CFP: Bodies in Digital Transition: Mapping a topology of digital bodies

Machines glow, pulse, perform and think through metal, light, code, and living matter. The second Bodies in Digital Transition (BDT) edition traverses the materiality of the mechanical body itself: what embodied gestures and rhythms animate its operations? What moves beneath its surface? What kind of being emerges in the loops of its code? From the lures of the aesthetic surface to the recursive depths of its algorithmic core, this year BTD aims to dissect the machine’s anatomy across several strata that form a speculative topology of the machinic body; a descent through appearance, mechanism, and ontology toward the thresholds where technology ceases to represent and begins to be. In mapping out the systems of embodiment inhabited by digital beings, we also open up inquiry into how human agents author, come into contact with, and transform machine bodies. There is neither “the technology itself” nor “the aesthetics itself” but rather a method of design in which the two are mutually implicated. To resist interior–exterior divides open inquiries of how human agents encounter and transform machinic bodies through the intra-active practice of design. Digital bodies condition human expression and are conditioned by cultural inflections at each strata. The plural and distributed materialities of digital systems span beyond physical objects, but encompass code, electromagnetic waves, and sensory outputs in complex and multiple communicating layers. How does the agency act as this morphing web? Following a post-human stance, neither digital nor human cognition is assumed to be contained within an algorithmic nucleus. Instead, it is conceived as emerging through relations across each stratum, whose analytical isolation is not intended to fix ontologies, but to map a topology of multiple, non-linear processes through which agencies coalesce. To move beyond the limits of this configuration and to encourage crossing of boundaries, we invite trans-disciplinary experimental and highly speculative inquiry and action into the machinic as event, intra-action, and formation of being.