CALL FOR PAPERS: SPECIAL COLLECTION ON CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF
MACHINE VISION

Abstracts due 1 Oct/ Decisions 15 Oct/ Full papers due 15 Jan

Editors: Jill Walker Rettberg, Gabriele de Seta, Marianne Gunderson,
Linda Kronman(University of Bergen)(Contact: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
<mailto:[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> or [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
<mailto:[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>)

The ERC project Machine Vision in Everyday Life invites submissions to a
collection of papers dedicated to the representation of machine vision
technologies in cultural and creative works including fictional
narratives, videogames, and artworks. The collection will be published
in the Open Library of Humanities or a similar university-funded open
access journal. No payment from authors will be required.

As visual technologies are increasingly automated, using machine
learning to interpret and generate images, societies around the globe
face practical and ethical questions about how machine vision
technologies should be implemented, evaluated and governed as they
impact people’s everyday life. With their anticipatory and speculative
potential, cultural representations of machine vision play a key role in
answering these questions.

Our premise is that cultural production – including literature, art,
cinema, video games, science fiction, memes, fandom and more – is a rich
source for understanding the impact of machine vision technologies on
society, as well as their potential future trajectory. What can we learn
from how machine vision is represented, used and discussed in digital
art, video games, novels, movies, TV-series, fan fiction, electronic
literature, popular culture, social media content and other
aesthetically or culturally expressive genres?

The Special Collection welcomes submissions engaging with the project’s
dataset on machine vision in 500 creative works (see references below)
as well as qualitative analyses, close readings and speculative studies
of machine vision in fiction, art, games, social media narratives, and
other forms of cultural production. Creative contributions such as
artworks or short fictions are also welcome.

Potential topics include:

                  •              Science fictional representations of
machine vision

                  •              The use of machine vision technologies
in contemporary art

                  •              Machine vision in videogames, board
games or role-playing games

                  •              Cross-cultural comparisons of machine
vision imaginaries

                  •              Corporate science fiction and the
marketing of automated vision

                  •              Imaginations and figurations of the
machine vision user

                  •              Surveillance assemblages and
surveillant landscapes

                  •              Narratives of trust and distrust in
machine vision

                  •              Machine vision and emotions

                  •              Analyses of the Database of Machine
Vision in Art, Games and Narrative

We encourage submissions from scholars from disciplines including
Communication and Media Studies, Digital Culture, Digital Humanities,
Digital Anthropology, Visual Studies, Art History, Literary Studies,
Science and Technology Studies and related fields.

Submission guidelines: Send your 250-word abstract to
[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> by 1 October 2022. Invitations to contribute
will be delivered by 15 October 2022, and full-length submissions will
be due by 15 January 2023. The Open Library for Humanities offers Open
Access publishing with no author-facing processing fees, and publishes
submissions on a rolling basis as soon as they are accepted, so we are
aiming at a speedy publication starting from February/March 2023.

REFERENCES

Contributors are encouraged to engage with the project dataset,
available on DataverseNO:

Rettberg JW, Kronman L, Solberg R, et al. (2022) A Dataset Documenting
Representations of Machine Vision Technologies in Artworks, Games and
Narratives. DataverseNO. DOI: 10.18710/2G0XKN.

The data can also be browsed in a more human-readable database:
http://secure-web.cisco.com/1SaabJLZEiV9tpZxB-TeMaIRz3ZOHYoBObL4xB5oP2m4Gnp3FVelDS3zOPq68CihVuVjFsD2a7IR2xFmiOEaOWRyPFCvrg0giTTC7u9t_JG9t4WT7awVC-2XZuuDEB7qMzjH8wgJPt3KpvcgIdiFhZ8yWypzAPzw0KdPXT6UhXB2yS1q-ztwdJCseh-LDbXvArFeKWaX18VkTsU4djf8Hd7W2twMNdP2zaz12MBAYgSF7qELva8b9mZwUjuMr47omNaYpSLpBixIO1M-tdqczOxjDA1wdA84fa5NoDnAyd-h-dqkJiksxOzd2PtorLGC1l39YwRleHT4nayXOFP2Chuz8dR9dcQG4c1WZo4ULsgxBRbdBiQzLHCZcFnxG_RyPWfFZZhaFDaUnL8soeS7DGZUf9fOiAnBncbPMjVEm5To8EZBP433LvlikRDiyXGNda4XtI9048U2njhKlTuiTaQ/http%3A%2F%2Fmachine-vision.no

More information on the data is available in this data paper:

Rettberg JW, Kronman L, Solberg R, et al. (2022) Representations of
Machine Vision Technologies in Artworks, Games and Narratives:
Documentation of a Dataset. Data in Brief. DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2022.108319.