Jan Løhmann Stephensen, aekjls@cc.au.dk

The proposed themes in this panel are how the application of AI-based technologies might (1) impact the fields of creativity and/or art-making on the level of production aesthetics (new formats, practices, audience relations, etc.); (2) reconfigure our various notions of creativity and all the practices that are subsumed under these notions; and (3) influence broader discussions concerning for instance the future of work (automation, robotisation, etc.) and our societal frameworks (e.g. legal issues concerning ownership and intellectual property, taxation, labor rights, etc.) that also follow from the potential disruption of the cultural and creative industries as ecologies of production.

Lotte Philipsen, lottephilipsen@cc.au.dk

This panel explores interrelations between artificial intelligence and contemporary visual culture. Today, AI image analysis and image generation flourish in several different domains (e.g., news imagery, transport, artistic practice, private photography, the culture industry, policing). The panel investigates how AI (possibly) transforms our conception of vision, our use of images, and image technologies’ use of us. While the distributed ecologies of AI images cut across traditional borders such as visible/invisible and human/machine, the panel especially welcomes papers that analyze concrete AI image practice(s) and discuss their possible cultural implications.

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, madsrt@cc.au.dk

Automation plays an increasing role in text production. Its impact is felt in translation and news media, as well as in the rise of grammar assistants and text generators that more and more seem to appear creative. This panel will discuss how automated writing changes fields, offers new perspectives for creativity and quality, and how automated writing can be studied across disciplines.

Jacob Wamberg (kunjw@cc.au.dk), Finn Olesen (finno@cc.au.dk) & Cathrine Hasse (caha@edu.au.dk)

How do we mobilize AI to generate genuinely new knowledge and, more broadly, new behaviors? Across their modes of operation, it seems fair to say that closed circuits of AI will project past solutions into the future. Algorithms tackle problems according to preprogrammed logical procedures, and neural networks match new situations with the patterns they have extracted from masses of old ones. In this panel we shall therefore examine how it is possible to generate new patterns – that is, to move into the spere of becoming – by integrating circuits of AI. Was Henri Bergson right in thinking that the intellectual sphere, which may be extendable into the calculation of AI, was alien to the potential of becoming, and accordingly that the genuinely new knowledge may only emerge, when AI circuits are broken open to the material surroundings and integrate their agencies, e.g. in Latourian networks of actors? Or may the new also emerge inside the circuits themselves, for instance through the indeterminacy of quantum computing? In this panel we welcome philosophically oriented contributions that reflect on AI’s role in mediating between past and future.

Shoshannah Ganz, shganz@grenfell.mun.ca 

Fiction has long been imagining a posthuman or even transhuman future where artificial intelligence in the form of cyborgs and more-than-human machines expand human possibilities or transcend the limits of the human animal. AI is used by posthuman theorists to question humanist ideals of progress and at the same time also used by transhumanists to suggest the culmination of humanist aspirations in the cyborg. In a posthuman context, AI literature enters a discourse that unseats the human as the only rational and language-capable animal thereby upsetting human hierarchies and the various binaries upheld through humanist thought.

Critical Data Analysis of ELO 2021, Platform (Post?) Pandemic conference

Christian Ulrik Andersen, Malthe Stavning Erslev, Pablo Rodrigo Velasco González & Søren Bro Pold.

The 2021 ELO conference, co-chaired by Aarhus and Bergen universities in May 2021, was planned and executed as a fully virtual event with the general theme Platform (Post?) Pandemic (ELO 2021). The theme led to numerous discussions of the concept of platforms in general and in electronic literature (e-lit). We experienced historical perspectives, discussions of contemporary critical issues with platforms such as criticism with/through art/e-lit, creation of artistic alternatives to major platforms, discussions of how platform culture relates to the pandemic situation and discussions of the definitions and potentials of platforms. Furthermore, the conference itself was held on platforms, thus its critical reflection on platforms relied heavily on the use of commercial platforms.

However, it is difficult to get a concise overview of the 5 conference days’ 62 tracks and our experience is obviously limited. This left us with the questions of whether there is a different way to map this through data analysis, including the sub-question of how the platforms themselves map and frame such a conference, and what could be the platform perspective on this platform critical conference?

We have been experimenting with mapping the conference through data analysis of its recorded and transcribed parts. With the assistance of students (Anne Nielsen, Magnus Wittrup & Jakob Kleofas Adolph) we operated three analytical approaches: human close-reading of data with a focus on the contexts of main keywords (‘platform’, ‘pandemic’, ‘conference’); a Gephi-based (Bastian et al.) network analysis and mapping of co-occurring words; and a mapping of the 1000 most occurring word-pairs done with Python’s Natural Language Toolkit and Pyvis.

Durings this process, we found that our approach was not merely a tool to produce findings; rather, we began viewing the data analysis as itself a form of electronic literature. This e-lit perspective affords a “critical reflection on the role of the digital (…) in humanistic inquiry” (Berner). As such, our efforts exemplify a “co-creation of critical discourse and poiesis” which characterizes the ethos of e-lit in a digital humanities context (Rettberg and Saum-Pascual).

This panel will present our research and discuss what we learned by operating the mentioned methods for observing the data generated by artists and academics in a virtual conference on platforms – and what it means to understand such data as itself a form of e-lit. We will divide the panel into four parts: 1) How does the conference see platforms? 2) How do platforms see the conference? 3) How to "read" or "see" a data-orama? And 4) Platform poems - conference data as electronic literature.