Calls: Rencontres interdisciplinaires EMERGENCE/Y 2022

Hexagram’s 2021-2022 Interdisciplinary season programming on the theme EMERGENCE/Y launched last September at the Ars Electronica Festival, following an initial call for projects. Hexagram presented a series of synchronous and asynchronous streaming-based events specifically curated and produced for the Festival. Over 50 co-investigator members, student members and Hexagram collaborators, as well as their collaborators, presented their most recent work, research and contributed insightful live discussions to the four-day programme.

To widen the theme of EMERGENCE/Y, Hexagram is launching TWO additional calls:

  • CALL FOR PROPOSALS OF RESEARCH-CREATION OUTREACH ACTIVITIES
    • Exploring hybrid modalities of presentation, discussion, and outreach, the proposed short activities should bring together Hexagram members, current and prospective partners whose approaches are equally dedicated to addressing the current complex challenges through research situated at the intersections of the arts, sciences, and diverse forms of knowledge. Activities must take place from February to end-of-June 2022.
    • Financial, administrative and in-kind support can be requested to produce activities. Please attach a summary budget including confirmed revenues and expected expenses (see last section of the form). Collaborative outreach activities between Network members and partners, and that are open to and inclusive of wider publics will be favored. This call for activities excludes residencies and activities that are strictly aimed at production; it privileges dissemination and transfer of knowledge such as round table discussions, workshops, exhibitions, or less-conventional approaches to meeting new and diverse publics.
    • Proposals will be reviewed by the Hexagram Executive Committee.
    • Organizers and participants must follow the directives provided by applicable institutional, municipal, provincial/territorial, and federal bodies in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, mitigation strategies may be required for in-person activities to accommodate requirements for physical distancing and limitations on gathering size.
  • CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
    • In the interest of producing a scholarly, peer-reviewed publication that will provide a comprehensive overview of current research at the intersections of artistic expression, scholarly investigation and material experimentation, and of what such research achieves with its multiple stakeholders and publics, the Network welcomes 250-words paper abstract submissions from all areas related to the sub-themes outlined below.
    • Submissions will be rigorously peer-reviewed and authors of selected abstracts will be invited to submit full chapters by Fall of 2022 (exact date to be announced). On the basis of proposals received, the Network intends to approach prestigious publishers, namely the MIT Press, for the publication of an edited volume in 2023.

Important information:

  • Deadline to submit abstracts and proposals of activities is 15 JANUARY 2022, 11: 59pm.
  • Hexagram co-investigators, student-members or collaborator members are welcome to submit more than one proposal to both calls. Please indicate in the forms, in the appropriate sections, if an abstract and an activity submitted are related.

ABOUT EMERGENCE/Y

“We are all living within a world where it is now easier to imagine the collapse of all life than imagine reinventing the right ways to live.” – Jay Jordan

In 2021, it is now a cliche to say that we have lived through an “unprecedented year” – particularly when the state of the pre-COVID world was in many ways unprecedented. Yet, the combination of the global pandemic and its resulting political-economic fallout, the continuing ecological crises, and the social-cultural explosion of long simmering systemic injustice and inequality have made the entangling of human, machine and natural orders ever more apparent, with radical consequences for all forms of life on this planet. The future appears uncertain, unstable, unsettling and unknown.

How do we respond? Métis and University of Toronto STS scholar Michelle Murphy writes that “assemblies of technical practices have generated not just facts but also speculative phenomena that are a felt part of the world, even if intangible. How do speculative social science [or research-creation] practices produce a world where undecided futures are brought into the present?” Murphy refers to this as “technoscience dreaming.” In other words, in an increasingly uncertain world, how can RC enable us to dream and trial new possible futures?

In order to respond with reflection and action to the wicked problems of our global situation, Hexagram’s Rencontres interdisciplinaires season of 2021-2022 explores the role that research-creation can play, at the broader intersections of the arts and sciences, in tackling these troubled times in order to offer new possibilities, hopes and visions of a more just, equitable and open future.

The Network is calling for activity proposals and abstracts from all areas pertaining to research-creation, on the following themes:

  1. Planetary Thinking, Climate Emergency and Environmental-Ecological Crisis;
  2. Critical and creative responses to Artificial Intelligence, Smartness, Human-Machine-Environment Interaction and Digital Transformation and Disruption;
  3. Interplays between Human and More than Human Sentience;
  4. New methods and research approaches between SSH, the sciences and creative practice;
  5. Emergent intersectional theories focused on critical gender, race, class and disability/debility research-creation in the broader context of the media arts and their relationship to the social, natural and computing sciences;
  6. New models for political economy involving the arts and sciences in new forms of transdisciplinary dialogue.

CONTACT : Manuelle Freire: coordination.hexagram@gmail.com

Cette publication est également disponible en : Français (French)