Deadline: 16 December 2020
\nCall for entries<\/p>\n
ISEA2020: WHY SENTIENCE?
\nMay 19-24, 2020<\/p>\n
The 26th International Symposium on Electronic Art turns towards the theme of “Why Sentience?” We invite submissions in the following categories:
\nFull papers
\nShort papers
\nPanel and roundtable discussions
\nPosters \/ Demos
\nInstitutional Presentations
\nWorkshops \/ Tutorials
\nArtist talks \/ Work-In-Progress presentations
\nArtistic works (including interactive works, concerts, performances, screenings, installations, site-specific works, etc.)<\/p>\n
WHY SENTIENCE?
\nSentience describes the ability to feel or perceive. To be sentient is thus to be \u00e2\u20ac\u0153capable of feeling,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d from the Latin sentientem (nominative sentiens) while \u00e2\u20ac\u0153feeling,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the present participle of sentire \u00e2\u20ac\u0153to feel,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d refers to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153being conscious\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of something. To feel or perceive something at first seems to suggest that sentience is a uniquely human t rait. Yet, sentience implies sensing the world and acting on it across all entities\u00e2\u20ac\u201danimal, plant, mineral, environment or machine\u00e2\u20ac\u201drather than cutting things into binaries: human\/non-human, animate\/inanimate, alive\/dead, human\/machine, nature\/technology.
\nISEA2020 will be fully dedicated to examining the resurgence of sentience\u00e2\u20ac\u201dfeeling-sensing-making sense\u00e2\u20ac\u201din recent art and design, media studies, science and technology studies, philosophy, anthropology, history of science and the natural scientific realm\u00e2\u20ac\u201dnotably biology, neuroscience and computing. We ask: why sentience? Why and how does sentience matter? Why have artists and scholars become interested in sensing and feeling beyond, with and around our strictly human bodies and selves? Why has this notion been brought to the fore in an array of disciplines in the 21st century?
\n——
\nISEA2020 invites artists, designers, scholars, researchers, innovators and creators to contribute to this growing discussion ab out our sentient world and to address the following questions:
\n– Why sentience now? Why has this ability to feel (or perhaps, inability or underused ability to feel) become crucial to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153our\u00e2\u20ac\u009d historical present (indeed, whose historical present)?
\n– What are the histories and geographies, places and non-places, temporalities, processes, specificities and intimacies, residual colonialisms of sentience, as explored in media arts and technological aesthetics?
\n– Should sentience be a genuine part of a climate or environmental aesthetics and politics?
\n– Is sentience queer? Is it an alternative to and a deep questioning of human\/nonhuman binarism, identity categories and heteronormativity? Does the investigation of sentience redefine queerness? Is sentience an emerging queerness?
\n– How is sentience investigated in Indigenous media arts, aesthetics, philosophy, humanities and social sciences?
\n– Is there such a thing as a politics of sentience? Is this politic s necessarily progressive? Could it be deceptive? What is sentience\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s relationship to power and knowledge?
\n– How does sentience intersect with ideologies of ability and disability? Who counts as worthy of rights and in what way? What would constitute a neuro-diverse politics and aesthetics of sentience?
\n– What is the role of sentience in a post-factual world? In the age of neoliberalism and globalization?
\n-Where are the sites that sentience takes place? In the laboratory, the street, the gallery, the museum, the forest, inside bodies, the planet?
\n– How does sentience reframe contemporary understandings of artificial intelligence, perception, cognition, and consciousness?<\/p>\n
SUB-THEMES
\nWith these questions, contributors are asked to identify their submissions with one or more of the following seven sub-themes:
\n1. Animality\u00e2\u20ac\u201dbeyond human sense, liveness, panpsychism and hylozoism in species other than us.
\n2. The Ecosophic World\u00e2\u20ac\u201dsentience across scientific, environmental, climate and mental ecologies and their current crises.
\n3. Machinic Sense and Sensibility\u00e2\u20ac\u201dautonomy, emergence, artificial life, machine intentionality, learning, perception and agency.
\n4. Sentient Difference\u00e2\u20ac\u201dsentience beyond or against norms: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153race,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d gender, queer, trans, ability\/disability, LGBTQ+.
\n5. Matter\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Mattering\u00e2\u20ac\u201dbodies, circuits, infrastructures, any matter and how they come to be.
\n6. The Politics of Sentience\u00e2\u20ac\u201dpost-truth, post-sense, sensorization, surveillance, racism, weaponization, control, inequality and discipline, quantification, globalization, capitalism, neo-liberalism and intense re-bordering.
\n7. The Planetary\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthe sentient rethinking of the global into a possible reaffirmation of the right to move; the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153sharing\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of the planet across differences in the context of the migrant crisis.<\/p>\n
SUBMIT YOUR PROPOSAL
\nEasychair is now open. If you do not have an Easychair account, you wi ll need to set one up (follow the instructions directly on Easychair).
\nPlease note: incomplete or late applications will not be considered.<\/p>\n