claiming to regulate, extract and restore wearers’ energies. But when commercial wearables offer solutions to the over-extension of personal energies, they offer cures for ills caused by an inequitable and precarious work culture that technology itself helps produce. These design decisions extend a practice of energy commodification which is also present in analog wearables, with the fashion industry using inclusion and representation in advertising as a means for obfuscating rampant consumption and unethical, unsustainable production practices. In what ways do wearable and fashion technologies contribute to a commodification of bodily energy and wellbeing, and how can different relationships be revealed by creative practice?

This panel will present critical inquiries into the relationship between wearables, bodies, and energy through theory and practice; examining alternative practices of engaging with technology that are rooted in the technological histories of developing countries, that engage with the built and natural environment, that sense energetic phenomena through embodied technologies, and that subvert surveillance. The resulting practice-based research includes technologies and garments designed to help the wearer probe, redirect attention, mine new energy sources, build community, create networks, recuperate energy, and heal.

ABSTRACT. Centering Vegetal flows of energy, alongside the burgeoning field of plant studies, this panel centers questions of life and law, vitalism, enlightenment modernity, and feminization to ask anew how we may reconceptualize the “vegetal” alongside the omnipresent Human. We center movements and flows of energy among the old and new, past and present, tradition and modern, life and its undoing, to think together about the travails of vegetal energy. Our papers work with story-telling as method and episteme to think about four different narratives of energy flows in the vegetal world. Accounting with the stories that plants tell, this panel considers what it does to imagine plants as inventors, as ‘new’ animals, as being tied to histories and what it means to be alive; we show how plants can enrich our understanding of the world. Thinking with plants and anchoring vegetal energy to theorize relations of humans and nonhumans, challenges logics of capitalism and decenters existing paradigms.

ABSTRACT. Mind thGAP was a series of workshops held in online and on-ground in May and June of 2021 The Transgenic Human Genome Alternatives Project (thGAP) presented the Generic Open-Source Plasmid for Human Arts (GOSPHA) which in tern asked public participants to build a Creative Germline Constructs Bank (CGCB) This hybrid experiment in public understanding of Bioinformatics, Germline Human Engineering and Artistic Practice was a part of the ReproTech & Arts / Germline Hacks and Designer Babies Program at Hackteria ZET – Open Science Lab of Zürich. Adam Zaretsky, Cristian Delgado, Paula Pin, Marc Dusseiller and Praba Pilar joined with representatives of psyFert, the Bioart Ethical Advisory Kommission (BEAK) and all of our participants to form the World Congress on New Reproductive Technology Arts. The Labs were about artistic research on genetic modification of future humans including: How to read scientific papers for artists, amateur gene hunting and interpreting introduction to GENBANK, FASTA and SCIHUB, DIY-Bioinformatics and novel design issues CRISPR baby construct production. We also focused on the prophetic power of Science Fiction, gave public understanding of the technology in terms of legal, social, ethical and libidinal issues (LESLI) of Germline Human Gene Editing. Through Citizen Science we all explored: How to unwork a contract, How to Bioart Criticism of Transgenic Humans and How to Build a GOSHPA to introduce your gene of choice into a Time Based, Ephemeral Sculptures/New Media, Multigenerational/Live Art DIY-Bioart Installation. The CGCB is a public resource that continues to grow to offer open source, semi-conceptual, EvoDevo human embryo and live young ART (Assisted Reproductive Technology) through the proliferation of non-normative infectious genetic constructs for multigenerational mutagenic alterity. The intention of these labs is to have a queering effect on on the biodiverse possibilities of future transgenic human mutants and to give interested people insight into the technics, ethics and aesthetics behind the renovation of the species commons now underway.

ABSTRACT. In conjunction with the departure from objecthood of the 1960s, a number of artists turned their attention to modeling invisible energy fields, including radio waves, infrared light, and brainwaves. The space between art participants acquired liveliness, being subjected to modulations over which one could exert more or less influence. Some artists took interest in translating energy oscillations into visual or auditory rhythms, others more drawn to conceptual gestures announced their presence without making them available to the human sensorium. Through such inquiries into the invisible, artists aimed to enhance awareness of social and environmental interdependence and propose alternative modes of communication which would elude regulation. This artistic trajectory has extended into the present. Contemporary artists stage performances or participatory scenarios in which otherwise inconspicuous signals are brought into experience and disclose persistent misconceptions about material boundaries. This panel examines artists’ past and present motivations for exploring the plasticity of invisible energy. It asks what role interpersonal communication plays in enhancing awareness of otherwise inconspicuous energy exchanges and what degree of agency one can hold in relation to the contingency of matter. The panel also looks into different forms of knowledge making, as well as the positive and negative implications of modeling energy fields.

ABSTRACT. This proposed roundtable, based on a forthcoming collection from Cambridge University Press, seeks to reenergize Darwin’s writings, exploring the profound and continuing influence. It will be moderated by Deanna Kreisel. Devin Griffiths will outline the collection as a whole, the first to focus on how Darwin’s thinking has shaped literary studies and its theoretical resources—in other words, the first to focus on Darwin as a critical humanist and philosopher of social forms. The present roundtable asks, what comes after? How might we look beyond natural selection for the wider possibilities of Darwin’s thought, particularly as a resource for critical humanism? Carol Colatrella will discuss Nineteenth-century tumultuous political debates, fears of violent revolutions, and the rise of women’s rights campaigns in Britain, the United States, and France provide a context for considering Darwin’s theory of sexual selection and its engagement with feminism. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) identified sexual differences, male-male combat, and female choice in courtship as key elements of animal copulation, while insisting that male choice controls human sexual relations, ideas that inspired radically different reactions from feminists who objected to what they regarded as Darwin’s sexism and fiction writers who highlighted women characters resisting patriarchal expectations and making independent decisions. The long history and profound consequences of the concepts of sexual difference and sexual selection call for careful consideration of the intertwining of Darwin’s scientific theories about sexual difference and choice with divergent cultural formations, ranging from Social Darwinism to feminist theory proposing a fluid understanding of sex and gender superseding the earlier two-sex model. Jesse Oak Taylor will ask what it means to read Darwin in the middle of what appears to be the seventh mass extinction in Earth’s history, and the first caused by the actions of a single species, our own. The historical distance separating us from Darwin marks not only a profound shift in the idea of nature, but in the ontological state of nature itself, which is to say the configuration of existing (and/or vanishing) species and ecosystems completely apart from our ideas of them. We need to reckon with both sides of that equation, and the relationship between them, if we are to understand Darwin’s relevance for our own efforts to forestall mass extinction in the present. And Ian Duncan will consider Darwin’s The Descent of Man and the deep relation between the biological and cultural imperatives of human emergence. That relation generates an ethical and political crux, in the tension between a universal sympathy, expanding across the boundaries of nation, race and species, which marks a fully achieved “humanity,” and an ongoing colonial history of the extermination and replacement of human and animal populations. Duncan analyzes the logic that binds these together, and its fallout in subsequent popular-scientific writing, from William Winwood Reade and H.G. Wells to some contemporary examples of human natural history.

ABSTRACT. Arts Lounge & Exhibition

We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence. ― Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

Across terrestrial life and machinic environments, the processes of energy transfer, conflict, and extinction drive the evolution of both species and signals. While phylogenetics studies the evolutionary history of a particular species or group, tracing the lines of descent and inter-species relationships among groups of organisms, this event thinks through various forms of ‘phylo-digital evolutions’, or Phygital Evolution, as the evolutionary histories of terrestrial life within a digital environment. Works in the program wander through the branches of the entropic processes of cyberculture as a dark forest theory, look to the potentials of generative adversarial tree networks, and mine the digital history of phytoestrogenic reproductive conflict. Rather than ‘cybernetics’ - or the equillibrium feedback systems of human dreams - we pose a ‘natureculture’ of the digital as an environmental contingency and as a theoretical mode (for generative forms of theory, media art, and digital archives), based in internet conflict, extinctions, adversarial networks, and digital abortions.

Format:

Phygital Evolution(s) is an Arts Lounge event and online exhibition featuring lecture performance, new media art, immersive archives, and music performance. During the lounge event, we present a thematic program of lecture performance, audiovisual works, and live music performance, followed by a Q&A. The lounge event will be accompanied by an online exhibition where conference guests can visit and view the works and videos for the duration of the conference.

Works:

Nelson's TreeGAN project explores how a generative adversarial network learns to produce the three dimensional form of a tree. Implementing voxelGAN configurations that are normally trained on geometrical forms such as chairs and tables, the treeGAN system examines the strange lineage of shapes produced as the system learns to make trees. In relation to Modernist experiments or Taoist conceptions of form, Nelson's 3D animations and robotically assisted paintings make morphing forests that examine how machine learning will contribute to the evolution of form and figuration in visual culture.

Konior’s Dark Forest Theory of the Internet translates Liu Cixin’s dark forest theory to Web 2.0. It outlines automated dynamics tied to communication and the manner in which the internet maintains a high entropy condition. The video accompanying her theory was made in collaboration with artist Andrej Skufca, with 3D engineering by Voranc Kumar, sound by Matej Mihevc, and graphic design by Jaka Neon.

Granata’s How Not to Grow an Abortion (HNTGAA) is a transmedia project and immersive archive that explores the somatechnical history of abortifacient plants used for DIY abortion while documenting the subculture of DIY abortion online within/as a Virtual Reality. Rather than collecting instructions for DIY herbal methods, HNTGAA poses a somatechnical history narrated by users as a VR archive that traces phytoestrogenic reproductive conflict.

Yanick’s Limits of CTRL explores co-creative expressions and semi-autonomous performance alongside an ensemble of generative adversarial networks, pushing machine learning to its limits through aesthetic means to spin a weird battle of ideas.

ABSTRACT. Organizations like the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru) highlight a growing trend in higher education that the arts not only play a vital role in campus culture but in research and teaching as well. Whether it be an increasing emphasis on the fluidity of knowledge and inquiry through movements in S.T.E.A.M. or elevating the role the arts and education can play in some of our most vital professions in healthcare and medicine, creative practice is energizing academia.

Yet, while all of this discourse gushes on the impact of the arts, there is a lot to be learned about how to cultivate and sustain energy flows in research. What are the elements necessary to create a vibrant ecology of research where art and design inquiry may flourish alongside, within, and out of research in the humanities and social and physical sciences that is so deeply embedded within the fiber of research-oriented universities? “Ecology” in this sense focuses on the relationships that bind component parts into ecosystems and may be used to understand a wide array of social and cultural production that may be akin to flows of energy.

This proposed panel reviews the forthcoming publication Vibrant Ecologies of Research (VER), a special issue of a2ru’s online peer-reviewed publication Ground Works (https://groundworks.io/). VER focuses on deepening our understanding of institutional, social, and epistemological systems that effectively weave arts-based inquiry into the scholarly fabric of research. VER calls attention to the complex and nuanced articulations of how institutions, research groups, and organizations come together and what elements allow them to thrive.

The Vibrant Ecologies of Research special issue follows threads of inquiry concerning: · What forms of leadership, resources, and institutional structures most effectively impact research agendas across disciplines? · How might these entangled and productive ecosystems be analyzed or understood so that other institutions, scholars, and communities may benefit? · How does disciplinarity operate in these ecosystems? What are its material and human components and how may they be sustained? · How responsive are these ecologies so that they may remain vibrant, productive, and impactful in light of social and cultural upheaval? How may productive ecosystems respond to failure? · How might vibrant ecologies of research provide leadership and vision in models of diversity, equity and inclusion?

The panel will review mature case studies of practice, using systemic perspectives to deepen our understanding of these research systems as energy flows. Reviewed submissions provide concrete examples of research ecosystems as well as jumping-off points to discuss, analyze or explicate the ecology through multimodal forms of scholarly publication via Ground Works’s unique capacity to feature rich media. Participants should expect discussion focused on the vitality of arts-based inquiry in spaces of research that extend, augment, or mutate conceptions of knowledge, ethical decision making, and accessibility to research cultures.

ABSTRACT. ‘The body contains watersheds, capillaries branching from veins, branching from arteries. There are branching rivers of air in the lungs, the breath. The branch and drain, the push and pull.’

Cass Lynch, Watershed

Think about this for a moment. Take it in. The ebb and flow of your body. As you breathe and live. Then add to that all the waters you have crossed to be here, today. Your ancestors’ travels. Painful nights at sea. The company you keep that arrived on the backs of loud waves and winds. Think of how much knowledge resides (t)here. Think of how we came together today, across so many seas.

This is where we begin… Spanning across the Northern and the Eastern Seas, our bodies of water have connected through a mutual interest in the embodied, collaborative and creative methods that surface when we immerse our thinking in water. In the roundtable we will be discussing these methods, including the roundtable itself as a collaborative and dialogical academic gathering that diverges from the monological conference paper presentation. Instead, the roundtable will take shape as a form of relational inquiry into collective thought across disciplines, backgrounds and empirical waters.

Our approach to water as a process that inspires the shapes and flows of our knowledges informs our exploration of the fluctuations of energy and exhaustion made available by water. Consequently, we work against and besides the dual distinction between fresh and saltwater. We conceive them as part of the same cycle, instead of following the often extractive separation between the sea and rivers or oceans and the shore. This processual, relational approach enables glimpsing oscillations of watery intensities.

Each roundtable participant will bring an example of a waterbody (fictional or “real”) that inhabits the tension between energy and exhaustion, highlighting the complexities of salty and sweet water and immersing us into a diversity of watery ways of thinking. These examples will function as a basis for a dialogical exploration of the potentialities of thinking (with) energies of water across disciplines and localities. We will also explore synergies of fictionality versus “reality” in thinking with water. As we still know so little about the watery worlds of our planet in comparison to how much we know about our terrestrial world, fictional and mysterious facets are important in lending shape to our watery thinking, enabling playfulness, looseness and fluidity.

ABSTRACT. This stream of panels began with a pandemic reading group about Gilbert Simondon’s 'Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information,' published in English translation by Taylor B. Adkins in 2020. For SLSA, we expand to the broader topic of Energy and Individuation while remaining an overall focus on Simondon’s philosophy of science and technology. 'Individuation' begins with a refusal of hylomorphism (form imposed on matter from the outside) and atomism, opting instead to rethink how individuals emerge from unstable environments of matter, energy, and information. From this beginning, Simondon studies the differences and similarities of individuation across physical, biological, and psycho-social phenomena. Central to his theoretical project is the role of energy in this process, which for him entails a critique of thermodynamics—especially the concept of entropy and its dependence on the assumption of a closed system. As we hope to show, Simondon’s work on energy and individuation is relevant to a wide range of projects in the humanities, arts, and design. The implications of his writing have already been explored by thinkers from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to Bernard Stiegler, Yuk Hui, and many others, but we hope that the English translation of Individuation will lead to renewed interest in Simondon’s work in Anglophone theory and research.

The three panels of our stream feature the complementary variation at work in current approaches to energy and individuation. In “Scaling Environmental Information,” Thomas Lamarre, Mark Hansen, and Derek Woods discuss the role of concepts of environment, milieu, scale, magnitude, potentiality, and virtuality in Simondon’s ontology, raising examples like radioactive pollution and crystallization, but staying close to the Simondon’s two major texts, 'Individuation' and 'The Mode of Existence of Technical Objects.' In "Media, Magic, and Aesthetics," Kendra Lee Sanders, Adam Nocek, and Jordan Szol look at algorithmic design, animation, and magic through the lens of Simondonian energetics. Finally, in “Ecological Economics,” Zach Yost, Burç Kostem, and Thomas Patrick Pringle study the implications of Simondon’s energetics for political ecology, thinking with examples such as the work of Turkish artist Serkan Taycan and YouTube’s recent foray into the sale of ecosystem services.

Energy and Individuation 3: Ecological Economics

Chair: Jerry Zee

Zach Yost, Metastability and Veritability: Simondon on Economics’ Thermal Vocation 

This paper reads the inheritance of thermodynamic concepts and forms within economics in light of Gilbert Simondon’s account of energy. Historically, neoclassical economics stabilized its formal language around models lifted from contemporaneous theories in the physical sciences, privileging ideals of conservation and equilibrium dynamics in closed systems. More recently, thermodynamic notions have gained resurgent purchase in the developing field of ecological economics which seeks to map matter-energy flows within social systems, with an eye towards efficient distribution of material and energetic resources for human use. Simondon’s treatment of metastable equilibrium, which considers potential transformations of system structures and energetic conditions as necessarily linked, complicates the parameterization of thermodynamic forms in economic systems presuming structural closure and stability. This paper will explore some of those implications, with a particular focus on the way entropy is often deployed as a specifically economic limit, whether rhetorically or formally. Additionally, beyond the direct relevance of these ideas for economics itself, Simondon’s notions of veritable relation and veritable analogical reasoning can help weigh the epistemological presumptions behind the deployment of such metaphors across conceptual domains. Veritable analogy seeks to identify relations between relations rather than developing a principle of identity founded upon resemblance. It problematizes the manner by which concepts such as energy and entropy might be assimilated from one domain of research to the next while preserving a stable set of formal properties and potentials. Simondon’s transductive method is offered as a more promising approach for interdisciplinary research which grasps the richness of thought that develops rapports between relations rather than inferring homologies. 

Burç Kostem, “Between Two Seas” – Propositions on Transindividuation and Degrowth

In the past decade Istanbul’s peripheries have witnessed an intensified transformation. Of late, this has been epitomized in controversial megaproject proposals, such as a 45km canal to be dredged between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara along the city’s western periphery. In this paper, I study Between Two Seas, Serkan Taycan’s walking-route/artwork that recruits collaborators on a four-day stroll on the city’s western limits along the proposed route of the new canal. Passing through abandoned lignite mines, sand pints, construction waste, as well as graveyards and garbage patches, Taycan’s map presents an encounter with the material substrates of Turkey’s fetishization of economic growth. Strolling Between Two Seas, I treat Taycan’s map as a methodological prompt with which to explore avenues of deterritorialization along aesthetic, geophysical, and political lines.

In doing so, I also stage an encounter between the philosophy of transindividuation and the literature around the concept of degrowth. Simondon’s energetics of transindividuation offers an opportunity to rethink some of the thermodynamic models that subtend degrowth. Drawing on this encounter, I argue first, that degrowth requires a general ecology, one where the peripheries of an urban ecology acts as a permeable “membrane” of the city. Second, that degrowth requires an “analogical” rather than hylomorphic knowledge of urban ecologies, one that opens up the periphery to aesthetic and political experiments. Last, that degrowth lodges itself within the margins of social reproduction to investigate affects for desiring the future otherwise.

Thomas Patrick Pringle, Streaming Capital: YouTube’s Ecosystem Service Economy and the Critique of Digital Energy Use

A 2021 YouTube campaign produced by Sheba Brand promises that by viewing advertisements online, individual users help coral restoration projects. The videos ask users to share the content, and each discrete view obligates the cat food company to donate money to assist regrowing coral reefs decimated by ocean acidification. Streaming would become practical environmentalism.

The energy intensive practices of streaming digital media have been the object of recent critique, notably advanced by Laura Marks et al. (2020). This paper builds on that research by approaching the question of digital media’s energy use from the perspective of political ecology, a field critically evaluating the ecosystem service economy as a development in neoliberal environmental economics that restores and manages the earth’s natural systems by interpreting autonomous action as financial gain. Such programs include biodiversity maintenance for industrial agriculture products or river wildlife management to secure water for bottling soft drinks.

From this view, Sheba’s corporate greenwashing signals the emergence of a media representational practise whereby the individual act of viewing on one’s computer equals the restorative energetic manipulation of a physical ecosystem. Thus, Sheba’s campaign illustrates a counterpart to the critique of the environmental toll of streaming media. Here, the user’s slacktivism goes beyond a carbon footprint as streaming suggests beneficial material intervention. Through an analysis of such streaming media, this paper shows how the critique of the energetic imbrication of physical and digital environments also sheds light on the media practices of corporations looking to exploit online environmentalism as a resource.

ABSTRACT. This roundtable, second in a series of four on "petromyopia," will center the methodological question of reading for oil, how best to approach it, how widely to look and how deep to dig, and how to trace its limits. It will be moderated by Stacey Balkan. Mark Simpson plans to turn petromyopia on its head, arguing for the continued centrality of oil and oil culture to both ecocriticism and the ongoing environmental crisis. Jeff Diamanti (University of Amsterdam, diamanti.jeff@gmail.com) will detail the horrid hegemony of oil, explaining why it requires a mode of figurative attention not entirely distinct from reading capital. Tracing the flourish of metaphors and tropes that cohere around oil as the horizon, frequency, and penumbra of modernity, he’ll examine these metaphors for strategies in order to reconcile reading capital and reading oil. Wenjia Olivia Chen will explore paranoid reading as an approach to oil novels, especially Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. Petrofiction, which is premised on the ubiquity of oil in modern life, seems to demand tracing those easily overlooked links to hydrocarbon production and consumption. She finds a productive tension in the philosophical contradiction between paranoia and myopia, between the urge to dig deep into various “literary oilfields” and demand that we cast a wider focus. Michael Tondre plans to develop this concern for the tension between surface and depth-based reading methods in a consideration of the 1871 Paris Commune and the petroleuse or female firebrand. If early petrocapitalism didn't fully obfuscate oil or repress it as an unconscious foundation for culture, then how might a return to textual surfaces yield a richer understanding of both oil and alternatives to it? And can reading for what's in plain sight serve as an anodyne to reified master models of the petro-unconscious?

ABSTRACT.  

 “Powering the Past, Future, and Everything:   

Energy Sources in Literature from Steam to Solar and Beyond.” 

Panel moderator: Lisa Yaszek (lisa.yaszek@gatech.edu) 

Panelists: Doug Davis (ddavis@gordonstate.edu); Jenni Halpin (jennihalpin@gmail.com); Lisa Yaszek (lisa.yaszek@gatech.edu) 

Over the past half century, modern people have become increasingly worried about what happens to civilization and even human life itself when we run out of fossil fuels. Such fears are central to dystopian blockbuster films and tv series ranging from The China Syndrome (1979) and Mad Max (1980) to The Cloverfield Paradox (2018) and Tribes of Europa(2021). But fiction is a big tent, and, as the members of this panel demonstrate, artists also offer audiences more complex and sometimes even more hopeful assessments of our many energy pasts as well as possible futures—especially if we learn to recognize the interrelatedness of technologically-managed energy and institutional power.  

In “Energizing Dixie: Sublime Power Sources in Southern Literature,” Doug Davis discusses how writers living in the American South have represented the sources of energy that have powered the region from slavery to the present. Davis argues that the South’s unique patterns of scientific and industrial development have conditioned a regional response to the powers that have shaped the region and its residents that he calls the ironic technological sublime. The American South has a unique history of energy, from the human chattel and wood-fired steam technology of the Old South and the cotton exports that fueled the Industrial Revolution, through the hydroelectric dams that powered the rise of the New South, to the Southern nuclear plants that armed the Cold War and energized the 21st century’s post-industrial Sprawl. Throughout his presentation, Davis will discuss how creative writers including Mark Twain, Harriet Simpson Arnow, Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, James Dickey, Bobbie Ann Mason, William Gibson, and many others have ironically represented the sources that have powered the South for the past 200 years. 

As Jenni Halpin notes in “The Unworking Soldiers: Taking the Energy from the Torture Modules in Kameron Hurley's The Light Brigade,” Kameron Hurley’s acknowledgements at the end of The Light Brigade (2019) exhort the reader to “be the light” and not “just fight the darkness” (355). This energizing structure plays off of the deployment of troops in the military SF novel via their transformation into light. Echoing the transporters of Star Trek and the drop capsules of Starship Troopers, the drops of The Light Brigade take people apart and put them back together again (usually), building combat units on the interconvertibility of matter and energy. Also as in Starship Troopers, these soldiers are explicitly meant to become a community with one another; her reading focuses on how the communal relations that do form in this novel with positive effect are, in Jean-Luc Nancy’s sense, inoperative—not formed of the energies of basic training and combat but in the time distortions of the protagonist’s misdirected deployments to combat situations out of shared chronology as well as in her efforts to defeat the trainings in how to be tortured. Through an analysis of where in the novel energy is expended in life-giving ways she plans to show The Light Brigade both as a significant redirection of the military SF tradition and as offering a different model for communal identity or commonality. 

Lisa Yaszek’s “A Brief History of Alternate Energy Futures in Black Science Fiction” maps  

a 125+ year old tradition of speculative fiction by Afrodiasporic artists across media that revisits, revises, and radically replaces the capitalist, coal- and oil-based energy futures central to so much Western scientific practice and media representation. Yaszek begins by considering how early twentieth century African American artists Pauline Hopkins and George Schuyler opposed mainstream White, Western representations of the industrial city as an environmental and economic dystopia with stories about utopian Black megacities predicated on the development of renewable energy sources and the pursuit of social justice. She then considers how contemporary science fiction artists update this tradition to respond to the explosion of Black-majority cities over the past half century and to new narratives concerning the tragedy of “White flight” and the need to re-energize “ruined” cities with slum clearance and capitalist investment. Since the 1970s, science fiction luminary Samuel Delany has drawn on his own experience as a queer black artist and intellectual from New York to create fictional and nonfictional representations of the city as a heterotopic space where diverse people use the sciences and technologies available to them to invent new identities, new communities, and new modes of art that are crucial to real urban renewal. More recently, artists including Caribbean-Canadian author Nalo Hopkinson, African American set designer Hannah Beachler, and graphic designer Olelekan Jeyifous have offered audiences visions of Black geniuses who remix African, Afrodiasporic, and Western ways of knowing the world to generate green and blue energy sources that power fantastic new cities predicated on the coincidence rather than the separation of nature and infrastructure.   

ABSTRACT. Artificial ignorance—an analytic tool for assessing AI—deploys ignorance, non-knowing, and strategic confusions. It reveals that at a technical level human and machinic faculties, material histories, and ways of knowing are inextricably entangled in AI.

For SLSA 2021, a group of potential collaborators will virtually converge to collectively re-energize the thinking on “artificial ignorance” that began at previous SLSA conferences in 2018 and 2019. After the lapse of the pandemic, the urgency to address this topic remains—in fact the pandemic has revealed that its relevance is stronger than ever. SLSA is a uniquely energizing community, so in lieu of multi-panel streams from previous years, the 2021 conference will provide an opportunity to consolidate, organize, and share our energies through two group activities.

“Artificial Ignorance” is an open roundtable. Participants will give lightning presentations about ideas generated in the "Artificial Ignorance" workshop and will primarily engage in discussion with each other and the audience.

Participant Biographies

Louise Amoore is Professor of Human Geography in the Department of Geography, Durham University, UK. She works on the politics of algorithms, the geopolitics of technology, biometric futures, and the ethics of machine learning systems. Her book, Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others (Duke University Press, 2020), examines algorithms as ethico-political entities that are entangled with the data attributes of people, and locates the ethics of algorithms in the partiality and opacity that haunt both human and algorithmic decisions. In her earlier work, including her book The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security Beyond Probability (Duke University Press, 2013), Louise traces how probability and statistical calculation are reframed through algorithmic possibilities and forms of calculation. Louise’s current research is funded by a five year ERC Advanced grant, ‘Algorithmic Societies’.

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Irina Aristarkhova is Professor at the Stamps School of Art & Design and the Digital Studies Institute of the College of Literature, Science and the Arts), at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has published widely on the intersection of gender, technology and culture. In her monographs Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine and Culture (Columbia University Press, 2012, Russian translation 2017) and Arrested Welcome: Hospitality in Contemporary Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2020, online edition at https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/arrested-welcome), Aristarkhova has developed novel feminist approaches to theories and practices of hospitality. Prior to her move to the USA in 2006, she founded and directed the Cyberarts Research Initiative at the National University of Singapore.

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Neda Atanasoski is Professor and Chair of the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (co-authored with Kalindi Vora, Duke University Press, 2019). She is also the co-editor of a 2017 special issue of the journal Social Identities, titled “Postsocialist Politics and the Ends of Revolution.” Atanasoski has published articles on gender and religion, nationalism and war, human rights and humanitarianism, and race and technology, which have appeared in journals such as American Quarterly, Cinema Journal, Catalyst, and The European Journal of Cultural Studies. She is currently the co-editor of the journal Critical Ethnic Studies. Previously, Atanasoski was Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and the founding co-Director of the Center for Racial Justice at The University of California at Santa Cruz.

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Katherine Behar is an interdisciplinary artist and critical theorist of new media whose work explores gender, race, and labor in contemporary digital culture. Associate Professor of New Media Arts at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, she is known for artworks that mix low and high technologies to create hybrid forms that are by turns humorous and sensuous. A comprehensive survey exhibition Katherine Behar: Data's Entry | Veri Girişi was presented by Pera Museum in 2016. Behar is the editor of Object-Oriented Feminism (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), coeditor with Emmy Mikelson of And Another Thing: Nonanthropocentrism and Art (punctum, 2016), and author of Bigger than You: Big Data and Obesity (punctum, 2016). Her exhibition catalogs include Data's Entry (Pera Museum, 2016) and E-Waste (Tuska Center for Contemporary Art, 2014). Her writing has been translated into Turkish, Portuguese, Russian, Lithuanian, and Spanish. Her current project, Indispensable, meditates on the essential work of automatic hand sanitizer dispensers.

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Simone Browne is Associate Professor of Black Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently writing her second book manuscript, Like the Mixture of Charcoal and Darkness, which examines the interventions made by artists whose works grapple with the surveillance of Black life, from policing, privacy, smart dust and the FBI’s COINTELPRO to encryption, electronic waste and artificial intelligence. Together, these essays explore the productive possibilities of creative innovation when it comes to troubling surveillance and its various tactics, and imagining Black life beyond the surveillance state. Simone is the author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness.

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Patricia Ticineto Clough is a professor emerita of sociology and women studies at City University of New York. She is the author of a number of publications about technology, psychoanalysis and subjectivity, most recently The User Unconscious: Affect, Media and Measure. She is a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City where she also teaches at National Institute for the Psychotherapies and the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy where she also is a member of the Training Committee and the Diversity Task Force.

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M. Beatrice Fazi is Lecturer in Digital Humanities in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom. Her research focuses on the ontologies and epistemologies produced by contemporary technoscience, particularly in relation to issues in artificial intelligence and computation and to their impact on culture and society. She has published extensively on the limits and potentialities of the computational method, on digital aesthetics and on the automation of thought. Her monograph Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics was published by Rowman & Littlefield International in 2018.

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Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programmer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, he is author most recently of the book "Uncomputable" forthcoming in Fall 2021 from Verso.

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Dr Sarah Hayden is a writer and Associate Professor of Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Southampton. She is the author of Curious Disciplines: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood (University of New Mexico Press, 2018), and co-author with Paul Hegarty, of Peter Roehr–Field Pulsations (Snoeck, 2018). Recent publications include essays on voiced writing in art for Cultural Politics, Holt/Smithson Foundation, LUX, b2o: boundary2 online, and a trio of experimental lectures for SpamPlaza. In 2019 and 2021, she was awarded Arts and Humanities Research Council Innovation Fellowships to lead “Voices in the Gallery”: a four-year research, curating, commissioning and writing project, held in conjunction with Nottingham Contemporary and John Hansard Gallery. Sarah is currently writing a book about voice in art.

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N. Katherine Hayles is the Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the James B. Duke Professor Emerita from Duke University. Her research focuses on the relations of literature, science and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her twelve print books include Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational (Columbia, 2021), Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2017) and How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Univ. of Chicago Press 2015), in addition to over 100 peer-reviewed articles. Her books have won several prizes, including The Rene Wellek Award for the Best Book in Literary Theory for How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Literature, Cybernetics and Informatics, and the Suzanne Langer Award for Writing Machines. She has been recognized by many fellowships and awards, including two NEH Fellowships, a Guggenheim, a Rockefeller Residential Fellowship at Bellagio, and two University of California Presidential Research Fellowships. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is currently at work on Technosymbiosis: Futures of the Human.

• hannah holtzclaw is a Ph.D. student in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University and a graduate researcher to the Digital Democracies Institute. Their work probes the intersection of critical data studies and design, decolonial experimentation, and imaginative methods. Their MA thesis, concerned with the relationship between form and content, studied the space in between processes and people of enactment. Exploring ‘interface’ as the space between self and screen; identity and being, they utilized fiction and poetics as methods for unraveling the potential worlding practices of interface when anchored in decolonial and nonbinary thought and commitments. Their current Ph.D. research explores the relationship between socio-technic systems, complex cultural conflict, and relational entanglement. It investigates the imaginative as a co-creative commons we inhabit and asks: how can engagement with this libidinal, transindividual realm alter the ways with which causality and information are exchanged to shift us away from designed associations to objects and images as well as technologies of control and extraction? How can critical imaginaries support the unlearning of these associations and habits (in both machines and culture) and turn us toward different forms of learning, inhabiting and relationality? •

Tung-Hui Hu is a poet and media scholar at the University of Michigan. He is the author of five books, most recently A Prehistory of the Cloud (2015) and Digital Lethargy (forthcoming from MIT Press), an exploration of burnout, isolation, and disempowerment in the digital underclass.

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Shaka McGlotten is Professor of Media Studies and Anthropology at Purchase College-SUNY, where they also serve as Chair of the Gender Studies and Global Black Studies programs. An anthropologist and artist, their work stages encounters between black study, queer theory, media, and art. They have written and lectured widely on networked intimacies and messy computational entanglements as they interface with qtpoc lifeworlds. They are the author of Dragging: Or, in the Drag of a Queer Life (Routledge, 2021) and Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality (SUNY, 2013). They are also the co-editor of two edited collections, Black Genders and Sexualities (with Dana-ain Davis, Palgrave, 2012) and Zombies and Sexuality (with Steve Jones, McFarland, 2014). Their work has been supported by Data & Society, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Akademie Schloss Solitude, and Creative Capital | The Andy Warhol Foundation.

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Jennifer Rhee is an associate professor in the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is also affiliated faculty in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and the Media, Art, and Text PhD Program. She has written about race, gender, and labor in robotics and artificial intelligence technologies, literature, and art in numerous articles and in her book The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor (University of Minnesota Press). She is also co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, which was edited by a group of scholars working under the name The Triangle Collective.

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Christian Sandvig is the H. Marshall McLuhan Collegiate Professor of Digital Media at the University of Michigan, where he teaches in both Information, Communication, and Media. He is also the Director of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC).

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R. Joshua Scannell is Assistant Professor of Digital Media Theory at The New School’s School of Media Studies. His research exists at the intersection of Critical Carceral Studies and Digital Media Theory. He has been published by Duke University Press, University of Minnesota Press, Routledge, and others.

ABSTRACT. This roundtable, the third in a series of proposed roundtables on "petromyopia," seeks to refocus the critique of petromyopia, examining what it offers as a lens onto the state of energy humanities today to the way petromyopia might be seen to diagnose the late-stage of petroleum policy. Mark Simpson will moderate. Jeffrey Insko will repurpose Jones’s “petromyopia" as a way of thinking about the shortsightedness of petroculture, a failure of imagination that is a persistent feature in debates over the future of fossil fuel infrastructure. As a case study of this myopia, he offers China Mievelle’s inventive, haunting story “Covehithe,” where infrastructural ruins (sunken oil rigs) are, literally, reanimated and reborn from the sea. Mónica Mohseni will examine how the acceptance of Petromyopia in the west — or rather the move away from oil as both a source of energy and revenue — speaks to the "energy unconscious" fostered throughout the twentieth century in "developing" countries. Countries like Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela, in light of the seemingly global shift away from oil, have drilled down on oil as a source of infrastructural and industrial progress, as demonstrated by heavy-handed media campaigns of Exxon and Chevron, underlining the pitfalls of unjust energy transitions. Graeme Macdonald will ask a series of questions about “petromyopia” centered on the way the energy humanities, both orbits around a central concern for oil and petroculture and depends on specific institutional capitals and scholarly constituencies: is it the case that other agencies, formations, and events might, or have already, constituted and 'challenged' petroculture's 'myopia' as the field develops? What is the field’s relation to wider frames of concern (expanded energo-cultural geographies, climate consciousness, political developments)? Is displacement something intrinsic to petroculture? And did it, in fact, always aim to widen antennae and open ground for the study of other energy forms and modes, thereby relativising the production of the energy humanities?

ABSTRACT. This Art Lounge session is cross-listed as part of SloMoCo—the 2021 MOCO unconference —asking our movement + computing communities to co-design the annual convening by approaching telematic engagement as a feature (and not a bug). 

The conversation on LIVING CODE & SHARING ABUNDANCE launched this summer through a seminar directed by Thomas F. DeFrantz, presentations by SloMoCo microresidents, and performances of practice works. For SLSA, we assemble to discuss how advances in human-computer interaction are being supported by multidisciplinary collaboratives within and beyond institutional spaces. Panelists share research, experience, and resources.

 “Our robots are too specialized, too impoverished in their sensing, too uncooperative and too unsafe to be productive at scale.” This excerpt from a 2020 grant proposal by Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze and co-researchers provides a humorous and insightful glimpse into the capacity challenges for the movement and computing field. Even high profile projects must compete for research dollars, but what expectations are tied to those investments? Further, how is that sense of scarcity influencing outcomes? Beyond simply getting a project off the ground, artists and developers must consider issues of privacy, safety, security, and equity.

We approach these topics from an abundance mindset by championing what is working and what is possible. Panelists detail how research centers and funders are thoughtfully supporting creatives. Those embracing distributed power structures offer guidance for institutions looking to adopt similar models. We gather in the spirit of mutual aid, fostering emergent strategies.

ABSTRACT. Life Touching Life is an experimental video series about multispecies relationships. It takes the form of an animated talk show hosted by a fantastical creature from the far future. Interview segments with scientists, anthropologists, creatives, and everyday people from various disciplines are intercut with digital animation sequences that find magic in related themes.

The episode that will premiere in the Arts Lounge during SLSA is themed by human/non-human boundaries in civilizations and the grids that we project onto the environment and its creatures. Animated interviews include: Erika Dane Kielsgard, a poet and insect breeder shares experiences from mantis caretaking and scholar Phillip Thurtle shares excerpts from his book “Biology in the Grid”.

The video screening will run 15-20 minutes and a Q+A session will follow between myself and scholars Phillip Thurtle, Nat Mengist, and Ang Sakrison. Introductions will be made by writer Mira Petrillo. Attendees will be encouraged to ask questions and contribute to the discussion.

At its core, Life Touching Life is an exercise in collaborative utopian thinking, one that posits a world where human supremacist violence has been eradicated, ecosystems are preserved, and non-hierarchical relationships with Earth’s living beings are the new norm. Yet the project is not merely a projective fiction; through screenings and exhibitions, I hope to amplify the voices that are actively reimaging future ecologies today. A video series offers the ideal format for fostering this kind of ecological discourse, and for disseminating it to the widest possible audience.

AWEsome Group http://awe.someother.space/

Life Touching Life Clip https://vimeo.com/499056597

@life_touching_life

ABSTRACT.  

NOTE: This is the second roundtable in the stream "Science in Society Under the Literary Microscope*." The first is "Disciplinary Synergies: Science in Society and the Contemporary Science Novel," Thursday, Session 3F, 11:00-12:30 EDT

Scholar and writer Laura Otis will lead a discussion with four accomplished novelists who write realistic, character-driven fiction about science. They’ll compare their inspirations and motivations, and describe doing the research for their science novels and how it differs from the research they’ve done for other novels. They will consider the unique challenges of writing such books: How do they create empathy for particularly nerdy scientist characters? Does the unfamiliarity of the scientific content influence their choices of narrative point of view? How do they construct plots that are comprised of both intellectual and emotional events? What different sorts of challenges do different fields of science present?

One of the attractions of realistic science novels is that they allow readers to experience and appreciate unfamiliar fields of scientific study. And yet, people read and value novels for their fictional stories, characters, and aesthetics. How do novelists negotiate this conundrum? In what ways do they fictionalize the science to fit their stories, and how do they rationalize this within the novels’ realistic framing? How do they create the narrative energy of their stories using abstruse scientific concepts and practices—and teach readers what they need to know to understand the story from within the story, without being didactic or condescending?

Audience members will be invited to add their own questions during the discussion.

The Novelists: Susan M. Gaines, Catherine Bush, Edward Schwarzschild, Chrissy Kolaya

Chair: Laura Otis

*The roundtables in this thematic stream were organized by the Fiction Meets Science program to celebrate the release of the volume of essays, Under the Literary Microscope: Science and Society in the Contemporary Novel and the science novels Accidentals and Blaze Island.

ABSTRACT. Nuclear energy is one of the primary means by which colonialism has been manifested and maintained since 1945. The intertwined programs of nuclear weapons and nuclear power rely on processes of mining, testing, and waste disposal that take place on Indigenous land across the globe, dispossessing Native people of their land and lifeways and leaving devastating legacies of environmental and bodily ruination in their wake. This panel investigates both the scientific approaches of the global nuclear complex that occupies and destroys Indigenous lands and how Indigenous writers and artists in various sites have used art and literature to theorize what decolonization might look like within a specifically nuclear context. The lens of nuclear energy reveals the limits of traditional definitions of decolonization, as political and even territorial independence remains bound within the environmental realities of ongoing radioactive energy emission. How can we conceptualize the decolonization of irradiated lands, waters, and bodies, which remain occupied by radiation long after the colonial powers have “left”? In this panel, four scholars working at the intersection of STS, Indigenous studies, and the energy humanities draw on their work in the U.S. Southwest, the Marshall Islands, French Occupied Polynesia, and Kazakhstan to consider this question. Bringing together a wide range of artworks by Indigenous artists, from novels and poems to films and video installations, the panel explores the histories and futures of nuclear energy and highlights how Indigenous artists have sought to decolonize their own futures in the face of a seemingly permanent occupation.

ABSTRACT. This social networking event is hosted by Ruth Robbins and Susan Watkins, editors of University of Wales Press Intersections in Literature and Science series. Robbins and Watkins are both professors in Literature Women’s Writing at Leeds Beckett University, UK. This event will: (a) Introduce the series and discuss plans for future development and volumes (b) Share our own current research. Topics we will introduce and invite comment on include: 1. Women’s energy then … Women’s biological energy has long been a source of debate. In the nineteenth century, as doctors professionalised and became ‘experts’, especially about women’s reproductive cycles, puberty and the menopause, all of which they defined as ‘energy-sapping’ events. Science and culture came together in an unholy alliance, the effects of which can still be seen in the ways in which women, their bodies and their energies, biological and creative, are still discussed, defined and regulated. 2. The dying body? Cancer memoirs. The cancers that affect women produce personal writings in which reproductive energy is one of the losses that those living with cancer often suffer. This is sometimes the result of inclination (the energy for sex is one of the first things to go under treatments such as chemotherapy, or after radical alterations to the body after surgery). It is also a key side effect of radiation treatment after which many women are infertile. If one of the core values attached to femininity is reproductive energy, what kinds of alternative energies can female survivors imagine? And what of those who will not survive? 3. Women’s Energies now: Contemporary apocalyptic fictions – sources of energy (their extraction, depletion, abundance, and exhaustion How do writers in this genre represent the crisis in the petrochemical industry and the end of fossil fuels and extractive technologies? What alternatives, if any, are offered in these fictions? 4. Reproductive dystopias and speculative fictions of ageing – how energy is connected to power, science, and profit, history and war, flesh and labour What does the popularity of contemporary reproductive dystopias tell us about the use of the energies of the maternal body and the work/ labour of mothering and reproductive futurism (Edel) (‘I believe that children are the future’). How do speculative fictions about ageing require us to rethink our assumptions about the future and reassign social value (= energy) to the older person rather than the child? Why are children and older people and their values and energies often set in opposition to each other? 5. Creative Ageing – energy (etymologically meaning “in or at work, working”) connects us to the most pressing issues of the day: mental and physical vitality or fatigue (individual and collective, personal and political, creative and professional) How do we retain the creative energy of women cultural practitioners as they become older and grapple with a host of exclusionary practices around workforce allocation and assumptions about audience demographics as these intersect with cultural attitudes around women’s aging to impact on their career opportunities?

ABSTRACT. This roundtable is inspired by and expands on transmedia artist and educator Stephanie Dinkins manifesto of “Afro-now-ism: The Unencumbered Black Mind is a Well Spring of Possibility” where she envisions new ways of operating and dismantling the systems of oppression that has been pushing down on BIPOC communities and LGBTQ+ people for generations. The pandemic laid bare the deep roots of racial health disparities and violence embedded within the very institutions that were built to care for, educate and uplift the people. While inventions in technology and science have accelerated tremendously, they have continued to perpetuate and exacerbate the embedded biases that continue to dehumanize, marginalize the subaltern, leaving them voiceless and gasping for breath in the 21st Century. In the depths of the difficult months following the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery in the summer of 2020 Dinkins channeled energy from her ancestors - mothers and grandmothers as she conceived of Afro-now-ism and wrote, “The question is not only what injustices are you fighting against, but what do you in your heart of hearts want to create? This is a pointed question for black folks but includes the rest of society as well. Our fates, whether we like it or not, acknowledge it or not, are intermingled. Though it is not immediately legible, we sink or swim together. Still, at times, communities need space and time to build, grow and fortify apart from the whole. That’s OK as long as communities find paths to understanding in a kind of complex Venn diagram of trust from which to negotiate our shared futures.” This discussion brings together leading artist-thinkers from diverse BIPOC communities and subjectivities to share their strategies and research that upends inequitable distribution of power and resources in the socio-cultural, political and technological systems and institutions. Their work envisions and foster ecologies of AI and smart technologies that are equitable, transparent, and mutually beneficial.

BIOGRAPHIES:

Stephanie Dinkins is a transmedia artist who creates platforms for dialog about race, gender, aging and out future histories. Dinkins is a professor at Stonybrook University where she is a Kusama Endowed Professor of Art.

Jason Edward Lewis is a digital media theorist, poet, and software designer. He is the University Research Chair in Computational Media and the Indigenous Future Imaginary as well as Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University, Montreal.

Mimi Ọnụọha is a Nigerian-American artist and researcher whose work highlights the social relationships and power dynamics behind data collection.Ọnụọha earned her MPS from NYU Tisch’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Morehshin Allahyari is an artist, activist, writer, and educator. She was born and raised in Iran and moved to the United States in 2007. She thinks about technology as a philosophical toolset to reflect on objects and as a poetic means to document our personal and collective lives and struggles in the 21st century.

Srimoyee Mitra is a curator and writer. She is the Director of Stamps Gallery, Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design, University of Michigan.

ABSTRACT. This panel thinks about the energies invested and expended in DeepFake phenomena: the embodied, cognitive, emotional, inventive, and other energies associated with creating and consuming machine-learning enabled media (video, text, etc.) that simulate human expression, re-create dead persons, or place living people into fake situations. Drawing on resources from phenomenology, psychoanalysis, media theory, and computational exploration, panelists trace the ways that the generative energies at the heart of these AI-powered media transform subjective and collective experiences, with significant consequences for gender, race, and other determinants of political existence in the age of DeepFakes.

ABSTRACT. This networking event explores the potential of art-science collaborations as one strategy to democratize science through the example of Artists with Evidence (AwE), a new non-profit seeking to facilitate Art-Science collaborations to address the crisis of this Anthropocene moment. This panel will explore aspects of the philosophy, formation, and current work conducted by this advocacy group as a form of deliberative engagement described by Bucchi and Trench. This networking panel will include panelists discussing the history of AwE originating from the sciences and the results of AwE’s initial library and art and climate science library project. Moreover, this event will host a conversation about launching new organizations with science and art goals and open-up a discussion on how to democratize public engagement through Art-Science.

In line with Horst and Davies, we consider how AwE can foster Art-Science collaborations as a novel pathway towards public engagement and the co-production of knowledge. More broadly, this panel will consider how artists and their allied organizations can facilitate discovery and innovation by connecting artists and scientists to create new ideas and works not otherwise possible. Art-science is a type of an event, per Horst, a space of novel engagement between the arts, sciences and the public. Thinking through Born and Barry, AwE brings the democratic process into the task of conceiving of and responding to environmental questions that are socially motivated, not just ‘opening-up’ the science itself but instead, reconceptualizing how knowledge is formed and scientific knowledge is communicated.

We will examine how AwE creates a platform for aesthetic and affective environments to inform the possibility of scientific practice. Informed by Calvert and Schyfter we ask how employing the use of imagination and creativity can create new framings and conceptualizations of environmental issues at hand. Panelists will consider the case of AwE as one strategy towards the creation of new forms of transdisciplinary insight, redefining the objects and practices of knowledge production itself to better address the urgency of the Anthrocene. Dr. Law will describe the origins of AwE from scientists and policy-makers seeking to make Science more accountable, publicly transparent and socially responsible amidst growing anti-science and anti-evidence sentiments. Law will consider how AwE assists in creating a societal consensus behind the rapid action necessary to solve and mitigate urgent planetary problems through employing various approaches including sponsoring artist residencies within science labs, field stations or research groups; working with curators of art-science exhibitions; commissioning works from musicians, literary and performing artists on art-science projects. Scott Johnson will introduce AwE’s robust gallery, which represents nineteen artists, including Kim Stanley Robinson and Erwin Redl among others, and AwE’s performance projects including pieces by Choreographer Jody Sperling and composer Matthew Burtner, Marie-Luce Nadal and Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. Johnson will also present on AwE’s exhibition space, AnthroARTscene, recently curated by Jia Jia and Gustavo Arroníz. Finally, Tamar Law will present on the mission of AwE’s newly launched Art-Science library which facilitates artists, scholars and the public to delve deeper into the methodologies and practices of Art-Science.

ABSTRACT. We are excited about epigenetics and biomedicine in literature, culture and science. Our roundtable, The Energies of Epigenetics, will be a discussion of the ways literature, art and culture harness the concept of epigenetics to propel form, aesthetics and politics. We want to have a lively roundtable to share our latest work and to continue our community and share the current work among interdisciplinary group of colleagues.

Roundtable members: Michelle Nancy Huang, Nat Mengist, Irina Aristarkhova, Faith Wilding and Hyla Willis

ABSTRACT. What is energy? Across fields, researchers confront the shortcomings of human language when they try to define energy. Even mathematical attempts to characterize systems may neglect factors that are or can quickly become significant. Human sensory systems can transduce only a narrow range of the world’s energy forms, and energy undetectable by human sensory organs unaided by technology can be hard to describe. Inspired by physical chemistry research on neglected energy terms in light-matter interactions, this panel will focus on factors omitted from studies that analyze energy states. More generally, the panelists will analyze human attempts to describe energy in language, including through the multi-modal sense of touch.

ABSTRACT. “When's the last time you listened to a chicken? How about a shrimp? A snail? A coyote? Listen, we all bleed,” writes Mandy-Suzanne Wong, “is about artists who do exactly that . . . record[ing] nonhuman-animal voices and turn[ing] their recordings into beautiful and devastating art because they believe that listening is a vital kind of activism.” We propose an interdisciplinary discussion of the literary essays in Listen, we all bleed from the perspectives of activist artmaking, exhibition curating, and creative writing, including a reading from the collection by its author. Sound is physical energy, is movement and weird matter with a strange kind of thingness. We’ll discuss how, in the radical artworks from around the world which Wong encounters in Listen, we all bleed, sonic energy becomes affect which may become activist energy: empathy, outrage, the urge to do something, in this case on behalf of living nonhuman beings whom humans reduce to edible and entertaining resources. “You can’t look away from sound. Sound invades your body with the touch of a stranger,” Wong writes. “Being struck by a strange cry implodes time and space, entangling my body, my history, with the cry itself, the entity who cries, and the mediators between us.” The participants will discuss how activist artists unearth within themselves the energy to overcome capitalist ideologies and to discover ways in which to mediate nonhuman voices without treating them reductively. We will discuss challenges of curating art installations that roar, bleat, and cluck—and of finding the energy to do so in a pandemic, the root cause of which was nonhuman trafficking. For even listening requires energy. Listening is an effortful attempt to become vulnerable to others’ voices, feelings, situations. Most humans find listening more difficult than screaming. As Wong puts it: “Really listening is an effort. Really listening means being quiet and not tuning out, disattending from your own hang-ups to attend to the sound you’re hearing . . . Taking the time to make the effort to pay attention is the first step in acknowledging that somebody might need you. It takes effort to let their plight interrupt your private telenovela. [Wong] hopes listening to art will encourage us to want to make that effort, the effort to want to be interrupted.” Through Listen, we all bleed, our art lounge will explore how artmaking, film, fine art, creative writing, can be forms of listening, ways of undertaking the work of listening. The essays in Listen, we all bleed are Wong’s attempt to use her instincts as a novelist to find creative, critical ways of listening to artists’ representations of nonhuman beings. For Wong, listening and storymaking are both about self-estrangement through imagination, openness to possibility, and attunement to the emotional complexities of others, including other species so different from ourselves that we may never meet them face to face. Advance copies of Listen, we all bleed will be available for purchase in time for the SLSA conference.

ABSTRACT. This panel explores the weird temporalities that are performed in and as computation, both materially and metaphorically. Materially, this is observable in the spatialization of processual information into discrete binary symbols that themselves make perceptible—in time—scales of action that were previously only diagrammed. Metaphorically, dynamic global interactivity is at once spatialized in the now standard network form of nodes and edges and reflected in these terms. More than just a site, though, computation also performs this entangled engagement in ways that cannot be linearly traced to their origins. Simply put, if we take computation seriously as an active force, it has to be analyzed in its aesthetic dimension. From this perspective there is something inarticulably strange that operates outside the deterministic causal frameworks that are typically attributed to computers. In different ways, papers in this panel profile these articulations, asking after the social, political, and aesthetic expressions that are brought together in the weird spatiotemporalities of computation. In short, contemporary technoculture—whatever it might be—is inseparable from the dynamics of computation, which are themselves always also something other than what they might appear.

ABSTRACT. This roundtable, fourth in a series of four on "petromyopis," will ask what comes after petroculture and petromyopia, from the perspective of the methods, objects, and institutions of the energy humanities. It will be moderated by Jeffrey Insko. Mark Simpson plans to turn petromyopia on its head, arguing for the continued centrality of oil and oil culture to both ecocriticism and the ongoing environmental crisis. Jennifer Wenzel will take up the institutional questions raised by the previous roundtable by considering conditions of possibility, urgency, necessity, and complicity in the emergence of energy humanities initiatives. The major institutional sites of energy humanities research are centered in geographic sites important to the energy industry: e.g. the Petrocultures Research Group at the University of Alberta, and CENHS at Rice University in Houston. This map of the energy humanities raises questions not only of geographic proximity and civic responsibility, but the realities of university finances and relationships to industry. Another point on this map is West Virginia University Press, whose energy humanities focus offers a coal country counterexample that proves the rule of a relationship between sites of industry and scholarly infrastructures. Looking back at Jones’ survey of the field, published in 2016, she will reflect on how different this landscape looked by 2017, with the election of Trump and the publication of texts looking beyond oil, such as Fueling Culture and Energy Humanities: An Anthology. Stacey Balkan will discuss the pitfalls of an unjust transition to solar capitalism (and like approaches to renewables that repeat the sins of the past), and the ways in which the very term "petromyopia" seems to reinforce a problematic relationship to/with energy infrastructures taking Ganzeer's Solar Grid as an instructive example. And Devin Griffiths plans to take up the question of the energy unconscious, asking whether Jameson's formulation, insofar as it embeds the problem of Marxist aesthetics and organic totality, provides an adequate framework for thinking about the unevenness of energy regimes and cultural production. Instead, he will ask whether the energy humanities needs to address itself to varieties of energy consciousness, particularly, as it seeks to attend to perspectives beyond the petro-privileged North, especially, Indigenous knowledges and the artist activism that, in some accounts, undergirds the environmentalism of the poor.

ABSTRACT. “The work of art is invaluable in so far as it is vibrated by the reflexes of the future.”—Andre Breton

A two-session series of five-minute presentations of twenty slides each (Pecha Kucha format).

In the spirit of Fluxus – Past, Present, and Future – art historians, critics and artists will perform timed presentations on Fluxus, a transnational, transdisciplinary, and transtemporal movement/nonmovement.

Fluxus works are ephemeral, experiential, random, mindful, performative, celebratory, socialist, democratic, anarchic, communitarian, and anti-commodity.

We seek presentations that succinctly yet vigorously question, undermine, or support varied perspectives on what for some is innately undefinable and undermining in itself, with its Fluxian confounding of curatorial categorization. Others demand legibility to justify its relevance.

How is Fluxus invaluable for the future - culturally, politically, or spiritually? What in Fluxus calls out to be resuscitated and/or reanimated? What institutional forces seek to stabilize (and control) the fate and ongoing social efficacy of Fluxus works and the many approaches of associated artists? How does colonizing the past sway the future?

Does Fluxus’s mix of randomness and systems prefigure the internet? Did past Fluxus practices and participants anticipate or fail our future of inclusion? What routes exist between Fluxus’ past methods and ideologies and future social justice? In what ways did Fluxus practices and theories exist within male/female/trans/genderfuid modalities? How did Fluxians respond or not respond to the crises of their times, and how might future Fluxians respond to theirs?

What Fluxian Futures are imaginable?

ABSTRACT. Computational literature -- including bookbound and bookish digital artifacts -- are some of the earliest forms of electronic literature and represent a contemporary thread of practice in print-on-demand and small press imprints publishing computer-generated literature. Authors continue to find new audiences and contexts for computational literature. Books are an interface that invites situated reading practices and evokes aesthetics connected to literary genres developed for the print tradition. Reading on screens also creates different expectations and practices, and digital ephemerality has long been considered both a key characteristic and perennial problem for electronic literature. Signifiers flicker on screens, but computational literature can also find form in the durable specificity of print and near-print artifacts. The aim of this panel is to bring more scholarly focus to bear on literature with programmatic origins that does not depend on an electronic screen as its interface. This panel will present four case studies of computational literature ranging from 1677 to the present that will unpack some of the motivations behind producing literary texts using algorithms and some of the interest in reading computational literature in print. Leah Henrickson will examine the social contexts for John Peter’s Artificial Versifying (1677), a system for codifying algorithms for generating verse, and the technological hype that drove its reception. James Ryan will present an account of Svensk Namnbok 1964 (1964), a book of computer-generated surnames commissioned by the Swedish government in the early 1960s to address a national crisis in the lack of surname variety. This, along with the case of a 1957 Pfizer book of computer-generated drug names, shows the power of computational literature as an (oftentimes practical) aid to creativity. Zach Whalen will offer a close reading of Energy Crisis Poems (1974), a small collection of poetry generated on an IBM S370/158 computer at the Standard Oil Data Center by the Cleveland-based poet, r.j.s. (Robert J. Sigmund) in 1974, offering a fitting counterpoint to the energy-intensive processing used in training contemporary AI engines used for text generation. Leonardo Flores will examine Ranjit Bhatnagar’s Encomials: Sonnets from Pentametron (2018) from the perspective of three waves of digital literature, examining the platforms they use, the audiences they cultivate, and the reading experiences they encourage. Focusing on print-bound computational literature offers an opportunity to consider specific audiences, social contexts, and medially-specific interventions for creative computing. By examining related works across distant time periods, contemporary aesthetic practices and concepts around computational literature come into sharper view, and the closely-themed papers assembled into this panel represent an emerging field of interest in the study of digital literature.

ABSTRACT. As a group, AWEsome is interested in new forms of experimental, collaborative scholarship. When the pandemic hit, we asked each other: what are the social forms appropriate to pandemics, and what types of knowledge production practices might be protocoled in the void of zoomspace? And if we are all out of energy, how might we curate events that build upon the spirit of collective action? What arised was a consensual interest in delight-based scholarship and an idea to host a Riff-Along. This event marks the second iteration of The Riff-Along, a format we've been experimenting with where a team of multidisciplinary scholars descend upon terrible movies and take them stupidly serious in an effort to engender new forms of collaborative scholarship. We focus on films that are "bad" in an exercise in resisting judgement, and use them as raw material for impromptu media and cultural analysis. Like Isabell Stengers’ convocation, the Riff offers a space to build thoughts together as an ensemble as we riff-along, riff-with, riff-against, riff-towards, and riff-beyond movies. In its playful and creative exterior, we propose that the riff-along is not only a welcoming and generative mode of social knowledge production, but perhaps a portal into the process of iteration itself. From its roots in the Black jazz tradition, the riff is a mode of response that does not drown out, but amplifies ambiguous harmonies. We invite you to join us as we arch towards delight-based scholarship in this Riff-Along to the 2014 cyberhorror screen-capture film Unfriended, which prophetically takes place in an online group chat. Joining us as a special guest is interdisciplinary media scholar Andrew Culp, author of Dark Deleuze with work on cyberhorror, cybernetics, connectivity, process, and politics. For more on AWEsome, visit http://awe.someother.space/.