[spsp-members] CfP: #mediaopera - Recomposing Agency / Technology and Language

[Alfred Nordmann]

A new issue of "Technology and Language" has appeared - altogether the 
14th - and with it a new call that invites contributions from history, 
art theory, musicology, media and cultural studies, and philosophy:

https://soctech.spbstu.ru/en/issue/14/

www.philosophie.tu-darmstadt.de/T_and_L

The most recent issue is dedicated to the Hermeneutics of Technology. 
For a long time, hermeneutics was confined to the humanities and arts, 
to legal and religious studies, and to the exegesis primarily of texts. 
In recent years, however, the hermeneutics of science and technology 
came into its own, along with questions of „scientific understanding“ or 
„hermeneutic Technology Assessment,“ and along with the challenges posed 
by Artificial Intelligence or quantum technology which appear to elude 
human comprehension as did the steam engine in the 19th century. 
Sense-making becomes especially important in a so-called culture of 
prediction, robustness, and reliability - with hermeneutics a critical 
method for analyzing and evaluating the various ways of making sense. 
This extends to the conceptions of technology in particular cultures or 
the practice of technology assessment. Nine papers highlight vario Guest 
edited by WU Guolin and LIU Dong (South China University of Technology 
in Guangzhou).

New Call for Contributions:

#mediaopera. Recomposing Agency (deadline: Dec 15, 2024), guest editor: 
Cheryce von Xylander. The word „opus“ refers to a technically or 
artfully produced work. The plural form „opera“ refers to an art-form 
that draws together many artists and technicians - musicians, singers, 
dancers, architects and builders of the space, costume and light 
designers, and then writer(s) and composer(s), conductor(s) and 
stage-director(s) who bring all this together. Opera presents a 
multi-media production of an artfully created world that affords a 
cultural experience, surpassed in scale of production only by another 
operatic art-form - the cinema. Both, classical opera and the cinema 
rely on the emergence of the city with its sensory modalities and urban 
concentration of technical competence. Akin to the medieval and 
renaissance Cathedral, modern opera and cinema enable assembly — and the 
„Gesamtkunstwerk“ finally constellated is arguably never completed. Such 
artworks engender affiliation across disparate nodes of engagement. Not 
only the cinema has been transformed by video which is now routinely 
incorporated in opera stagings and, most recently, spawned a whole new 
genre of „mediaoperas“ - such as „Einstein and Margarita,“ „Theremin’s 
Last Secret,“ or „Pink Mouse“ by Iraida Yusupova. Is this simply a 
continuation of the tradition of the complete art work by other means? 
Or is something genuinely new in play? — While there will be a special 
focus on Yusupova’s mediaoperas, we invite contributions from history, 
art theory, media studies, data science, sociology, philosophy, and 
related fields to consider more generally the configuration of aesthesis 
in social space: How are technical media and sensory modalities 
organised in spectacular art-forms which herald the historical changes 
they exemplify? Looking at the principles of composition or pattern 
recognition brings to light the role of context, narrative, ritual, 
notations, codes, scripts, and data. And treating operas as „works“ of 
collective production shows cathedrals, opera-houses, Hollywood movies, 
and video productions to be aggregation machines that exhibit different 
forms of agency.

Other open calls (shortened):

„ChatGPT and the Voices of Reason, Responsibility, and Regulation“ 
(inquire about submissions by May 10) — ChatGPT reconfigures the public 
sphere. It brings to a head the question: Must we mean what we say? How 
to take responsibility for artificially produced text - and how in 
different technopolitical traditions to regulate it. The special issue 
seeks to highlight three aspects: 1) Large language models (LLMs) and 
the culture of dialogue in the context of human-machine interaction. 
Will a new way of asking questions bring us into a new world of 
thinking? 2) „Garbage in, garbage out“ - training effects, 
re-enforcement learning, transparency and the problems of an open or 
closed society. 3) Legal regulation of ChatGPT in various sociocultural 
contexts, technical and technocratic governance as societies confront 
the question of how an intelligence should behave and how it can be 
bound to the truth. (guest editors: Elena Seredkina, LIU Yongmou)

„Speculative Technologies“ (deadline: July 5, 2024) — It is a 
distinctive feature of human language that we can refer to things that 
aren't there - to events in the future or the past and even to things 
that wiill never exist. Does this hold for technology as well? Can 
machines and other technical schemes refer to impossibilities? Can they 
invite us to engage in hypothetical thinking about alternate worlds? And 
where do they come from, what is the cultural or socio-technical milieu 
for their conception? Astronomical clocks invoke ideas of the cosmic 
order, a perpetuum mobile reflects the human ambition to conquer 
physical limits, von Kempelen’s chess player challenges humans to 
question human and machine intelligence, prototypes herald an imagined 
future, envisioned carbon reduction technologies enter into calculations 
of climate futures - and a machine that is standing still holds the 
secret to that machine in motion. There is a long tradition of 
wish-fullfilment machines (quantum computers, fusion reactors), and a 
long tradition of difference engines with different settings for various 
contingencies. We invite historical reconstructions, philosophical 
reflections, and cultural technology assessments on this range of 
subjects. (guest editors: Anna Kotomina and Colin Milburn)

“Translation - Theory and Technology” (deadline: Oct 5, 2024) —A 
mechanical device delivers faithful translations of rotary motion into 
the vertical back and forth of a beam - and vice versa. Ludwig 
Wittgenstein analogized translation to the ways in which a musical 
performance can be mapped onto the grooves of a gramophone record as 
well as a score - no interpretation involved. And if only the data set 
is big enough, new computer applications for translating between natural 
languages require nothing but the discovery of correlations in the 
occurrence of words in phrases - again, no interpretation involved. To 
be sure, there are other conceptions which highlight gains and losses, 
proximity and distance, inventiveness and transformation in the process 
of translation. If one thinks of translation as a kind of transport from 
the one bank of a river to the other side, this would be akin to the 
work of engineers who transport knowledge of functional regularities in 
biological systems into the sphere of human devices. And if one thinks 
of the techniques and collaborative arrangements for rendering old 
meanings in new settings, one will appreciate how new works and new 
ideas are created. — Considered for its linguistic as well as technical 
dimensions, the art of translation will be of interest not only to 
philosophers, linguists, and literary scholars, but also to cultural 
studies, biomimetics, mathematics and engineering. (guest editors: 
Andrea Breard and Marco Tamborini)

Beyond these calls for special topics, any submitted paper and 
interdisciplinary exploration at the interface of technology and 
language is always welcome. The next deadline for submitted papers in 
English or Russian is July 10, 2024.

Queries, suggestions, and submissions can be addressed to 
soctech at spbstu.ru or to Daria Bylieva (bylieva_ds at spbstu.ru) and Alfred 
Nordmann (nordmann at phil.tu-darmstadt.de).

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Alfred Nordmann
Professor em. Institut für Philosophie, TU Darmstadt
Residenzschloss 1, 64283 Darmstadt, Germany (mailing address)
Glockenbau im Schloss S3|15 206 (physical address)
* Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, University of South Carolina, USA
* Guest Professor Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University
* President-elect Society for Philosophy and Technology (SPT) www.spt.org
* Book series www.routledge.com/series/TECHNO
* Journal Technology and Language https://soctech.spbstu.ru/en/
* Yearbook Jahrbuch Technikphilosophie www.jtphil.nomos.de
* IANUS-Verein für friedensorientierte Technikgestaltung 
www.ianus-peacelab.de
Homepage www.philosophie.tu-darmstadt.de/nordmann
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