Artificial Lives: Imagining Life
Late November 2017
Venue TBC, University of Sussex
This one day conference is the first of an interdisciplinary series investigating developments in the arts and science responding to the manufacturing of being, and will feature keynote presentations from artist Paul Vanouse and Sherryl Vint of UCR.
In the wake of the creation of the first stable semisynthetic organism, and numerous developments towards enhancing and manufacturing life, artists and critics have risen to respond to the seemingly limitless extension of being. Significant developments in fields including, and not limited to Biopolitics, Disability Studies, Affect studies, Post humanism and Medical Humanities have renegotiated the way we imagine the human. As the gap between speculation and reality narrows, this conference provides a timely opportunity to survey and reflect on the possibilities of all synthesized lifeforms for literary representation.
We welcome papers across disciplines from academics and practitioners, including but by no means limited to the following suggested areas. Please send abstracts to artificiallivesproject@gmail.com by 1st September 2017.
• Artificial intelligence
• Speculative fiction
• Representations of virtual and physical prosthetics
• Representations of disability
• Genetic and genomic recoding
• Visual representations of artificial life
• Post humanism
• Chemical manufacturing applied to life forms
• Critical materialism
• Rethinking anthropocentricism
This conference will be followed by a series of workshops, and counterpart conferences at Sussex and Huntington, US respectively: ‘Enhancing Life’ (January 2018) and ‘Engineering Life’ (March 2018). Keep up to date with the project at www.artificiallives.wordpress.com, and on Twitter @ArtificiaLives.
Humanities & Science
Humanities & the Digital Age
