::fibreculture:: cfp: the culture of the artifical

[nathaniel tkacz]

Please, circulate widely

Call for Papers:

The Culture of the Artificial symposium, at AISB-­‐50, Goldsmiths,
London, 1-­‐4 April 2014


As part of the AISB-­‐50 Annual Convention 2014 to be held at
Goldsmiths, University of London, on April 1st-4th 2014
http://aisb50.org/



The convention is organised by the Society for the Study of Artificial
Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB)
http://www.aisb.org.uk/



Overview

In 1964, when AISB was founded, computing was largely associated with
the repetitive operations of the large mainframe machines employed by
the military, by industry and by space programmes. Alan Turing, who
had died prematurely just a decade before, had formalised the notion
of what it means to compute in his seminal work of 1936, and in 1950
he had speculated again as to the association between computation and
mental operations. Yet in 1964, the mechanisation of computation
through digital means was generally only familiar to the scientist,
the businessman and the maverick. Today, by contrast - half a century
later - much has changed: from taking a phone call or a picture, from
shipping goods to organising labour, without risk of exaggeration one
could say that few activities in the contemporary world can evade the
computational altogether. To all intents and purposes, we live in a
computational culture, many of the principles and possibilities of
which were established and reinforced in those mid-century
explorations from which the AISB originated.



In this symposium we take computational culture as our topic and
object of enquiry. We argue for the existence of a specific ‘culture
of the artificial’, to paraphrase Herbert Simon’s expression, and
contend that its foundations, limits and potentials can be best
approached and analysed only if this artificiality is granted the
possibility not just of imitating, amplifying or speeding up the
cultural, the societal, and the economic but of producing them in its
own terms, times and modes. The Culture of the Artificial symposium
will therefore bring together cultural theorists, philosophers,
scientists, mathematicians and practitioners to investigate how
computational artificiality and algorithmic simulation are not simply
passive markers of 21st century culture, but amongst its most active
players and decision-makers. For this symposium we invite
contributions that engage with the theoretical and historical
foundations and implications of this scenario, and possibly help to
define strategies and methodologies for understanding its future
developments.



This event thus aims to move beyond general arguments about the
rapidity and power of the information society, about the distribution
of computational technology or about the commercialization of the
Internet (factors that have, for material as much as ideological
reasons, certainly contributed to the establishment of computational
culture as such). Similarly, we want to move beyond some of the
traditional critiques of the artificial and of the simulated that have
been perpetuated, at various points, by cultural theory.
‘Cyberculture’, ‘digital media’, ‘information revolution’ are familiar
cultural tropes, synecdoches for something more significant;
computation was a component part of all of them, but now needs to be
studied in its own peculiarity and distinctiveness. Making this claim
of course does not equate to advocating a naïve embrace of the
rationalization and quantification of life and society, but actually
asks us to be even more attentive to and critical towards the detail
and operation of such dynamics.



The event is organized in the context of the Society for the Study of
Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour annual convention
due to two main motives. On the one hand, we argue for historical and
conceptual resonances between the emerging condition of a
computational culture and the development of the AI programme: the
former arguably stemmed from the contingencies and formalisms that the
latter initiated or participated in.  Equally, the condition of
computational culture shares much of the hopes, fears, sensibilities
and practicalities of the broad AI field and its historical
precedents.  Software studies approaches drawing on computing, media
and cultural theory, philosophy, art, science and technology studies
are means of attending to these resonances.

Our second motive is more methodological: computational culture is a
culture where notions of the artificial and the natural blur, where
science and the humanities converse, where the empirical and the
formal clash, but in which each needs and tangles with the other.
Equally, computation produces fully-fledged ontologies and
epistemologies, many of which originated in primarily technical
contexts but are now active as and with cultural forms in their own
right.  This condition creates a novel context for the understanding
of forms of intelligence and behaviour and for the development of new
research programmes operating in a fully inter-disciplinary or
post-disciplinary manner.





Topics of Interest

We welcome submissions from various fields of expertise and areas of
research related to the rationale of this event. Topics include, but
are definitely not limited to:



- Software Studies analyses of historical artificial intelligence and
simulated behaviour artefacts;

- Critical and philosophical analyses of the legacy and achievements
of Alan Turing in relation to culture;

- Developments in modes of collaboration and mutual problematisation
between cultural theory and artificial intelligence and robotics (such
as for instance the “Critical Technical Practice” proposed by Philip
Agre);

- Artificiality and simulation as modes of speculative culture;

-The cultural and political conditions of the pursuit of AI agendas in
the generalization of computational forms of life;

- Speculative possibilities for a theoretical and practical
exploration of what intelligence is or might be said to be in relation
to the computational turn in culture.



Submission and Publication Details

Submissions must be full papers and should be sent to:
cultureoftheartificialATgmail.com



Text editor templates from a previous convention can be found at:

http://www.aisb.org.uk/convention/aisb08/download.html



We request that submitted papers are limited to 2000 words. We will
provide fast feedback on whether a paper is accepted or not.  Each
accepted paper will receive at least two reviews. Selected papers will
be published in the general proceedings of the AISB Convention, with
the proviso that at least ONE author attends the symposium in order to
present the paper and participate in general symposium activities.



Papers successfully submitted and presented will be considered for
further development towards inclusion in a special issue of the online
open-access peer-review journal “Computational Culture, a journal of
software studies”: http://www.computationalculture.net/



Important Dates

i.   Full paper submission deadline: 3 January 2014

ii.  Notification of acceptance/rejection decisions: 3 February 2014

iii. Final versions of accepted papers (Camera ready copy): 24 February 2014

iv.Convention: 1-­‐4 April 2014 [confirmation of symposium dates tbc]



Additional Information

Please note that there will be separate proceedings for each
symposium, produced before the convention. Each delegate will receive
a memory stick containing the proceedings of all the symposia. In
previous years there have been awards for the best student paper, and
limited student bursaries. These details will be circulated as and
when they become available. Authors of a selection of the best papers
will be invited to submit an extended version of the work to a journal
special issue.



Symposium Chairs

Prof. Matthew Fuller (Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths) and M.
Beatrice Fazi (Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths)



Organising Committee

M. Beatrice Fazi, Matthew Fuller & Luciana Parisi, Digital Culture
Unit, Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London

Computational Culture Editorial Group, Matthew Fuller (Goldsmiths),
Olga Goriunova (Warwick), Andrew Goffey (Nottingham), Graham Harwood
(Goldsmiths), Adrian Mackenzie (Lancaster).



Symposium Website

http://computationalculture.net/cfps-events
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