[Air-L] Digital Existence III: Living with Automation

[Amanda Lagerkvist]

DIGMEX and The Sigtuna Foundation present


Digital Existence III:
LIVING WITH AUTOMATION
A conference about AI, biometrics and the human condition
The Sigtuna Foundation
One-day symposium May 31, 2022

The DIGMEX Network, in collaboration with the Sigtuna Foundation, are excited to finally present “Digital Existence III: Living with Automation,” following on from the two previous conferences “Digital Existence: Memory, Meaning, Vulnerability” (2015) and “Digital Existence II: Precarious Media Life” (2017). Day one of our conference will be an open one-day symposium, held at the Sigtuna Foundation (just outside of Stockholm) on May 31. It will feature a series of keynote lectures by distinguished international guests from the humanities, with expertise on AI and the human condition. We welcome interested participants from inside and outside academia to register as audience!

The May 31 program will include the following keynote speakers and events:

Prof. Amanda Lagerkvist, Dept. of Informatics and Media, Uppsala University, PI of the WASP-HS Project BioMe and the Uppsala Informatics and Media Hub for Digital Existence.
 “Introduction: AI as Existential Media”

Prof. N. Katherine Hayles, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of Literature, literary critic and theorist.
“Inside the Mind of an AI:  Materiality and the Crisis of Representation”

Dr. Benjamin Peters, Hazel Rogers Associate Professor and Chair of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa and affiliated fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.
“What Comes after the Anthropocene? Soviet AI and the Collapse of Other Inhumanely Smart Environments”

Prof. Joanna Zylinska, Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice, Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London, writer, lecturer, artist and curator, working on digital technologies, new media, ethics, photography and art.
“Imaging the Future: The Eye, the ‘I’ and AI”

Prof. Btihaj Ajana, Professor in Ethics and Digital Culture at Kings College, international scholar and media practitioner in the fields of digital culture and social analysis.
“The Immunopolitics of Covid-19 Technologies”

Prof. Nick Couldry, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science. Sociologist of media culture, focusing on media practices, ethics and data colonialism.
Endnote

Dr. Jacek Smolicki, interdisciplinary artist, designer, researcher, and soundwalker interested in techniques of attending to (as in paying attention) and recording (as in calling to mind and heart) human and other-than-human realms, events, and existences.
Art Exhibition: “Slip of the Digital Tongue”

Due to the limited amount of seats, please declare your interest in participating by sending an email to matilda.tudor at im.uu.se<mailto:matilda.tudor at im.uu.se> who will then confirm the availability and help out with registering procedures. Members of the DIGMEX network will be prioritized. The symposium is without charge, but participants will have to pay for lunch and refreshments at the Sigtuna Foundation venue.

Conference rationale
AI (artificial intelligence) is mounting on the human horizon, evoking both hopes and fears. Mapping itself onto almost every conceivable realm of human life and experience, AI is however not only a concern for the future: it is already here, at our fingertips. As AI is part of our most intimate lives, quantified self-imaginings, embodied perceptions, and our emergent practices of care and of law enforcement – especially via biometrics – our lives are increasingly ‘on automatic.’ But where did this world stem from – historically and ideologically? What founds it philosophically? How can it be (re)conceived, theoretically and artistically, in order for us to responsibly craft AI to serve human kind? What can we learn from attending to how we already live with automation – about risks and possibilities – and from how we have lived with its imaginaries on our horizon throughout history, in fiction and techno-progressivist discourse and practice? What are the existential needs and necessities that face us anew with AI? And can we now harness, as scholars in the humanities, those rich sources of insight and wisdom about the human condition, that remain our footing, while mobilising them creatively and critically for a new era with ‘responsible AI’ (Dignum 2019)? This symposium is motivated by the fact that in increasingly conspicuous ways, leading AI alignment collaborations to develop philosophically robust notions of “benign AI”, are almost entirely absent of any in-depth engagement with humanistic knowledge, whether philosophical, historical, artistic or anthropological. AI must be placed in historical sociopolitical contexts, yet their many exigencies and meanings also require looking backward to our history as scholars in the humanities, as much as looking beyond its classic trajectories, to find novel and pertinent framings.

From the perspective of existential media studies (EMS), which revisits classic questions and themes in existential philosophy about ‘what it means to be human’ – while upgrading them to our contemporary technologized culture in conversation with posthumanist and new materialist debates – the stakes are foremost existential (Lagerkvist 2022). Technologies define and redefine the human condition. Hence, automated data services are conceived as everyday “mundane data;” they co-condition our world and media are our material infrastructures of being (Peters 2015). Yet, automation is simultaneously theorized as a fresh source for embodied disharmony, friction, vulnerability and social injustice. Not only do we use technologies; our lives are increasingly digitally “thrown”, to draw on the language of Martin Heidegger, into a highly connected, fast changing technological world that uses us, threatening to leave us displaced and ever more vulnerable (Lagerkvist 2016, 2019). In EMS human existence is consequently conceived also as an ongoing moral project (Kierkegaard 1849/1989; Sartre 1956), stretched out in an anticipatory mode towards horizons of the possible, the contingent and the imperative. EMS thus maintains that the towering existential and ethical task of our time is to reflect upon, and take responsibility for, the media technologies that we develop, use and embrace, and how that embrace simultaneously raises new affordances and limits; the new resources and risks of modern human life. This conference will take existential media studies in new directions, prompting a necessary interrogation of AI and biometrics from creative, imaginary, artistic, philosophical and historical angles, while anthropologically centring on experiences of living with automation in today’s world.

Context and funding
The symposium is an activity within the project “BioMe: Existential Challenges and Ethical Imperatives of Biometric AI in Everyday Lifeworlds” (2020-2024), headed by Prof. Amanda Lagerkvist (based in the Uppsala Informatics and Media Hub for Digital Existence: http://www.im.uu.se/research/hub-for-digtal-existence) and hosted by the Department of Informatics and Media at Uppsala University. BioMe is part of the national research program WASP-HS: Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems Software Program – Humanities and Society: https://wasp-hs.org (2020-2030) financed by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation (MMW) and the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation (MAW). The conference is co-organized by the DIGMEX network and the Sigtuna Foundation, and co-funded by MMW, MAW, Uppsala University and the Sigtuna Foundation.

Best regards,
Amanda Lagerkvist

Amanda Lagerkvist
Professor of Media and Communication Studies
PI of the WASP-HS Project BioMe and the Uppsala Informatics and Media Hub for Digital Existence<https://www.im.uu.se/research/hub-for-digtal-existence>
Dept. of Informatics and Media, Uppsala University
Box 513, SE- 751 20 Uppsala
Office: +46(0)18-471 1522  Mobile: +46(0)73-660 0574
E-mail: amanda.lagerkvist at im.uu.se<mailto:amanda.lagerkvist at im.uu.se>
Profile page<https://katalog.uu.se/profile/?id=N7-774>
Research Fellow at Worlds of AI - Department of Informatics and Media - Uppsala University, Sweden (uu.se)<https://im.uu.se/research/worlds-of-ai>
New book: Existential Media: A Media Theory of the Limit Situation, to be published by Oxford University Press, 2022<https://global.oup.com/academic/product/existential-media-9780190925567?type=listing&prevNumResPerPage=20&prevSortField=1&sortField=8&resultsPerPage=20&start=0&lang=en&cc=gb>























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