POM Aachen 2024

Overview

Politics of the Machines
Lifelikeness & beyond
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The 4th POM Conference
RWTH Aachen University
KäteHamburger Kolleg:
Cultures of Research (c:o/re).
April 22-26, 2024

Life is in crisis. In society, this crisis has generated an uncertainty entangled with environmental injustices, health emergencies and the many faces of right-wing movements around the world – to mention some examples. Uncertainty might blurry the future and our capacity to make decisions, but it also opens up a space of possibilities. In this fragmented framework a new field for contingencies emerges. If we are unsure about what might be, alternative but unstable scenarios become possible. How does society react to those alternative scenarios? How are scientific and artistic communities responding to the various contingencies of the present?

Holistic life of the machine – The machinic beyond – What is it like to be a machine?

Track Chairs
Erich Berger (University of Oulu)
Aurora Del Rio (Aalto University)
Katri Naukkarinen (Aalto University)

Throughout this cycle and beyond its inherent machinic purpose, the machinic extends into a plethora of localities with a multitude of effects on life, landscapes, and potentials. Viewed in its entirety, it is now difficult to reduce a machine to its function alone as it presents characteristics alike to what we usually attribute to organisms. In light of these considerations, can one still state that the machine is non-living, or not alive? And what would define life, and lifelikeness, today?

As the machinic has expanded its substrate to silicon and DNA, the certainty of a clear statement that it is not alive collapses. But instead of looking for new boundaries and definitions of life to externalize the machinic, we would like to ask: What is it like to be a machine? And then again: Are we willing to allow the machine to tell its story?

Returning to a human perspective, a simplistic reduction of the machinic to its function further obscures what happens before and after this very function. This is not only to ask about when is the onset of the machinic of a machine and when it ceases, but to invite a host of new questions. Specifically, when novel machines adopt functions like reproduction and adaptation, the real shift from lifelikeness to ‘alive’ is finally made. It is within this very shift that this new machinic could paradoxically be showing scientific evidence of animist perspectives, and thus in a way closing the circle of objectification.

Furthermore: if one way of considering the machine’s birth is seeing it as a sort of prosthetic, or utensil handled as a way of enhancing what a body is capable of, this recent conversion of the machine into its own lively organism fosters a major shift in perspective when considering the ending of such a life. In its afterlife, indeed, the machine becomes a present remnant of its own past, moving into its ghostly life ready to produce and haunt its own spectral landscapes. Take for example the meltdown of Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986. While the resulting fallout is still environmentally detectable in many of the exposed countries, this contamination will remain in need of multigenerational care: the ghost of the machine expands through time and space.

One can say that the machinic afterlife presents a way of re-enchanting technology, following Weber’s thoughts. But further questions are generated in considering the machinic relation to human politics and the course of action to undertake in certain situations. How should politics consider justice, care, and compassion when the scales of time go beyond our temporal comfort zones? And, how to care about the undesirable and the difficult? Is it possible to integrate or turn the undesirable into something lovable and acceptable, in order to welcome it? Or, beyond value judgments, is the machine to be looked at as a simple presence, not this generation’s problem to think about?

Track Chairs
Kit Kuksenok

What artistic, practical, and speculative tools make care possible within complex biological systems? This track imagines mechanisms of care within the human body as a complex system.

Complex systems are difficult to computationally model or intuitively grasp, and are relevant to many different fields of study (see: Nicolis and Prigogine, 1989). The human body is implicated in many complex systems: interactions between body organs and pathways; interactions with microorganisms and pathogens; and interactions between human agents. These relationships include non-linearity and feedback loops, which can lead to emergent behaviors. Complex systems are difficult to understand or control directly, but can undergo regime shifts in response to sustained changes. Thus, care for such a system cannot include direct control.

This track asks for contributions that propose methods or mechanisms of care within the human body as a complex system. Potential questions to explore include: How do the proposed methods address the challenge of the body as a complex system – one that cannot be directly and reliably observed or controlled? How do the proposed methods explore non-linearity, feedback, or emergence within the body as a complex system?

Any proposed mechanism need not be technological in nature, but if it is, we are particularly interested in practices that domesticate technology (e.g. Mary Maggic); engage with medical knowledge through art (e.g. Šlesingerová et. al., 2017); empower self-understanding (Sanders, 2017); and support collaborative body knowledge-building (e.g. Satsia, Kuksenok, 2021). We invite contributions across and between and beyond disciplines, including, for example: self-experimentation and self-reflection; visual and performance art; speculative fiction and design. Reflections on the subject of mechanisms of bodily care may also reject methodological approaches, and address the human body in a different way entirely.

Contributors are asked to submit an abstract of 500-750 words for participation in a presentation of their work, and brief panel reflection. Images are welcome, and references and captions do not count toward the word limit; both academic and experimental presentation formats are welcome and will be accommodated depending on their specific needs. Exhibition or performance needs should be mentioned in the abstract, and are additional to panel participation. Prior to the event, the track chair will reach out to the invited participants with additional information on what to expect from the panel; these questions will reflect the specific composition of the track, and therefore depend on the submissions.

Track Chairs
Gabriele Gramelsberger (Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cultures of Research, RWTH Aachen University)

One form to look at this is considering the shift from analytical techniques of research to synthetic ones (Gramelsberger, 2014). One example of this kind of development can be seen in synthetic biology, where design and engineering are central not only for the production of new biological elements and devices but to understanding how life is organized, how it operates, and what it is at all (Roosth, Helmreich; 2016). On the other hand, the changes in methodologies and models are narrated according to institutional and political constraints and frameworks (Roosth,
2017).

To understand the changes in the era of lifelike-research this panel looks both at the conceptual shifts in sciences after life has entered its models and methods and historical perspectives on these same shifts. What kind of research culture has given rise to lifelikeness as a concept? What kind of research culture emerges out of life entering computation? How are we to historicize the development of the appearance of life in computational sciences? We are interested in conceptual, methodological, and historical perspectives of lifelikeness research. Thus, we encourage researchers from these fields to submit a proposal for this track: from life sciences, philosophy of biology, philosophy and history of science, media studies, and STS. Other fields are as well welcomed if they are compatible with the concept of this track.

Track 07

Track Chairs
Benjamin Bacon (Duke Kunshan University, the Design, Technology and Radical Media Labs (DTRM))
Vivian Xu (DePaul University, the Design, Technology and Radical Media Labs (DTRM))
Boris Debackere (LUCA School of Arts, V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media)

This track calls on researchers, practitioners, and scholars to consider reality media within the digital sphere, biosphere, ecosphere, and geosphere to critique the limitations of current XR technologies and practices. We seek novel interventions within reality media that present actionable approaches to non-anthropocentric utopias through (1) papers, (2) workshops and (3) hybrid presentations that embrace XR technology for knowledge creation and transfer. Through the track, we incite ideas and concepts that can be developed into guides toward a future all-inclusive and ethical practice of immersive technology. The foundation for this work was developed by the XResearch Cluster, a collaborative research cluster between V2_Lab for the Unstable Media and the Design, Technology, and Radical Media Lab. We hope to generate sustained conversations about non-human-centric XR at the intersection of philosophy, creative practice, sciences, and technology.

Track 09

Track Chairs
Donovan Stewart (Leuphana University Lüneburg, Leiden University), Lijuan Klassen (Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (LMU))

The “crisis of life” announced by the becoming “life-like” of technology invites reflections on the ambiguous relationship between life and technology, challenging the common divisions of nature and culture, history and material environments, and human and non-human forms of life. In this track, Worlds of Camouflage: Environment, Technique, Response-ability, we hope to approach these themes by rethinking camouflage in its different guises and registers, drawing out their philosophical, political, and ethical implications.

Rather than having one origin, the concept of camouflage has a convoluted history, interwoven between zoology, evolutionary theory, the arts, and military science (Shell, 2012). To take one example, during the First and Second World Wars, cubist artists and naturalist scientists were hired to develop technologies of deception. By means of photography and taxidermy, these engineers sought to demonstrate the “natural laws” according to which non-human beings blend in with their environments, performing experiments that would flatten bodies (including those of moths, ducks, and hares,) into two-dimensional representations that were staged against static backgrounds. Paired with a neo-Darwinian ideology which characterised the natural world as a violent competition between species, these experiments reduced multitudes of non-human techniques of imitation and environmental responsiveness to pre-determined genetic properties and instinctual mechanisms to be appropriated for warfare technologies (Haraway 2008; Margulis & Sagan, 1997). This militaristic understanding of camouflage dogmatically presupposed that human beings are autonomous agents, free to utilise technologies to master their ostensibly inert natural environments.

And yet, underlying and enabling this anthropocentric thinking of camouflage, there is already lurking a radically different configuration of the relations of the human, non-human and techniques. Imagine a soldier in a field covered in foliage and branches—where does the “technology” of camouflage end and the “nature” of an environment begin? Here, rather than being a mere instrument, camouflage already problematises the supposedly clear delineations of human/nature/technology, attesting instead to the specific forms of engagements-with and responses-to an environment, which itself is far from being an inert background, but a localised field of different forces in and against which any form of life is articulated (Deleuze, 2014; Simondon, 2020).

This question of camouflage as a matter of environmental response also arises in regard to non-human techniques. Octopuses, for example, can rapidly morph their body shapes and colours to produce eerily accurate imitations of coral reefs, kelp forests or sand plains (Hanlon, 2018). This dynamic camouflage, along with their remarkable intelligence, curiosity and skills, has helped render neo-Darwinian notions of animals as instinctual automatons untenable. Instead, octopuses’ camouflage presents a technique of a continuous negotiation of boundaries through which a self and environment take form, pushing us to rethink camouflage as a fascinating play between the organic and inorganic, a kind of responsiveness to locality that precedes any opposition of (non)human life and technique (Barad, 2007; Derrida, 2009, 2011, 2017; Haraway 2016; Hoffmeyer, 2008; Jackson, 2020).

In this way, we suggest that camouflage presents a particular mode of worlding—a responsive boundary negotiation that underpins any composition of locality—opening onto a myriad of questions: How can camouflage as ruse or sabotage be an emancipatory strategy for human and non-human survival, evading authoritarian surveillance regimes and systems of taxonomic order? How can we understand camouflage differently, as a form of expression or storytelling, where the non-human becomes an unreliable narrator? How do contemporary biomimetic technological developments have to be scrutinised in light of this thinking of camouflage? How does this question of non-human technique challenge the traditional binaries of human and non-human life, according to which access to history, community, and being are monopolised for humans alone? Finally, how does this question of camouflage complicate the very formulation of “life-likeness”?

We invite paper submissions and experimental engagements in line with, but not limited to, the suggested themes that may take the form of theoretical reflections, artistic presentations, performative interventions or the like.

Track 11

Track Chairs
Diego Maranan (University of the Philippines/SEADS)
Angelo Vermeulen (Delft University of Technology / SEADS)
Amy Holt (SEADS)
Ulrike Kuchner (University of Nottingham/SEADS)
Pieter Steyaert (University of Antwerp/SEADS)

The question opens a field of inquiry spanning multiple disciplines. Consider the imaginaries that we develop for lifelike agents, machines, and systems. Should death be programmed into such technologies? What can the processes, conventions, rituals, and technologies typically associated with death teach us about the design of lifelike agents and systems? Should artificial life emulate and adapt to the organic cycle of life and death by incorporating self-limiting mechanisms and transformational phases that lead to the ecological benefits of death? Or can we envision alternative pathways where lifelike agents evolve without a predetermined endpoint?

Attempting to define death might be less important than understanding its potential function in the context of the lifelike. After all, death, renewal, adaptation, and evolution are inextricably intertwined in living systems. Far from being a mere endpoint, death assumes a profound role in biological existence. It clears the way for new generations, ensuring the survival of the fittest and adaptation to changing environments. Death can also confer meaning along with finitude; after all, ‘what exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious,’ as Lisel Mueller writes. Consider as well other phenomena that attend death, such as cognitive decline and memory loss. In the digital sphere, forgetting is often a deliberate act—a means to safeguard privacy or maintain system efficiency. As we imbue lifelike agents with learning and memory capabilities, the act of forgetting takes on new dimensions. Is there an ethical imperative to allow lifelike systems to forget, just as humans do, to avoid the burden of eternal memory? How should artificial life forget?

Perhaps death is not inevitable. With growing insights into the mechanisms of ageing, reproduction, and death in humans and other organisms (such as naked mole rats and microanimals like rotifera), humans are increasingly capable of extending lifespans of engineered cells and organisms much longer than what was previously believed possible. Biological engineering thus takes us closer to pre-programmed immortality (or near-immortality), with the potential to completely rewire outrage and loss in the face of death.

Conversely, what roles can creative technologists, digital humanists, and new media artists play in designing for individual and collective decline? Consider, for instance, the ethical implications of death and lifelikeness in artificially sustained biological functioning, as in the case of a human on life support; can they still be considered alive? If not, who should have the ultimate authority to decide whether to keep a body functioning when it’s no longer capable of sustaining itself? How could technology-mediated memory contribute to that which has ceased to exist, living on in a state of impermanence? Might new technologies summon forth new forms of hauntology, nostalgic yearning, or mourning? As boundaries between the organic and inorganic become murkier, humans might be forced to reframe the processes and experiences of dying. Could behavioural innovations or new social technologies help support such shifts in perspective?

In this track, we invite submissions of scientific and artistic research and practice, and hybrid versions thereof, that embrace such questions. We welcome contributions from (but not limited to) creative technologists, anthropologists, digital humanists, new media artists, speculative designers, biohackers, and transdisciplinary researchers who explore senescence, obsolescence, decay, degrowth, deterioration, disintegration, decomposition, forgetting, mortality, and finitude in the age of artificial life and programmable biology.