CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

ISEA2020 ONLINE: WHY SENTIENCE?
October 13 to 18, 2020

SUBMISSIONS CLOSED ON DECEMBER 16th, 2019. Submissions are no longer accepted. All notifications of acceptance and rejection have been sent. The full programme will be announced on August 17.

 

Applicants (both accepted and rejected) may still connect to their  Easychair space here: https://easychair.org/cfp/ISEA2020

 

ISEA is one of the world’s most prominent international arts and technology events, bringing together scholarly, artistic, and scientific domains in an interdisciplinary discussion and showcase of creative productions applying new technologies in art, interactivity, and electronic and digital media.

 

For 2020, ISEA Montreal turns towards the theme of Sentience. Sentience describes the ability to feel or perceive. To be sentient is thus to be “capable of feeling,” from the Latin sentientem (nominative sentiens) while “feeling,” the present participle of sentire “to feel,” refers to “being conscious” of something. To feel or perceive something at first seems to suggest that sentience is a uniquely human trait. Yet, sentience implies sensing the world and acting on it across all entities—animal, plant, mineral, environment or machine—rather than cutting things into binaries: human/non-human, animate/inanimate, alive/dead, human/machine, nature/technology.

 

ISEA2020 will be fully dedicated to examining the resurgence of sentience—feeling-sensing-making sense—in recent art and design, media studies, science and technology studies, philosophy, anthropology, history of science and the natural scientific realm—notably biology, neuroscience and computing. We ask: why sentience? Why and how does sentience matter? Why have artists and scholars become interested in sensing and feeling beyond, with and around our strictly human bodies and selves? Why has this notion been brought to the fore in an array of disciplines in the 21st century?

 


 

ISEA2020 invites artists, designers, scholars, researchers, innovators and creators to contribute to this growing discussion about our sentient world and to address the following questions: 

 

– Why sentience now? Why has this ability to feel (or perhaps, inability or underused ability to feel) become crucial to “our” historical present (indeed, whose historical present)? 

 

– What are the histories and geographies, places and non-places, temporalities, processes, specificities and intimacies, residual colonialisms of sentience, as explored in media arts and technological aesthetics? 

 

– Should sentience be a genuine part of a climate or environmental aesthetics and politics? 

 

– Is sentience queer? Is it an alternative to and a deep questioning of human/nonhuman binarism, identity categories and heteronormativity? Does the investigation of sentience redefine queerness? Is sentience an emerging queerness?

 

– How is sentience investigated in Indigenous media arts, aesthetics, philosophy, humanities and social sciences?

 

– Is there such a thing as a politics of sentience? Is this politics necessarily progressive? Could it be deceptive? What is sentience’s relationship to power and knowledge?

 

– How does sentience intersect with ideologies of ability and disability? Who counts as worthy of rights and in what way? What would constitute a neuro-diverse politics and aesthetics of sentience?

 

– What is the role of sentience in a post-factual world? In the age of neoliberalism and globalization? 

 

-Where are the sites that sentience takes place? In the laboratory, the street, the gallery, the museum, the forest, inside bodies, the planet? 

 

– How does sentience reframe contemporary understandings of artificial intelligence, perception, cognition, and consciousness?

 

With these questions, contributors are asked to identify their submissions with one or more of the following seven tracks:

 

  1. Animality — beyond human sense, liveness, panpsychism and hylozoism in species other than us.
  2. The Ecosophic World — sentience across scientific, environmental, climate and mental ecologies and their current crises.
  3. Machinic Sense and Sensibility — autonomy, emergence, artificial life, machine intentionality, learning, perception and agency.
  4. Sentient Difference — sentience beyond or against norms: “race,” gender, queer, trans, ability/disability, LGBTQ+. 
  5. Matter’s Mattering — bodies, circuits, infrastructures, any matter and how they come to be.
  6. The Politics of Sentience — post-truth, post-sense, sensorization, surveillance, racism, weaponization, control, inequality and discipline, quantification, globalization, capitalism, neo-liberalism and intense re-bordering. 
  7. The Planetary — the sentient rethinking of the global into a possible reaffirmation of the right to move; the “sharing” of the planet across differences in the context of the migrant crisis.

 

 

IMPORTANT NOTE

Full and short paper submissions and panel discussions will be double-blind peer-reviewed by members of the International Programme Committee (IPC). Chairs make the final decisions of acceptance/rejection based on IPC’s recommendations. Full and short papers, and abstracts of panels discussions will be published in the Proceedings. Proposals for artworks for the juried exhibition will be single-blind peer-reviewed (reviewers know the identity of the artist, but the artist does not know the identity of the reviewer) by a jury comprised of members of the IPC and organizing committee members. Workshops/Tutorials and Artist Talks/Work-in-Progress Presentations will be selected by appropriate chairs based on their quality and relevance to the Symposium. Institutional presentations are selected by the organizing committee, based on their relevance to ISEA’s mission.

 

SUBMIT YOUR PROPOSAL
Easychair is now open. If you do not have an Easychair account, you will need to set one up (follow the instructions directly on Easychair).

Please note: incomplete or late applications will not be considered.

Academic

Full Papers — Oral presentation

  • Will be double-blind peer-reviewed so please remove any author names and identifying information from submission.
  • Should be 5-8 pages in length (including references)
  • Should use submission template (download template)
  • Convert to pdf and submit via EasyChair
  • 20-minutes oral presentation with 10 minutes Q&A
  • Submission must be accompanied by signed copyright form available here

 

SUBMIT YOUR PROPOSAL

Authors are requested to remove their names and institutions ahead of submission for review and to add back their names for camera-ready version. Any other features that might identify the authors must be removed ahead of submission.

Short Papers — Oral presentation

  • Will be double-blind peer-reviewed so please remove any author names and identifying information from submission
  • Should be 2-4 pages in length (including references)
  • Should use submission template (download template)
  • Convert to pdf and submit via EasyChair
  • 15-minutes oral presentation with 5 minutes Q&A
  • Submission must be accompanied by signed copyright form available here

 

SUBMIT YOUR PROPOSAL

Authors are requested to remove their names and institutions ahead of submission for review and to add back their names for camera-ready version. Any other features that might identify the authors must be removed ahead of submission.

Panels and roundtables

  • Will be double-blind peer-reviewed so please remove any author names and identifying information from submission
  • Proposals should be maximum 6 pages in length
  • Should use submission template (download template)
  • Should contain an introduction and abstracts from individual discussants (3-6 people)
  • Will take the form of moderator-led groups of 3–5 experts responding to questions on the selected topic
  • 30+15 to 60+30 minutes allotted presentation time depending on number of speakers
  • Submission must be accompanied by signed copyright form available here

 

SUBMIT YOUR PROPOSAL

Authors are requested to remove their names and institutions ahead of submission for review and to add back their names for camera-ready version. Any other features that might identify the authors must be removed ahead of submission.

Presentations & Discussions

Posters / Demonstrations

    • Proposals should be maximum 1 page
    • Should use submission template (download template)
    • Accepted posters proposals will be invited to submit poster with template provided
    • Posters will be published in the conference proceedings and will be allotted a wall space (with electricity and Internet connectivity by request)
    • Submission must be accompanied by signed copyright form available here

 

SUBMIT YOUR PROPOSAL

Institutional Presentations

Institutional Presentations from communities working on matters pertaining to the themes of ISEA symposia, based on their relevance to contemporary trends, developments, and debates, intended as opportunities for networking and as a forum for institutions such as galleries, museums, NGOs, networks, schools, and companies to introduce themselves to the community and discuss for example organizational, financial, and curatorial matters.

 

To submit:

  • Maximum 1 page
  • Should use submission template (download template)
  • 10 minutes is the allotted presentation time and space for presenting posters, brochures, banners, etc.
  • Specific space requirements for larger-format demonstrations and displays to be specified in proposal
  • Presenters of institutional presentations are not eligible for symposium fee discounts
  • Submission must be accompanied by signed copyright form available here

 

SUBMIT YOUR PROPOSAL

Talks & Tutorials

Artist Talks / Work in progress

  • Proposal of maximum 1 page
  • Should use submission template (download template)
  • Will be allotted 10 minutes presentation time
  • Submission must be accompanied by signed copyright form available here

 

SUBMIT YOUR PROPOSAL

Workshops and Tutorials

Proposals for half, full or two-day workshops during ISEA2020. Workshops will be announced on the ISEA2020 website, and organisers may release their own call for submissions and may submit a one-page abstract of their workshop proposal to be included in the proceedings.

 

To propose a workshop:

  • Proposal maximum 3 pages
  • Should use submission template (download template)
  • Title of the workshop/tutorial
  • Duration: half day or full day
  • Abstract (ready to be released on the symposium website)
  • Rationale/target audience of the workshop (academics, professionals, general public?)
  • Short bios of the organisers
  • Plan of how to solicit participation
  • Preferred venue and necessary special equipment
  • Your preference to possibly exhibit outcomes of the workshop during the symposium
  • Links to any relevant online material
  • Submission must be accompanied by signed copyright form available here

 

SUBMIT YOUR PROPOSAL

Artistic works

Artistic Works

We welcome submission of interactive works, concerts, performances, screenings, installations, site-specific works, interdisciplinary projects, animation, video, experimental animation, photography, and events in the public space.

Application Requirements:

IN A SINGLE PDF FILE, please provide the following information:

1. Application form. Please use submission template (download here)

– Artist(s) Bio (within 300 words)

– Thematic Statement (200 – 500 words)

– Artwork Proposal (300 – 800 words)

– Images, Sketches, Drafts

– Technical and Logistical Requirements

– Links to the Video Documentation online (if applicable)

2. CV

3. Estimate budget and an indication of existing financial support

4. Submission must be accompanied by signed copyright form available here

If relevant, please mention:

5. Venue/location preference (if known), OR, venue/location requirements and constraints

6. Time of day and date preference (if known), OR, time of day and date requirements and constraints

7. Estimate project timeline

 

SUBMIT YOUR PROPOSAL

Note: proposals for artworks for the juried exhibition will be single-blind peer-reviewed (reviewers know the identity of the artist, but the artist does not know the identity of the reviewer) by a jury comprised of members of the International Programme Committee (IPC) and organizing committee members.

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