HomeFictions, Technologies, Practices of Care
Published on Tuesday, January 19, 2021
Abstract
Nebulx apt get fict -404 () project is about the ways in which lives, human and non-humanalike, are entangled with contemporary technologies, and tries to(re)define care consequently. We offer to create a digital journal developing experimental writing modes in order to explore narrative, descriptive and speculative possibilities about contemporary technologies. We encourage the fictionalization of non-fictional materials and/or fieldwork materials (archives, interviews, testimonies, field notes, diaries).
Announcement
Our project
Contemporary technologies affect us physically, psychically, and socially. By contemporary technologies, we mean all kinds of technical dispositifs which are based on coding. Those technologies model our feelings and behaviors by entailingaddiction; they predict who we will be and will have been, preempting our selves as if they were commodities; they alter how we relate to ourselves, to our communities and to the living beings with whom we share a territory. By creating milieus one could call prosthetic - because those milieus shape and/or substitute our organic relationship to the real world - those technologies disrupt our attention and our relationship to time and space. Breaches, connections, displacements, accelerations, stagnations, lags, fragmentations are features of contemporary attentional regimes.
Considering how intricately our lives and those technologies are entangled, the NebulX project claims that overhauling what "care" means is necessary, because "care" is essential to human mediations which shape individuals and societies.
Our project is looking for answers to the following questions: what strategies can we elaborate in order to respond to contemporary technologies and the way they transform how we relate to the world? What kind of struggles, resistances, alliances, surrenders, and threats go together with the deployment of technologies in our physical, psychic, and social ecologies?
NébulX apt get fict -404 () offers to tackle this question through fiction. We encourage the fictionalization of non-fictional materials and/or fieldwork materials (archives, interviews, testimonies, field notes, diaries). In Robot Futures, robotist Illah Reza Nourbakhsh [1] intimately interweaves science-fiction short stories and essays in order to imagine what everyday life would look like, were we to share it with artificial intelligences. Drawing from that practice, NébulX offers to create a digital journal developing experimental writing modes, literary as well as multimedia, in order to explore other narrative possibilities. Our approach is both descriptive and speculative. We aim at investigating the ways in which lives, human and non-human alike, are entangled with contemporary technologies, and at thinking how to (re)define care consequently.
We will pay close attention to proposals involving science-fiction, which we define as a fictionalized and futurized description of what is already happening.
Editorial Categories
- Digital Technologies & Pathologies: Addictions, dependencies, attentional politics and instrumentation [How do technologies impact our conceptions of health and sickness?]
- Health Technologies: Prosthetic bodies, use of technologies in the field of health [How do technologies transform our relationships to our bodies?]
- Techno-politics: Prediction and techno-capitalist temporality, governance by/for algorithms, surveillance technologies, access inequalities [How do capitalist technologies transform our relationships to time, space, and power?]
- Artificial animalities, vegetalities, micro-organisms: Synthetic life forms, cultures in depleted environments, imaginaries of life [How do we observe and represent life forms through technologies? How do technologies modify the way we relate to them?]
- Technological Materials: Extraction, infrastructure, energy, storage, waste, pollution, retrieval, appropriation, sabotage [What are the trajectories of technological artefacts, materially speaking?]
- Identities & Subjectivities: Capturing of the selves through (big) data and computation, technological racism, altering of the relationship one has to oneself, reformulating identities, genre modulations, resisting to the recording of data and capture of the selves [How do technologies transform our relationship to ourselves and to identity?]
- Labor Technologies: Click labor, artificial intelligences, involvement of technologies in production and reproduction [How do technologies transform labor and laborers under the techno-capitalist regime?]
- Fragments of the Love Network: Attachments and digital interfaces [How do technologies influence our emotional and affectional lives and our socializing modes?]
- Oneiric Technologies: Technological imaginaries, presence of technologies in dreams, technological access to dreams, technological possibilities and impossibilities, science-fiction [How do technologies appear in oneiric spaces and times? Could we imagine alternative technological worlds?]
Who can participate?
This call is addressed to tech workers, artists, writers, poets, students, and researchers in human and social sciences as well as in sciences.
Languages
Fictions can be produced in any language. However, for practical reasons, proposals which draw on text would have to be accompanied by a French or an English translation. If you encounter any kind of difficulty, please do not hesitate to reach out to us: nebulx404@protonmail.com.
Formats: NébulX project welcomes all kinds of creation: text (short story, poem, experimental essay...), images (photographs, drawings...), audiovisual or audio materials, mixed multimedia materials. Accepted formats: .odt ; .docx; .pdf; .mp3; .mp4
Timeline
-
November 30, 2020 – February 28, 2021 : submissions
- March 30, 2021 : notice about selection
- May 1st, 2021 : delivery (1st version)
- May-June 2021 : feed-back, editing, touch-up, etc.
- July 15, 2021 : launching
How to submit?
We expect a proposal of 3000 characters maximum. The proposal will explain what your creation would look like (materials, format, themes, issues, story-line, extracts, etc.), the themes/editorial categories in which it inscribes itself, and the reasons why you think that your creation matches the intentions of the NébulX project.
Send the proposal to: nebulx404@protonmail.com
About us: NébulX is a nebula gathering PhD students, young researchers, and artists who are committed to addressing the themes of attention, psychic care, and human and other-than-human ecologies in their relation to new technologies. A diffuse cluster made of dreams and ideas, we want to experiment new writing modes in order to explore novel political and technological arrangements. For any additional information, please feel free to reach out to us: nebulx404@protonmail.com.
The project is supported by the Research School ArTec and the ComUE Paris Lumières University.
Note
[1]Illah Reza Nourbakhsh, Robot Futures, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2013.
Subjects
- Epistemology and methodology (Main category)
- Mind and language > Information > Information sciences
- Mind and language > Language > Literature
- Mind and language > Representation > Visual studies
- Mind and language > Epistemology and methodology > Epistemology
- Mind and language > Epistemology and methodology > Methods of processing and representation
- Mind and language > Epistemology and methodology > Corpus approaches, surveys, archives
- Mind and language > Epistemology and methodology > Digital humanities
Date(s)
- Sunday, February 28, 2021
Keywords
- technologie, soin, science-fiction, épistémologie, enquête
Reference Urls
Information source
- Coline Fournout
courriel : nebulx404 [at] protonmail [dot] com
License
This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.
To cite this announcement
« Fictions, Technologies, Practices of Care », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Tuesday, January 19, 2021, https://doi.org/10.58079/15tl
