The Institute of World Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in cooperation with the Department of Philosophy and Applied Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava invite you to the international conference
Interdisciplinary play and interplay in the postdigital age
October 5-6, 2016, Bratislava, Slovakia
Keynote speaker: Jay David Bolter (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)
In the Western civilization, there seems to be no doubt about the significance of modern technology in natural, technical, and empirical sciences. However, the potential of technology is also reflected in the humanities and social sciences, making these disciplines more flexible and able to syncretically merge various textual, visual, and auditory input, augmented or mixed reality. One of the few excellent examples of successfully combining these dimensions are the longstanding efforts, research and projects of Jay David Bolter (Turing’s Man, Writing Space, Remediation, co-creator of the program Storyspace).
On the other hand, the increasing focus on the importance of technology is often at the cost of adequate and consequential evaluation of its real potential, if not at the cost of precisely specifying the core of the humanities.
The conference Interdisciplinary Play and Interplay in the Postdigital Age will focus on play and interplay of modern technology in the arts, humanities, and natural and empirical sciences. Despite the obvious differences in methodology, there is a partial overlap. Just as air travel has diminished the distances between countries and cultures, the postdigital age is diminishing the distances between the humanities and natural sciences, between theory and practice, between individual disciplines and different media. In the natural sciences, the increasing volume of data and context complexity calls for ever more careful interpretation. On the other hand, the subject matter of the humanities – text, code, and other semiotic systems – has never been more suitable for analysis using exact methods and universal theories.
How is this new space reflected in contemporary humanities and non-humanities? How does technology change and restructure their frames of interpretation and methodology of knowing, acting, and creating? What are the new layers of interdisciplinary interplay?
In this context, the conference is open to contributions from a wide range of topics including:
• new media and augmented reality,
• multimodal literature, multimodal discourse,
• speculative realism, object oriented ontology,
• speculative aesthetics,
• visual versus visible/invisible,
• computer games,
• new anthropomorphism,
• transhumanism,
• digital humanities,
• interpreting digital data in research – bad interpretation, falsification
• new methods of medical diagnostics
Organizing committee:
Bogumiła Suwara Ph.D.
Jana Tomašovičová Ph.D.
Mariusz Pisarski Ph.D.
Krištof Anetta MSc.
The conference is organized and funded within the VEGA grant Hypermedia artifact in the postdigital age.
You can send the application form to play2016bratislava@gmail.com until June 30, 2016. The organizers will contact you by July 15, informing you about whether your abstract was accepted and how to pay the conference fee. The main presenters will have 60 minutes for their presentation including discussion, the other presenters 30 minutes, poster presentations are limited to 4 minutes. Presentations in English, German, Polish, Czech, and Slovak are welcome. The conference fee is 50 €.