Upcoming events
July 25-26, 2024 AI and Other Scientific Fables
School of Cybernetics, ANU (and online): Keynote Speaker: Professor Sherryl Vint (University of California, Riverside)
Organisers: Chris Danta (ANU) and Matthew Chrulew (Curtin University)
Please register for the event via Humanitix: https://events.humanitix.com/ai-and-other-scientific-fables
This exploratory two-day symposium engages critically and creatively with the idea of the scientific fable and aims to establish a community in Australia around the topic of AI and literature. How does the literary form of the fable enable a type of speculation that is important to the practice of science? Equally, how have scientific understandings of nonhuman life inspired literary fables, particularly in the genres of fantastic and speculative fiction? How can we think about AI itself as a kind of fable involving human and nonhuman characters and perspectives?
This free, catered, in-person and online event is kindly supported by the School of Cybernetics at the Australian National University, the Australian Research Council and the AHRC project, “Rethinking Fables in the Age of Global Environmental Crisis”.
If you attend online, the zoom link will be provided one day before the event.
Agenda
Day 1. Thursday July 25
9.30-10am Welcome.
10-10.30am Session 1.
Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker: Campfire (reading + talk)
10.30-11am Morning tea. Level 3 kitchen.
11am-12.30pm Session 2.
Judith Bishop: Fables of the AI Child
Tyne Daile Sumner: Alice’s Adventures, Ambiguity & AI
12.30-1.30pm Lunch.
1.30-3pm Session 3.
Baylee Brits: Misalignment and the Fable
Monique Rooney: A Fable of a Narrating Brain in Andrea Long Chu’s “China Brain” (2021)
3-3.30pm Afternoon tea.
3.30-5pm Session 4.
Charles Paulk: Demonic Multitudes: Monstrous AI
Chris Danta: Fabulous Devourment in Philip K. Dick
Day 2. Friday July 26
9.30-11am Session 5.
Sherryl Vint: Nephelokokkygia: Ecological Storytelling at the End of the World
11-11.30am Morning tea.
11.30am-1pm Session 6.
Jasper Montana: Suzie and the Dark Vessels: Satellite Data, Environmental Subjects, and Fable in Ocean Governance
Isabel Richards and Ella McCarthy: Climate Change Fables and Their Calls to Action
1-2pm Lunch.
2-3.30pm Session 7.
Sarah Collins: “He’s not there. He doesn’t reflect”: The Mimetic Nonhuman in Hoffmann and Offenbach
Bridget Vincent: Klara and the Reader
3.30-4pm Afternoon tea.
4-4.30pm Session 8.
Screening of Moonrise (2021; 11 minutes) and Requiem (2023; 16 minutes), two short films in the Archival Futures of Outer Space Film Quartet, co-created by Ceridwen Dovey & Rowena Potts.
4.30-5pm Wrap up.
September 12-13, 2024, Global Fables (online)
Enquiries: Kaori Nagai [E-mail: K.Nagai@kent.ac.uk ]
October 25, 2024, Animal Languages (online)
Enquiries: Kaori Nagai [E-mail: K.Nagai@kent.ac.uk ]
Speakers: Leonie Cornips (Maastricht University), Christiane Bongartz (University of Colgne), Ana M. Ochoa ( Columbia University) plus a workshop with Susan Richardson
Recent events
May 27 2024 (online)
Pigeons, Tigers, and Vampire Bats: On Ethnonationalism, Hospitality, and Kinship in South Asia (Chair: Radhika Govindrajan)
[Abstracts/bios]
This panel explores South Asian fables about human relationships with more-than-human entities. Drawing on songs, films, and stories about bats, pigeons, tigers, and elephants, the panel explores how “folktales”, old and new, animate questions of ethnonationalism, militarization, hospitality, and kinship.
Muhammad Kavesh (Australian National University), Ethics of Welcoming Pigeons in Pakistan
Dolly Kikon (University of California, Santa Cruz), Tiger, Spirit, Man: Creation Journey and Relationship in the Naga World
Mythri Jegathesan (Santa Clara University), Vampire bats, white blood, and thirsty elephants: fabulating ethnonationalism on Sri Lanka’s plantations
Enquiries: Kaori Nagai [E-mail: K.Nagai@kent.ac.uk ]