Call for Proposals: Art, Aura, and the Algorithm 2026 PNCA Symposium | October 1–3, 2026 Pacific Northwest College of Art at Willamette University 511 NW Broadway, Portland, Oregon Free and open to the public

Keynote: Sasha Stiles

Poet, artist, and researcher Sasha Stiles makes work at the intersection of language and machine intelligence. Co-founder of theVERSEverse and Poetry Mentor to the humanoid robot BINA48, her projects Technelegy and Cursive Binary have been honored by the Prix Ars Electronica and the Lumen Prize and exhibited at MoMA and Art Basel. She will deliver the symposium keynote and lead a hands-on workshop.

About the symposium

What does it mean to make art if AI is part of the process? As emerging technologies reshape cultural production, the status of artistic presence—what Walter Benjamin famously described as aura—invites renewed reflection. Aura once named the singular “here and now” of the artwork, but how might we understand artistic presence within fragmented digital worlds, networked circulation, machine-assisted creativity, and hybrid forms of authorship? If mechanical reproduction once seemed to dissolve aura, contemporary algorithmic systems—whose operations often remain opaque even to their creators—raise the possibility that new forms of artistic presence emerge precisely through obscured processes of production.

Art, Aura, and the Algorithm is a three-day convening of artists, writers, scholars, and students to explore how meaning emerges across entangled systems of humans, machines, and platforms. Drawing on thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Donna Haraway and practitioners like Hito Steyerl, Trevor Paglen, and Sougwen Chung, we're interested in exploring the full range of how creativity unfolds through assemblage, collaboration, and recombination.

We invite contributions that grapple with questions such as:

• Can AI-generated art possess aura?
• What infrastructures of labor, logistics, and energy are obscured by the figure of the singular artist or the “black box” of AI?
• What is an author/producer?
• How is aura strategically performed, produced, gamified, accumulated, or “farmed” within digital culture algorithms?
• What becomes of authorship, originality, and presence when artistic production emerges from distributed networks of humans, machines, and texts? 
• What is art’s aura, presence, and temporality when fragmentation is the mode of algorithmic life?
• What new artistic possibilities emerge from intertextuality and human-machine collaboration?

Submit a proposal

We invite individual academic paper presentations in the following format:

• Individual Papers (15–20 minutes): Academic presentations based on research, creative practice, or community work accompanied by a slide deck presentation. Papers will be grouped into thematic panels by the organizers. Each panel session, lasting two hours, will feature four individual papers with approximately 25 minutes for audience and mediator questions following the presentations.

Graduate and advanced undergraduate students are especially encouraged to submit. Creative practice and community-based work are as welcome as traditional academic papers. You don't need all the answers — just a good question and fifteen minutes to explore it.

Proposals should include an abstract (300 words max), a bio (100 words max), and any tech or accessibility needs. Submissions in English only.

Deadline: July 15, 2026 | Notification: August 20, 2026 

Submit to: pncasymposium-group@willamette.edu

Questions? Contact Symposium Coordinators Renee Hollopeter (she/her), Tori Nickles (they/them), and Vienna D'Angelo (they/them) at the address above.