In the context of today’s rapidly shifting landscapes—shaped by advancements in digital technology, ecological crises, and societal transformations—Entangled Cartographies takes this relationship between map and territory as a jumping off point to investigate fluctuating and transmutative topographies. The conference puts forward topics of sentience, society, reality, and cosmology, where cartography, both literal and metaphorical, could serve as a critical tool for navigating and untangling these new converging landscapes.
We call for proposals that address complex issues within these topics that bring together artists, academics, and students from the arts, humanities, social sciences and natural sciences to explore strategies of co-existence. This project is a partnership between the Design, Technology, Radical Media Lab (Duke Kunshan University), V2_Lab for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam, Netherlands), and Presence Lab (DKU, Duke University). The conference is generously funded by the Humanities Research Center at Duke Kunshan University.
About the Design, Technology, Radical Media Lab (DTRM)
The Design, Technology, and Radical Media Lab (DTRM) is an artist collective and research lab that investigates topics at the intersection of art, media, and technology. The lab is co-directed by Benjamin Bacon and Vivian Xu.
About V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media
V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media is an interdisciplinary center for art and media technology in Rotterdam (the Netherlands). V2_ presents, produces, archives, and publishes research at the interface of art, technology, and society. Founded in 1981, V2_ offers a platform for artists, designers, scientists, researchers, theorists, and developers of software and hardware from various disciplines to discuss their work and share their findings.
About Presence Lab
Presence Lab focuses on the exploration of theoretical, historical, and critical practice perspectives around topics of computation, media, and culture. The lab is a collaboration between Duke University’s Art, Art History & Visual Studies and Duke Kunshan University’s Computation and Design.
Conference Theme and Tracks
Track I: Ambient Intelligence This track explores the notion of distributed sentience, ambient intelligence and their various manifestations across scales, materialities, and temporalities through metaphysical, mechanistic, and materialistic frameworks.
Track II: Networked Societies This track explores new notions of society, public space, and ethics that can aid in our understanding of relational and social dynamics within large, complex networked systems.
Track III: Constructed Environment and Reality This track explores the notion of ambient intelligent environments and constructed realities through philosophical and technological lenses.
Track IV: Techno-Ontologies and Cosmology This track explores new approaches to reframing the notion of technology itself as well as its ontological and cosmological implications.
