STREAM STREAM ORGANIZER(S)

Meha Gupta CUNY Graduate Center mgupta@gradcenter.cuny.edu

Soham Sen University of New Mexico sen.soham.26@gmail.com

For this stream, we use the word “technology” as an all-encompassing term for supply chains, computational methods, artificial intelligence, wearables, surveillance infrastructure, digital methods, and more. How do we define “technologies” today, and how does it shape our interrogation of affect? We invite discussions of technological infrastructure—the black-box invisibilities of its production, the procedural behaviors of its material units, and the ongoing aftermaths of socio-technical actualizations. We encourage playful and fateful reckonings with the embodied nature of tangible technologies through a human/post-human lens. How/when/where do we grow capacious (or turn obstinate) when enmeshed with the forces of affective production, movement, and connection in the depths of the digital, technological, and computational? What happens to, say, matters of method and academic methodologies, when a machine, created and credentialed by humans with the authority, audacity, and quasi-autonomy to contribute to disciplinary knowledge structures (see: the earliest anxieties of cybernetics in the mid-20th century), also starts contributing beyond the flows of human accessibility? We are thinking here, for example, of AI prompts that do not require language coherence, academic sophistication, or a well-curated reading list, yet have the power to disrupt, disorganize, and reorient the methods that help to determine the form and content of various systems of knowledge. How do we devise methods amidst the folding and unfolding in the ocean of AI prompts, constantly directing and redirecting the flows of the knowing and unknowing? In this atmosphere of the constant meaning-making process, territorializing and deterritorializing the intellectual legacy of knowledge making, prompts are the methods reshaping distinct disciplinary orientations. Even beyond prompts, what other elements of intellectual decay have come into being, and how do we imagine these atmospheres?

DESCRIPTION What does poesis—the making of technology and what we do about it—look like in the present moment? What ethical, ontological, and epistemological approaches might guide how we interact and intra-act with technologies? How can we imagine otherwise through decolonial and indigenous knowledge systems? How do we feel affect in concepts such as hallucination, consciousness, and embodiment in relation to Artificial Intelligence (AI)? What would an affective interpretation of a technological knowledge system look like? What philosophical implications emerge as we reflect on thought in relation to these technological affective processes?

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