We are thrilled to hold several local, hybrid and online events, where you can tune in and engage with the work of Prof. MacCormack. One of these events is the Tema Genus Higher Seminar taking place on 29th March 2023 at 13:15-15:00 CEST.
Occult Ahuman Pedagogy: Death to the Anthropocene by Witchcraft with Prof. Patricia MacCormack (Anglia Ruskin University, UK)
If you wish to attend remotely, please register at http://bit.ly/3ZRCurg or follow this QR:
Bio: Patricia MacCormack is Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge. She has published extensively on philosophy, feminism, queer and monster theory, animal abolitionist activism, ethics, art and horror cinema. She is the author of Cinesexuality (Routledge 2008) and Posthuman Ethics (Routledge 2012) and the editor of The Animal Catalyst (Bloomsbury 2014), Deleuze and the Animal (EUP 2017), Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema (Continuum 2008) and Ecosophical Aesthetics (Bloomsbury 2018). Her new book is The Ahuman Manifesto: Activisms for the End of the Anthropocene. She is currently a Leverhulme Research Fellow researching death activism.
Välkomna till visning av den prisbelönta kortfilmen GUILTY NOT GUILTY med tillhörande forskarsamtal och dialog.
Vad händer när juridiken inte går jämna steg med tekniken?
Hur ska ansvar utkrävas när det inte längre är en människa som ligger bakom besluten?
Hur förhåller sig lagen till ”Deep fake” och andra exempel på kreativ AI?
Filmen Guilty Not Guilty är en 5 min kort, fri fiktionsfilm som twistar komplexa frågor och där filmskaparna utmanar känslor och tankar kring etiska och filosofiska aspekter av autonoma system och artificiell intelligens. Här ser vi filmen tillsammans med Karin Wegsjö, regissör och filmskapare, Eva Krutmeijer, forskningskommunikatör och forskarna Gregor Noll, vars forskning inspirerat till filmen, och Katja de Vries.
Vi träffas i Filmhusets restaurang för ett glas bubbel kl 17.30. Filmvisningen startar kl 18 i Bio Victor.
Our friends at CEMUS, The Centre for Environment and Development Studies, have some exciting events this year.
Starting on Feb. 9, they have a great seminar line-up for Spring. You are welcome to visit in person in Uppsala or online!
They are also hosting the ClimateExistence conference Aug 16-18 with the Sigtuna Foundation (in Sigtuna). Check out the details on their website and do not forget to submit your application by the March 1 deadline!
The Creative-Ai (AI and the Artistic Imaginary – WASP-HS) and MUSAiC project teams at KTH kindly welcome you to the third seminar in our series “dialogues: probing the future of creative technology” on Thursday 2 February, 15:00-16:00 (CEST).
This seminar (held on zoom, https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/67706212115), we talk about “Artistic and legal-philosophical perspectives on deep fakes”. We start with two presentations from our invited guests (see below), followed by a discussion between each other and then with the audience.
Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti are an award-winning experiential artist duo who founded their collaborative art practice, known as Operator, in 2016. Referred to as “the two critical contemporary voices on digital art’s international stages” (Clot Magazine), their expertises collide in large scale conceptual works recognizable for their poetic approach to technology. Ti’s background as an immersive artist and HCI technologist, and Catherine’s as a choreographer, performance artist and gender scholar make for a uniquely medium-fluent output–bringing together environments, technology and the body.
Operator has been awarded a Lumen Prize (Immersive Environments), ADC Award (Gold Cube), S+T+ARTS Prize (Honorary Mention), and MediaFutures (a European Commission funded programme). They’ve been speakers at Christie’s Art+Tech Summit, Art Basel, MIT Open Doc Lab, BBC Click, Bloomberg ART+TECHNOLOGY, Ars Electronica, Contemporary Istanbul, and CADAF. Ti and Catherine are originally from Los Angeles and currently based in Berlin.
Title: Soft Evidence–Synthetic cinema as contemporary art
Abstract: Art has always explored notions of truth and fiction, and the relationship between image and reality. Synthetic media’s capability to depict events that never happened makes that relationship more complex than ever. How can artists use synthetic media/deepfakes creatively, and start conversations about ethics and the social implications of unreliable realities? In this presentation, artist duo Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti of Operator discuss their work Soft Evidence–a slow synthetic cinema series created as part of MediaFutures in 2021. They will detail how research and interviews with experts on media manipulation in law, education, and activism informed their creative and technical processes. As experiential artists, Ti and Catherine plan to exhibit Soft Evidence as an installation, a site for the public to learn and process a rapidly changing media landscape through immersion and feeling states.
(For Katja:) Katja de Vries is an assistant professor in public law at Uppsala University. Her work operates at the intersection of IT law and philosophy of technology. Her current research focuses on the challenges that AI-generated content (‘deepfakes’ or ‘synthetic data’) poses to data protection, intellectual property and other fields of law.
Title: How can law deal with the counterfactual metaphysics of synthetic media?
Abstract: How can law deal with deep fakes and synthetic media? Law is influenced by the politics, norms and ontologies of the society in which it operates but is never exhausted by it. Law always first and foremost obeys to an already existing system of parameters, rules concepts and ontologies, to which new elements can only be incrementally added. This contributes to legal certainty and foreseeability, as well as law’s slowness to adapt. The EU legislator is trying to adapt to new digital challenges and opportunities by creating a true avalanche of legislation. In the case of deep fakes and other synthetic media the question, however, is if operative concepts such as transparency and informed consent and dichotomies such as fact v. fiction, human v. machine, etc. work well with the counterfactual metaphysics of synthetic media, namely the articulation of what is possible into digital mathematical spaces of seemingly endless alternative realities, and extensions in time and space. More concretely: is it important to simply flag that we are interacting with a synthetic work? Can we consent to live-on forever in disseminating digital alter-egos?
VENUE: ARBETETS MUSEUM (THE MUSEUM OF WORK), NORRKÖPING
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
Prof. Patricia MacCormack (Anglia Ruskin University, UK)
Prof. Em. Nina Lykke (Linköping University, SE/Aarhus University, DK)
SPEAKERS:
Dr Evelien Geerts (University of Birmingham, UK)
Prof. Christina Fredengren (Uppsala University, SE)
Dr Tara Mehrabi & Dr Wibke Straube (Karlstad University, SE)
Dr Marietta Radomska (Linköping University, SE)
In the Anthropocene, the epoch of climate change and environmental destruction that render certain habitats unliveable and induce socio-economic inequalities and shared ‘more-than-human’ vulnerabilities, death and loss become urgent environmental concerns. As climate scientists indicate, in order to achieve UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), a much more radical transformative action is needed from all stakeholders: governments, the private sector, communities and individuals (Höhne et al. 2020).
Simultaneously, planetary environmental disruption, contributing to the mortality of humans and nonhumans, destruction of entire ecosystems, the sixth mass extinction, both abrupt and ‘slow’ violence (Nixon 2011), evoke feelings of anxiety, anger and grief, manifested in popular-scientific and cultural narratives, art, and activism. These feelings are not always openly acknowledged or accepted in society; and the ecological, more-than-human dimensions of death have traditionally been underplayed in public debates. Yet, what we need now – more than ever – is the systematic problematisation of the planetary-scale mechanisms of annihilation of the more-than-human world in their philosophical, socio-cultural, ethico-political and very material dimensions. Only then will it be possible to talk about the issues of responsibility, accountability and care for more-than-human worlds (Radomska & Lykke 2022).
Taking its starting point in critically investigating and challenging conventional normativities, assumptions and expectations surrounding issues of death, dying and mourning in the contemporary world (Radomska, Meharbi & Lykke 2020; https://queerdeathstudies.net/), this interdisciplinary symposium zooms in on more-than-human ecologies of death, dying, grief and mourning across spatial and temporal scales.
The participation in the symposium is free of charge, but we have a limited number of seats. If you wish to take part in the event, please, fill out the form: https://forms.office.com/e/Yb4qXpyVtX
Registration deadline: 15th March 2023 or until the event is fully booked.
NB! In case you register and it turns out you can no longer participate, please let us know by sending an email to: ecobioartlab[at]liu.se . In this way we may be able to let in anyone who may be on the waiting list.
