Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 236.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2023-09-30 15:14:40+00:00
        From: Sayan Bhattacharyya <bhattach@umich.edu>
        Subject: CFP for ACLA conference seminar "AI and/as Form" (deadline 11:59 PM PDT, Saturday September 30)

At the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA)'s annual
conference next year (to be held in Montreal during March 14th-17th,
2024), Gabriel Hankins and I are organizing a seminar on "AI and/as
Form" (link is below).

Please check out our call for papers (CFP) below, which is posted on
ACLA's portal, and consider sending abstracts. (The ACLA-specified hard
limit on abstract length is: 1500 characters (incl. spaces), which
usually is equivalent to about 300 words.)

ACLA's portal to propose a paper will close at 11:59 PM PDT, Saturday
September 30.

URL; https://www.acla.org/ai-andas-form <https://www.acla.org/ai-andas-form>


   AI and/as Form

Organizers:
Sayan Bhattacharyya, Lecturer, Humanities Program, Yale University

Gabriel Hankins, Associate Professor, English, Clemson University

How does aesthetic, material, and theoretic form relate to the current
generative AI revolution? How should we critique the ideological and
material consequences of the “textpocalypse” and the deeply fake world?
To what new tools and metaphors to think with may AI lead, in terms of
forms of cultural production and contestation or formulations of
posthumanist theories of language and mind? Should AI be regulated,
restricted, refused, or re-employed? We seek to intervene in these
debates by addressing the question of AI and/as /form/, the latter term
including, but not limited to, such forms as: generated writing and
visual “art,” fossilized labor, digitally enclosed commons, and the
statistical and textual formalisms functionalized in “content”
production. While a special issue of /New Literary History/ on the topic
of “Culture, Theory, Data,” an issue of /American Studies/ devoted to
“Critical AI Studies,” and a forum in /Critical Inquiry /(“Again Theory:
A Forum on Language, Meaning, and Intent”) have recently//addressed some
of the above issues, our seminar seeks a more focused and direct
engagement with the question of AI and form. Abstracts (max 1500 chars
incl. space) can pose these and other questions:

   * How to understand the form and affordances of generative AI? What
     does AI enable, how does it constrain, and what does it preclude?

   * What kinds of formal arguments are enabled or precluded by
     generative AI? How does the blackboxing of sources and training
     datasets matter to such arguments?

   * How do literary/political formalisms relate to those digital
     formalisms that best describe AI?

   * What happens to the epistemological and ontological status of the
     work of art, as mechanical and then digital reproduction shift to
     generative and remixed forms?

   * How can scholars of literature and culture illuminate binaries of
     truth/falsity, mediation/immediacy, and authenticity/fakery in the
     context of AI?

   * How, in the AI era, may scholars of form take up questions of
     pattern, structure, and repetition in visual, textual or sonic arts?

   * What are the contours of the emergent area of generative-AI
     aesthetics? What are its possible tactical/strategic uses?

   * How do critics of genre, power, coloniality and gender address the
     era of AI? What are key informing discourses, epistemic frames and
     ideologies that AI makes (in)visible?

   * Forms of extraction: In what extractive contexts and ecologies, and
     out of which labor régimes or industries, does AI emerge? Towards
     what new forms of creative extraction will it be employed?

   * How does /writing about form/, or /the form of writing/, change
     after generative AI?

   * What new forms of regulation, restriction, reuse and remixing does
     generative AI call for? How does it intersect with the forms and
     categories that constitute neoliberal capitalism? What new
     enclosures does it represent, and what kinds of commoning practices
     might it call for?


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