- HOME
- Call for papers
Call for papers English Version
Call for papers
InterArtes, n. 3, 2023
Editors-In-Chief: Laura Brignoli, Silvia Zangrandi
Department of Humanities
Università IULM - Milan
AI: ArtIntelligence
In the first two issues of InterArtes, we dealt with 'border permeability' and 'hybridisation' as fundamental concepts of contemporaneity. There is also another boundary that this journal ‒ dedicated as it is to research and reflection on artistic phenomena considered in their most broadly multi-semiotic and inter-semiotic sense ‒ cannot fail to attend to carefully, all the more so in an era of experimental hybridisations that seem to aspire to its abolition. That boundary is between what we call artistic creation and what is instead the product of automation.
Artificial intelligence and the search for unlimited energy sources characterise the current, powerful trend towards an increasingly efficient 'algorithmisation' and artificialisation of all human activity, which is particularly affecting the 'arts', understood in the broadest sense as practical fields inextricably dependent by their nature on historically particular contexts. In principle, this makes every art irreducible to the utopias/dystopias of overarching control and replicability. This is why, until a few decades ago, artistic and academic-scientific cultures could easily criticise the Mechanism of technologising fantasies, contrasting it with the complex singularity of each creative phenomenon. Today, we are witnessing a manifest reversal of perspectives: technological advances seem to point towards the artificial creation of complex singularities, i.e. towards the imitation or duplication of vital systems and their characteristic ability to maintain themselves over time while continually varying and managing a certain amount of entirely anti-mechanistic unpredictability. The process of artistic creation is clearly at the heart of this paradigm shift whose implications are as much aesthetic and scientific as they are ethical, political, and then legal, economic, social, environmental...
For these reasons, the third issue of InterArtes will be devoted to critically questioning the relationship between "Artistic Creativity and Automation", both with theoretical contributions and with essays of a historical and empirical nature.
-
- To what extent, on a speculative level and on the level of contemporary artistic practices, are these terms irreducible, if not downright contrary?
- What specific contributions has neuroscientific research of recent decades made to investigating this question?
- Which works, currents, schools, and poetics have made it - in an explicitly ideologised or implicitly depicted way, in an oppositional or analogical perspective - a conceptual dyad that is, in fact, operational?
- To what extent is the landscape of contemporary art and literature characterised by artistic explorations of the expressive potential of a growing mass of technological innovations, and to what extent, on the other hand, are research and technological development aiming to replace human subjectivity even in artistic and literary creation?
These questions should be set against the backdrop of the more general problem of the relationship between art and technology. Their common semantic root in the classical Greek idea of techne makes all the more significant the clear divergence that they appear to have undergone ‒ on a political as well as socio-historical level ‒ with the rise, affirmation and current structural crisis of the thermo-industrial civilisation. This overshadows risks of self-extinction of the human species but at the same time fuels increasingly frenzied expectations of 'singularities' capable of transcending its physical and biological limits.
Among the research questions that this issue of InterArtes wishes to stimulate us to investigate, through one or more fields of artistic and literary production or aesthetic reflection, are, by way of example and without any claim to exhaustiveness:
-
- Which practices and issues, from a historical perspective or that of contemporary experimentation and criticism, are inherent to the idea of automation of the creative process? Which, on the other hand, are inherent to the use of algorithms and automation technologies for non-automated creativity?
- What particular points of contact and distinctive elements characterise the theoretical comparison between literary practices of rewriting (and their analogues in other arts) and algorithmic proceduralisation of creative processes?
- What boundaries, respective peculiarities, and possible entanglements and hybridisations exist between human subjectivity and emerging 'artificial' subjectivities (AI) in artistic creation and enjoyment?
- What forms (and historical-aesthetic dynamics) of artistic resistance to the dehumanisation or transhumanisation of the creative process is it possible to map in the contemporary and mid-period of the long rise of automation technologies?
- In which literary and artistic works and research can we find forms of representation of this problem?
Methods of submission
The texts proposed, which will have a theoretical or analytical framework with theoretical premises, must be unpublished and written in Word format, in compliance with the journal's editorial rules published on the website, and will be subject to double-blind peer review.
Languages accepted: Italian, English, French.
Articles should be sent, accompanied by a brief bio-bibliographical note, by 15 June 2023 to: [email protected]