Description
Since the 2022 releases of AI image and language generation technology, stories suggesting that machines will become sentient have flooded the news media. No matter whether scholarly or popular media, these stories are typically given weight by alluding to scientific objectivity in their emphasis of unprecedented challenges brought about by technological advancement. Yet, questions relating to the boundary between life and non-life have been raised across cultures and throughout human history.While it seems that the same basic questions about the boundary between life and non-life have been asked across times and continents, the answers given in various contexts are very different. They reveal diverse ontological and epistemological frameworks and depend on the languages and practices used to make a response explicit or tangible. Cultures influenced by European thinking tend to inscribe themselves in the classical Aristotelean logic whose binary worldview is made tangible in tales across time. Its logic links the ancient stick-to-snake and similar tales of the Jewish and Christian traditions to the science fiction of the 18th century and the most recent discussions of sentience in AI.
Throughout history, indigenous practitioners and thinkers, poets, artists, and mystics have challenged the binary logic inherited from classical European thought. Some scientists have been critical as well and questioned the logical foundation of their disciplines. The 20th century gave rise to poly-valued logics and quantum mechanics, offering entirely new ways of conceptualising life. Likewise, in contemporary times, we find thinkers reconfiguring the foundations of being. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s concept of the Grammar of Animacy illustrates how a native American language – unlike English – captures the animacy and interconnectedness of the more-than-human world through its structure. Karen Barad’s agential realism underscores the active role of observers, revealing how measurement and perception shape outcomes, challenging classical notions of separability and objectivity. Arturo Escobar’s vision of the pluriverse embraces a world of many relational ontologies and interconnected realities. How do these framings influence the way we conceptualise sentience?
This track seeks to explore alternative frameworks for understanding sentience through approaches that embrace grammars, taxonomies and logics that transcend classical dichotomies towards new ecologies of life and mind. Of particular interest are works that challenge binary distinctions between animate and inanimate, conscious and unconscious, natural and artificial. We invite artistic investigations and design practices that reframe sentience through an engagement with:
Poly-valued logics, pluriversality, and non-classical reasoning
Indigenous and non-Western taxonomies of animacy and life
New forms of relational materialism without relata
Quantum approaches to consciousness and sentience
Alternative cosmologies and cosmotechnics
Reframings of uncertainty and indeterminacy in living systems
Experimental grammars and languages for describing non-binary states
The track aims to open new possibilities for understanding sentience. We welcome papers, workshops, artworks, performances, and other forms of radical experimentalism that contribute to expanding conceptual and experiential frameworks. Rather than simply extending classical notions of sentience to artificial systems, we seek contributions that fundamentally reimagine the categories and relationships through which we understand consciousness, life and being.
| Period | 16 Jul 2025 → 18 Jul 2025 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Perth, AustraliaShow on map |
Keywords
- synthetic
- sentience
- Art