[Air-L] Nonhuman Vision: How Technologies and Animals See and Make Sense

[Adam Fish]

Dear Colleagues,


We invite papers for our 4S panel, Nonhuman Vision: How Technologies and
Animals See and Make Sense. Please submit your abstract by February 29 to:
https://www.easst4s2020prague.org/call-for-papers-and-panels/


Yours,


Adam Fish,  Michael Richardson, Edgar Gomez Cruz, University of New South
Wales


*Nonhuman Vision: How Technologies and Animals See and Make Sense*


Seeing—and the sense making that follows—is usually conceived as something
humans alone do. Anthropocentric vision has been radically decentered by
both computer vision and by multispecies ontologies, even if all-too-human
biases stain the former and the latter is anything but surprising to
indigenous people. And yet nonhuman vision remains under-examined and
under-theorised in disciplines cognate to STS, where image and sense-making
often remain the privilege of the human. This panel offers a corrective by
advancing vivid case studies in non-human vision that center technologies
and animals as agents of meaning-making.


>From analogue photography to computer vision, technologies of vision see in
nonhuman ways (Mackenzie and Munster 2019, Zylinska 2017). Photons are
processed into computer readable code, filtered by algorithms, and
correlated by machine learning to build so-called artificial intelligence.
Animals, too, can see beyond, differently, and better than RGB, the human
visual light spectrum (Barad 2007). While the chasm separating human vision
from other animal vision is vast, efforts towards remembering and forging
inter-species companionship are essential to responding to the species
extinction and climate crisis (Haraway 2016). Seeing as
non-human–technological or animal–uniquely challenges key concepts in media
studies: who or what makes sense of symbols.


Across the assembled papers, this panel explores some of the crucial
technical, affective, multi-species and multi-modal ways in which nonhuman
vision figures in the contemporary moment. In doing so, it brings expertise
in STS, new materialism, visual culture, media arts, and cultural studies
to the study of communication and technology. Collectively, we question the
politics of vision: who or what sees who? What, how, and when? What or who
can avoid being seen, provide consent, and avoid the gaze? Awareness of how
vision technologies and non-human animals see and sense–or avoid such
efforts–in uncanny and alien ways not only challenges but should transform
human relationships to others, both technical and animal.


*Contact: **mediacultures at protonmail.ch <mediacultures at protonmail.ch>*


*Keywords:* vision, animal, drone, visual, seeing, gaze


*Categories: *Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Information, Computing and Media Technology

STS and Social Justice/Social


How to apply:


https://www.easst4s2020prague.org/call-for-papers-and-panels/