Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 34, No. 148.
            Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
                   Hosted by King's Digital Lab
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2020-07-01 12:15:24+00:00
        From: Melanie Dulong de Rosnay 
        Subject: CFP on AI and Fictions - International conference in Paris, 3-5 June 2021

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



----------

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@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).



_______________________________________________
Unsubscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted
List posts to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
List info and archives at at: http://dhhumanist.org
Listmember interface at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted/
Subscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/membership_form.php

Editor: Willard McCarty (King's College London, U.K.; Western Sydney University, Australia)
Software designer: Malgosia Askanas (Mind-Crafts)

This site is maintained under a service level agreement by King's Digital Lab.