[Air-L] Many, Many Machine Agencies: Call for Participation in 4S Open Panel and Edited Book

[Fenwick Mckelvey]

I am sharing a call for research-creation works critical engaging with AI.
The goal is an edited book and a 4S online workshop. Please contact me if
you have any questions.


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Many, Many Machine Agencies: Call for Participation in 4S Open Panel and
Edited Book

Where is the artificial intelligence? With AI included in every job talk,
abstract commentary, or refrigerator, our edited collection, Many, Many
Machine Agencies, challenges contributors to present encounters with many
kinds of artificial intelligences in a more curious fashion than the hyped
search for the artificial intelligence so far has been able to amass. The
book theoretically eschews the instrumentalizing language of artificial
intelligence in favour of an open-ended call for more experiential
understanding that advances a posthumanistic and materialist method of
critical cultural AI through experience design, critical making, and
research-creation.

We seek contributors for this unusual, edited collection of machine
agencies, asking for recipes, instructions, or games that center the
problem of agency and interaction and the importance of new kinds of
encounters with machines. Constructed, found, or haphazard encounters
define our approach rather than any presumed intelligence, utility, or
efficacy. This collection brings together agencies that must be worked out
through documented interactions rather than named as an a priori aptitude
or benchmark. As such, this is a call for all the hybrid maker-thinkers who
dabble in different theories of machinic agency including artificial life,
digital games, interaction design, robotics, ubiquitous computing, expert
systems, virtual life, simulation, and neural networks.

Prospective authors are invited to propose recipes for human-machine
encounters that actualize machine agencies and intelligences. Many, Many
Machine Agencies is a kind of a cookbook for engaging critically with
machines, and as such, we take inspiration from celebrated cookbook authors
like MFK Fisher who provides recipes and instructions for dishes, while
embedding them in a broader biographical and cultural narrative. Certainly,
we want to teach readers how to get on cooking with AI, but we also do not
want to be too prescriptive in the kind of instructions they dispense.
Essentially, the chapter-recipes are descriptive accounts of interactions
and experiences that the reader can reproduce for themselves in their own
setting, and they provide the pretext for the articulation and
understanding that arise from the encounter.

An encounter refers to an interaction between humans, machines, and
environments. The prompt, for example, can be an encounter, one highly
scripted in the history of computing where machines guess/predict what we
expect. Often our roles in interactions with machines are prescripted, and
we find ourselves reproducing encounters within frames of client/server,
sender/receiver, core/periphery. Our book challenges these expectations
that are inherited from the instrumentalist logics that curtail stories of
other kinds of encounters with machines. Encounters can be simple games,
thought experiments with technologies, reflections on artistic praxis that
produce agencies in the experience.

For more details about the book, see:
https://ebauche.facil.services/form/#/3/form/view/b4c188787c12116a94c3019f1426e0ca/

To support the book, we also have a 4S open panel #136 Many, Many Machine
Agencies: Recipes for Posthuman-Human Encounters

We encourage anyone interested to submit a 250-word abstract. The deadline
is 30 April.

Please contact me if you have any questions.


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Be good,
Fen