Tag Archives: conference

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AI and the Weird

In February I was at Loughborough University’s London campus to speak about AI and HCI, at an event called Building Trust in AI: Designing for Consent – a double-bill talk, as it were, with Prof. Shaun Lawson of the NorSC Lab at Northumbria University. I spoke mostly about the evidence I’d given to the UK Parliament to an audience of lawyers, ML engineers, and HCI scholars.

In April I was in Germany once again, at the University of Göttingen, for a conference on The American Weird: Ecologies & Geographies. My paper was on ‘400 Years of Millennialism: a Doxa of the American Weird’, and a book is forthcoming.

At some point during the summer, but I’m not entirely sure when, the paper I wrote with my long-standing Lincoln Institute of Social Computing collaborators, now at Cork, York, and Northumbria, was published in Funology 2: “Playful Research Fiction: A Fictional Conference”.

And in November I spoke at the entirely splendid KFFK.de – the Cologne Short Film Festival – about why our cultural visions of an artificially intelligent future are so often dystopian warnings.

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Virtual Futures 2.0’11 programme

Virtual Futures 2.0’11

The speakers list and programme for Virtual Futures 2.0’11, to be held at Warwick University on the 18th and 19th of June, have been released. I’ll be there giving the opening plenary, talking about “Non-Human Agencies: A Skeuomorphological Account”.

It’s a great line-up: Stelarc returns, as do Rachel Armstrong, Ian Stewart, Jim Flint, Mark Fisher, Diane Gromala, Sue Thomas, Pat Cadigan, Richard Barbrook, Nick Fox, Martyn Amos, and o(rphan)d(rift>); plus Kevin Warwick, Sue Golding, Andy Miah, Alan Chalmers, Steve Fuller, Jeremy Wyatt… No Hakim Bey this time, though. Registration is now live.

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Virtual Futures returns

Fifteen years ago, I wrote in the TLS that the rate of social change was itself accelerating. This year, I find myself the victim of my own prophecy.

At Warwick University on the 18-19 June, an event resurrecting Virtual Futures, Virtual Futures 2.0’11, takes place, organized by Luke Robert Mason, who’s doing his research thesis on the influence the conference had upon philosophy, technology, and culture, and investigating the ways in which VF led to modern synthetic biology, living architecture, and transhumanism.

It’s both extremely flattering and mindsplittingly frightening for a jobbing academic to find his activities of a mere fifteen years ago the subject of new research and conferences. I seem to be becoming-historical, as Deleuze might have said.

Anyone who was at the original conferences is especially asked to get in touch with the organizer, Luke; the line-up of speakers already looks like TED to the power of n

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Forthcoming talks, part 1

A proleptic roundup of some conference talks & guest lectures:

On the 24th of April I’m speaking at Modernism and Utopia: Convergences in the Arts about “The Machinery Underground: Subterranean Space and Modernist Utopias”. This is a 2-day conference on the 23rd and 24th at the University of Birmingham, UK.

On the 11th of June I’m talking with Alex Burghart at l’Université Paris IV-Sorbonne on “Ruins of statues and the dystopian landscape”. This presentation is part of a book we’ve been writing on the apocalyptic imaginary in English and American history; the event is a symposium organized by Prof. Jacques Carré on «Utopie, ville et paysage dans le monde anglophone». It runs on the 11th and the 12th.

On the 17th & 18th of September at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany, I’ll give a paper at the conference Contemporary British Fiction: Narrating Violence, Trauma and Loss, on “Traumatic Irony: A Model of Unintentional Disclosure”.

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Reports from the Ballard conference

The Ballard conference at UEA was quite a plateau of sustained intensity. At the always-excellent Ballardian there’s a very comprehensive overview of the weekend, with links and trackbacks to other blogs with write-ups. And quite extraordinarily, Ballardian scholarship has its very own recording angel, Rick McGrath, at whose site there’s now an archive of many of the papers in audio, with photos and abstracts.

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UEA Ballard conference

There’s much more information now available on the conference on J. G. Ballard, on the 5th and 6th of May at UEA. As well as the full programme of events, there are also abstracts now online.

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Conference on J. G. Ballard

On the 5th and 6th of May there’s the first ever conference on Ballard’s work, held at the University of East Anglia. Called “From Shanghai to Shepperton”: An International Conference on J.G. Ballard, it’s a pretty wide-ranging event, with over 40 speakers involved. There’s even a session on Ballard and Deleuze, which sadly I’ll miss, as at the same time I’m speaking in another session, on “Reading Posture and Gesture in Ballard’s Novels”. This is clearly some kind of divine punishment for writing something which isn’t about Deleuze… The final programme is now available at the conference website (follow the above link).

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