Call for Abstracts and Artistic Submissions

Creative Machines and Minds Without Life: Critical Detachment and Disengaged Futures
A Cybioses Study Circle/Symposium organized by the Nordic Summer University (NSU)
March 5-8, 2025
“Augmented Performance Lab” at Aalborg University Copenhagen
Copenhagen, Denmark
https://www.nsuweb.org/study-circles/circle-2-cybioses-life-in-the-future-imperfect/

Deadline for submissions: January 15, 2025

As part of the study circle/symposium series Cybioses – life in the future imperfect, organized as part of the Nordic Summer University (NSU; https://www.nsuweb.org/), we are pleased to announce a call for abstracts and artistic submissions for our symposium on “Creative Machines and Minds Without Life”.

Invitation

We invite scholars, artists, students, technologists, and other professionals working or writing on future technologies to take part in the winter symposium of our study circle Cybioses – life in the future imperfect, part of the Nordic Summer University (NSU), a migratory non-hierarchical group of international researchers that has existed for over 70 years. Since its inception, the primary aim of NSU has been to provide a forum for experimentation and cross-disciplinary collaboration, welcoming members both from within and outside of universities and other institutions.

1. Cybioses – the future imperfect (what is it?)

The study circle has existed for seven years and its name ‘Cybiosis’ (pl. cybioses), is a neologism, based on ‘cybernetic’, ‘symbiosis’, and ‘bio’. It embodies the new technological modes of living that we aim to investigate. Cybioses is meant, from the start, as a speculative metaphor. The term is intended to support an imagination of the ambivalent relation between:

(cybernetic) systems of symbioses and inclusion, and the relentless drive to commodify life forms and extend the networks of technological control.

The commodification and control points to a future that will be imperfect. Also, this type of ‘ambivalence’ is central to our shared investigation of the status of the “future” in today’s technological world.

Indeed, the future that will be imperfect, because, of course, “it will be”, how could it be otherwise? There will be actions, or even a state of affairs, characterized by their continuity and yet it will remain incomplete and will not be defined by a precise start or sequence of events. It might be the case that in English, the tense form does not exist – there are no grammar rules for a “future imperfect” – but it is nonetheless advisable to acknowledge that it is challenging to think, investigate, and discuss our ability to make plans without knowing precisely what is the point that the future starts and without closing down what the future might hold.

2. Creative machines and minds without life

The title of the winter symposium is again ambivalent, with the creativity of machines juxtaposed with the sensation that something might be lost. Losing our mind, and some part of life is the obvious answer, with as its immediate context AI and its impact on the creative process. In turn, the subtitle questions this perspective, asking whether the answer lies in detachment and disengagement, inviting different ideas about the future of creativity.

Clearly machines are part of creative processes. This much is obvious and applies to high tech examples, like robots or AI voice assistants, and to old fashioned mechanisms, either with solid parts or many moving parts. All can be put to good use, creatively and inspired. It could be the creativity of some original work that required the skill and talent of an accomplished artist. It could, however, also be about the basics; about any type of devices that is needed to play, as entertainment, experimentation for its own sake and open-ended exploration.

Regardless, there is the narrative about machines that are creative, as autonomous agents, singular and able to take decisions of their own. This is a variation on machines that are learning, AIs that can be trained and AI assistants that have personalities, like Claude, Siri and Alexa. Everywhere human characteristics are being applied to what is not human, or rather to what is complex and unstable configuration code, facts, data, artifacts, and more.

This is not new. Very few are around that might recall how Turing wrote about machines that think, in 1950, when natural language processing was new, and so was the language of the cybernetics movement that AI advocates have borrowed heavily from. At every point there were serious warnings and critique, including science fiction narratives about the merger of humans and machines. These normalized not only cyborgs that behave like monsters but gradually also the creative human-machine hybrids that struggle against oppression.

The creative machine exists in this sense, as a dream that is old and everywhere in popular culture as well as niche philosophies, artistic projects, unusual areas of invention, and on game computers. This has become a normalized part of everyday live, and part of how humans interact with machines constantly, ascribing subjectivity as a mundane reaction to functionality. Given that machines do tasks, why would they not speak, listen, understand, perform, entertain, and create?

Indeed, AI is an example of a creative machine by how it is able to cause surprise when generating text or editing voices, songs, imagines, videos, and so on. Yet, these creative machines illustrate what Cybioses refers to (e.g. symbioses), as they are examples of a global technological culture that is the result of having become deeply invested in the relation between information (e.g. cybernetics and AI) and life (e.g. evolutionary theory, nanotech, environment). Hence the anthropomorphism is not innocent, given its capacity to reach out, extend and redistribute our sensing capacities and, thereby, get under our skins: under the outer physical boundary of our bodies and embodied individuality that serves as the boundary site for inscribing new attributes, capacities, and dreams into our bodies.

One language from where to approach this juxtaposition of creativities is that of AI vs. the human. This might invoke human dignity, freedom, authenticity and the mind as the seat of reason. What is at stake is humanity itself, in how our sense are mediated through (AI) technology. Also this is a creative process, one that undermines and diminishes our sense of self, as artists, as inventors, as researchers as well as shrinking the space that is left for other experiences in the (natural) world around us.

In part ‘minds without life’ refers to this concern over our capacity to understand, communicate, and act in the brave new world of AI. It is an imperfect future of concerns over ownership, bodily integrity, privacy violations and the constant monitoring of information flows, surveillance of everything and everybody. Simultaneously, concerns over the status of the individual (its autonomy, dignity and reason) tends towards nostalgia about a past. The future is about detachment and disengagement as the corollary of a past that is remembered in terms of how life was real, and minds were sharp.

Perhaps there are still futures for creative engagement, and for being deeply (and critically) attached to what is at stake. What would be needed is a joining of forces, of unconventional types of agencies, critique, art, and invention, aiming for a more creative exploration of the many new terrains that have been opened up.

Our symposia has always been about this type of collaboration, as the sensible response to powerful and technologically driven ideas about growth that can continue indefinitely, about living with dwindling natural resources that fuel environmental collapse and extinction of countless species in the context of human-made climate change.

Its implication is a future wherein there will be conflicts, disagreement, irresponsibility, and a plethora of challenges to conventional (and convenient) boundaries between the natural and artificial, living and non-living, minds and machines, creativity and automation. Alongside indifference, detachment, and disengagement, it is important to keep exploring what new types of creativity, change, and renewal are becoming possible.

Accordingly, we are interested in reflecting on creative machines that are different, as ideas, events, or narratives coming from different fields, explicitly including artistic practices, philosophical niche topics, natural scientists willing to share their experiences and more. The topic is defined broadly on purpose, as our working method is to seek to deepen and renew our collaboration with artists, hackers, designers, technologists, theorists, and others.

This is the defining setup of the Cybioses workshops, which have been running for over 6 years, with various histories going back much further. We hope once again to find contributors with experimental approaches to presenting and collaborating.

In the past, there have been long and short presentations, textual (read out) and performative, theory-based, and practical, with artistic and aesthetic aims. Accordingly, this symposium, as is customary with Cybioses, seeks to explore its themes from a broad range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives. We welcome contributions from the arts, the sciences, technology, the social sciences and the humanities, seeking a new conversation on this topic and deepening the thematic of the Cybioses study circle.

Topics that relate strongly to the key works of the symposium are encouraged, such as:

• creative machines (e.g. robots, AI, ‘biological’ machines)
• creativity in art and machines
• creativity and the human mind
• the future of creativity
• intellectual histories of creative machines and/or creativity
• the political economies of creative machines
• creative machines and surveillance
• synergy with creative machines
• rules for creative machines (e.g. ethics, law, policy, government)
• creative vs. irresponsible machines (e.g. art vs. ethics).

Other topics that fit the profile are welcome and perspectives that we welcome include (but are not limited to):

• ethical and philosophical perspectives
• science, technology, and engineering
• science and technology studies
• the arts and humanities
• political economy and theoretical critique
• cybernetic thought and information theory
• hard/soft/wetware experiments
• critical examinations of neoliberal and authoritarian systems
• a focus on alternatives, including failed experimentation
• literature studies

Feel free to contact us if you are wondering how you would fit in and please send a short motivation letter and bio to eric.deibel@nsuweb.org and palle@chalmers. For information about abstract submission and the background writing that details the topics of the conference, please visit our web-page: https://www.nsuweb.org/study-circles/circle-2-cybioses-life-in-the-future-imperfect/

Finally, there is always next time! In the summer we’ll be in Finland (20th of July to 28th of July). We aim to continue beyond that, as we have a storied history, it’s been 8 years in this format, and with roots going back to the 1950s for the topic of technology (and cybernetics). Our previous topics have included Speculative Technologies and Future Frictions (Summer 2024, Denmark), Information crisis (Winter 2024, Vilnius, What a waste (summer 2023, Lithuania), and Slow futures (winter 2023, Brussels). Earlier themes have included Human-Technology Futures, and Improvisation and Technology.

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Palle Dahlstedt, Professor of Interaction Design, Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Gothenburg / Chalmers University of Technology

Eric Deibel, PhD, researcher with the ADAPT research centre on AI, and the UCD school of Information and Communication Studies, both in Dublin, Ireland

Talya Deibel, PhD, senior postdoc at University College Cork on “Law and the Inner Self”