[Air-L] CFP on AI and Fictions - International conference in Paris, 3-5 June 2021

[Melanie Dulong de Rosnay]

Dear colleagues,

We are happy to share the call for proposals of an international 
conference on Artificial Intelligence and Fictions we co-organise from 3 
to 5 June 2021 in Paris.

A call for papers is open until 30 September 2020.

https://cis.cnrs.fr/ia-fictions/

Kind regards,

-- 
Melanie Dulong de Rosnay
Associate research professor, CNRS
https://cis.cnrs.fr/melanie-dulong/
Director, Center for Internet and Society of CNRS
http://www.cis.cnrs.fr/en.html



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AI Fictions / Artificial Intelligence and Fictions

This international conference, organized by the University Paris 3 
Sorbonne Nouvelle, in partnership with the Center for Internet and 
Society, will be held in Paris from 3 to 5 June 2021. A call for papers 
is open until 30 September 2020.

This is the first conference ever organized on the theme of Artificial 
Intelligence in fiction (literature, series, films, comics, video 
games): the focus will be on representations of AI and their meanings, 
as well as the creative uses of AI to produce and understand fiction.

A road trip entirely written by an artificial intelligence embedded in a 
car, Ross Goodwin's /1 the road/ has joined at the start of the 2019 
literary season a whole series of texts whose common point was to stage 
and act out a dream of automation and artificialization of literary 
language, whose genealogy goes back at least to the first automatic 
writings of Oulipo: artificial intelligence is no longer just a fiction 
but a tool for producing fiction. Hito Steyerl revisits the narrative 
power of documentary film using deep learning algorithms to better 
question its ability to shape reality; /Second Earth /by Gregory 
Chatonsky takes us into a new world whose automatically generated images 
already tell the story, while by associating two images to a logical 
connector he shows the power of an algorithm to create a small story 
(/If... then/, 2009).

Embodied in figures, familiar, AI now offers incarnations that cannot be 
resolved on the apocalyptic horizon of robots waiting for the hour of 
singularity to triumph over the human species. AI is no longer just the 
object of a fantasy but is gradually becoming an everyday tool through 
facial recognition or personal assistants, while the first tools of 
predictive writing and cultural recommendation are emerging and it is 
announced that a story produced by an artificial intelligence would have 
been a finalist for a literary prize in Japan. We already knew the very 
rich mythology of AI in cinema, from 2001's /Odyssey of Spac/e to 
Spielberg's /A.I. Artificial Intelligence/, via /Terminator /or /Her/: 
each time, the political, ethical and social stakes of AI open up 
avenues for deep critical reflection and question the most essential 
philosophical categories by which we think about mankind and our place 
in the world. But AI is now taking on a concrete presence. 
/Databiographie /by Charly Delwart proposes to retrace a destiny based 
on digital data and their visualisations; /Le_zéro_et_le_un.txt /by 
Josselin Bordat tries to stage an artificial intelligence in the process 
of awakening to the world, /Kétamine /by Zoé Sagan sets a scene of a 
"predictive" journalist centred on data: never have we been so close to 
artificial agents that are integrated into our lives.

Moving from fantasy to computer tools, the fictional representations of 
AI are thus added to the fictional representations of the emerging uses 
of narrative AI by opening up a field of opportunity and fear for 
culture: on the one hand, creation by AI or assisted by AI can offer a 
major experimental field of interest to both conceptual writers and 
storytelling practitioners.

On the other hand, the way in which culture is "dated" and the way in 
which these dates are analyzed can profoundly affect the fiction 
industry and its attention control, further multiplying our perplexity 
about the emergence of artificial narrative intelligence.

Contributors are invited to consider one or other of these topics:

- examples of fictions produced by AI: tools, projects, applications, 
games; - the computer methods used: GAN, machine learning, deep learning;

- AI's fiction: robots, cyborgs, computers;

- the themes of post-humanism, singularity, utopias and dystopias of AI;

- the cultural history of representations of AI and its inventors (Alan 
Turing for example);

- criticism produced by AI: audience analysis, scenario analysis, 
cultural recommendation algorithms;

- the analysis of fiction by AI methods in the field of Digital Humanities;

- the legal problems induced by creation: law, data sharing, tax system;

- the narrative aesthetics of AI, the link with conceptual art and 
performance literature;

- the transformation of theoretical categories by AI and the 
modification of the vocabulary of criticism and aesthetic philosophy, 
from the notion of narration to that of literature;

- the representation of psychological, ethical and political problems 
induced by AI, from Asimov's three laws of robotics to /Westworld/;

- the philosophical dimension of fictional reflection on AI: the problem 
of freedom, consciousness, agentivity, autonomy;

- AI as a way of questioning the question of minorities, the topic of 
vulnerability, the frontiers of the human, the frontier of gender, the 
frontier of species.

The conference will take place at the Maison de la recherche of the 
University of Paris 3 - Sorbonne nouvelle, Maison de la recherche, 3 rue 
des Irlandais, 75005 Paris, from 3 to 5 June 2021.

Proposals in English or French (1 page + 1 short bio-bibliography) 
should be sent to ia.fiction.2021 at gmail.com 
<mailto:ia.fiction.2021 at gmail.com> before 30 September 2020.

Conference organized by Alexandre Gefen (CNRS/Paris 3) with Marida di 
Crosta (Marge, Université de Lyon III), Ksenia Ermoshina (CNRS, Centre 
Internet et Société), Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel (Université of Geneva), Léa 
Saint-Raymond (ENS).