Call for Proposals:

(Re)Imagining AI Interventions /// Intervening (into) AI Imaginaries
Special issue of Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies
https://imaginationsjournal.ca/index.php/imaginations/cfps

Deadline for submission of abstracts: January 15, 2025 (papers due June 1, 2025)

In an age of endless disruption, how do we live with the rapid advances and early analyses of artificial intelligence software, moral panic, and the voracious consumption of already oppressive datasets and social relations? We have already seen some deep scholarly engagement with issues of ethical database scraping and intellectual property violations (Crawford 2021; Delfanti & Phan 2024; Luka & Millette 2018), environmental impacts (Hogan & Lepage-Richer 2024; Valdivia 2023; MIT Technology Review Insights 2023; Torres 2024), and workflow interferences and augmentations (Ahmed et al 2024; Grohmann et al 2022; Khovanskaya et al 2022; Poell, Nieborg & Duffy 2022). How can we imagine and design critical and creative futures (Alcoff 2020; Nakayama & Morris 2015; Tozer et al 2023; Varon & Peña 2021) for artists, activists, scholars, and consumer-worker-citizens considering these latest AI developments? How do we resist (re)colonization impulses (Couture & Toupin 2019; Campbell & Forman 2023; Hampton 2023) in the AI context? Building on recent work (e.g., Chan et al., 2020; Cifor et al, 2019; Coleman 2023; Lewis 2024; Ricaurte Quijano 2021; Stinson & Vlaad 2024), how can we imagine rebuilding… revisualizing… repairing… refusing… the world(s) we live and work in? In this issue, we want to explore a range of critical framings and interventions that understand AI as the latest wave of technological change that may be able to help or hinder us in our weird and sometimes wonderful daily grind(s), rather than as a totalizing and inevitable replacement of human existence.

In this call, we seek accounts and theorizations of research and everyday projects that carry with them a critical analysis of or intervention into the enigmatic promises of AI imaginaries. But we aim to make a larger socio-cultural contribution. We seek to critically imagine and design insightful, sustainable and joyful futures in the context of ubiquitous digital demands and possibilities, including the recent explosion of AI in our work worlds and everyday lives.

This special issue will bring together submissions across arts, humanities, visual culture, and media fields of study as well as feminist STS, critical disability, knowledge media design, research-creation, world-building and futurisms studies. We aim to generate provocations, approaches, and examples that can address the renewed racialized, gendered, colonial, economic, and geopolitical power dynamics at play in the AI context.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

• The ways in which the notion of “self” slithers in the AI context, flowing and drifting between materiality and virtuality, including melding together AI capabilities with/around/about prosthetics, digital intimacy, and affect;
• Critiquing reactive and derivative predictive models and modes of futurisms and imagining ways of looking that incorporate but go beyond foresight, “for-see,” and socially just world-building opportunities;
• How we can create meaning-making with emerging technologies, reversing the notion that technological creators do not know how technology will be used by general publics and vice-versa;
• The ways that we are already experiencing AI apathy, as forms of technological fatigue, civic disengagement, or pedagogical frustration;
• How AI operates as the latest technological “disruptor” in a digital landscape littered with the debris of its predecessors. For example, how do early adopters and artists harvest the opportunities presented by AI as a society and disciplinary “disruptor” in social and commercialized ways?
• Why and how tension is amped up through conflicts generated by open or accessible “democratic” modes of creativity and inclusion and the commercialization impetus of “Creative Industries.” For example, how can the idea of “open AI” and the operations of “Open AI” (the company) be theorized together or separately;
• Analysing the specificity of impacts of Generative AI on creativity and visual cultures in/from the Global South, potentially extending into considerations of how industrial structures are being normalized in Global North (minority) forms, reshaped by AI and emergent digital technologies;
• The potential for AI to outright kill, or by some means rekindle (sub)cultural literacies, expressions, and formats (fanfiction, social media, video, audio, publishing);
• Curatorial critiques and valorizations of AI exhibitions and artistic work, including how some tools limit or support the creative explorations of marginal artists, artistic legacies and narratives;
• The effect of AI on creative labour, how systems of cultural production and distribution inevitably privilege capital over creative workers and consumer-worker-citizens, and how active resistance to such privilege can repair and revive these fields of production and distribution

Contributions may include: research articles or manifestos (4,000-6,000 words), video essays, multimedia research-creation pieces, and exhibition and book reviews (approx. 1,500 words).

Contributions may be in English or French. Email your 500 word abstract by January 15, 2025 and/or enquiries to:
Maryelizabeth.luka@utoronto.ca
Caroline.klimek@utoronto.ca
Aline.zara@mail.utoronto.ca

Guest Edited by Mary Elizabeth (ME) Luka, Caroline Klimek, and Aline Zara, University of Toronto.

ABOUT THE JOURNAL:

https://imaginationsjournal.ca/index.php/imaginations/about

WORKS CITED:

Ahmed, I., Mim, J., Nandi, D., Khan, S., Dey, A. (2024). Impacts of Text-to-Image Generative AI Tools on Digital Image-making Practices in the Global South. Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24), 18 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3641951

Alcoff, L. M. (2020). Lugones’s World-Making. Critical Philosophy of Race 8 (1-2), 199-211.

Campbell, M.V. & Forman, M. (2023). Hip Hop Archives: The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production. Intellect.

Chan, L., Hall, B., Piron, F., Tandon, R., & Williams, L. (2020). Open Science Beyond Open Access: For and with communities, A step towards the decolonization of knowledge. Ottawa, Canada: Canadian Commission for UNESCO’s IdeaLab

Cifor, M., Garcia, P., Cowan, T.L., Rault, J., Sutherland, T., Chan, A., Rode, J., Hoffmann, A.L., Salehi, N., Nakamura, L. (2019). Feminist Data Manifest-No. Retrieved from: https://www.manifestno.com/

Coleman, B. (2023). Reality Was Whatever Happened : Octavia Butler AI and Other Possible Worlds. Berlin: K. Verlag.

Couture, S., & Toupin, S. (2019). What does the notion of “sovereignty” mean when referring to the digital? New Media & Society, 21(10), 2305-2322. https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1177/1461444819865984

Crawford, K. 2021. Atlas of AI. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Delfanti, A., & Phan, M. (2024). Rip It Up and Start Again: Creative Labor and the Industrialization of Remix. Television & New Media, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/15274764241227613

Grohmann, R., Pereira, G., Guerra, A., Abilio, L. C., Moreschi, B., & Jurno, A. (2022). Platform scams: Brazilian workers’ experiences of dishonest and uncertain algorithmic management. New Media & Society, 24(7), 1611-1631. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221099225

Hampton, L. M. (2023). ‘Techno-Racial Capitalism: A Decolonial Black Feminist Marxist Perspective’, in Jude Browne, and others (eds), Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data, and Intelligent Machines (Oxford, 2023; online edn, Oxford Academic, 23 Nov. 2023). https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192889898.003.0008.

Hogan, M., & Lepage-Richer, T. (2024). Extractive AI. Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy. https://www.mediatechdemocracy.com/climatetechhoganlepagericher

Khovanskaya, V., Tandon, U., Arcilla, E., Hussein, M. H., Zschiesche, P., & Irani, L. (2022). Hostile Ecologies: Navigating the Barriers to Community-Led Innovation. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 6(CSCW2), 1-26.

Lewis, J. E. (2024). The future imaginary. In T. J. Taylor, I. Lavender III, G. L. Dillon, & B. Chattopadhyay (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of CoFuturisms. New York: Routledge.

Luka, M.E., & Millette, M. (2018). (Re)framing Big Data: Activating Situated Knowledges and a Feminist Ethics of Care in Social Media Research. Social Media + Society, 4(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118768297

MIT Technology Review Insights. (2023). “Sustainability starts with the data center.” https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/MIT_Hitachi_FNL_111623.pdf?utm_source=pdf&utm_medium=all_platforms&utm_campaign=insights_ebrief&utm_term=11.27.23&utm_content=insights.report

Nakayama, T.K., & Morris, C.E., III. (2015). Worldmaking and Everyday Interventions. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking2(1), v-viii. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/575372

Poell, T., Nieborg, D. B., & Duffy, B. E. (2022). Platforms and cultural production. Cambridge: Polity.

Ricaurte Quijano, P. (2021). Reimagining AI. Feminist AI.https://feministai.pubpub.org/pub/reimagining-ai

Stinson, C., & Vlaad, S. (2024). A feeling for the algorithm: Diversity, expertise, and artificial intelligence. Big Data & Society, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231224247

Torres, E. P. (2024, June 24). AI doomers have warned of the tech-pocalypse – while doing their best to accelerate it. Salon. https://www.salon.com/2024/06/24/ai-doomers-have-warned-of-the-tech-pocalypse–while-doing-their-best-to-accelerate-it/

Tozer, L., Nagendra, H., Anderson, P. and Kavonic, J. (2023). Towards just nature-based solutions for cities. In Nature-Based Solutions for Cities, eds., T. McPhearson, N. Kabisch, & N. Frantzeskaki, pp. 29-47. Elgar. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800376762.00011

Varon, J. & Peña, P. (2021). Building a Feminist toolkit to question A.I. systems. Why is A.I. a Feminist Issue? Retrieved from https://notmy.ai/news/algorithmic-emancipation-building-a-feminist-toolkit-to-question-a-i-systems/