Shifting Cosmologies – Deadline 18.12.2023
More Than Human XR track instigates a discursive conversation about reality media and the machines and technologies that define it. In the present reality we live in today, crises are marked by tensions between the interpersonal, socio-political, local, and global. These entanglements are often complex and range from the micro to macro scale, circumscribed by human and other-than-human agents and their place in a largely anthropocentric system. From this built-in anthropocentric bias evolves outcomes and scenarios with real and perceived calamities manifesting in complex problems that are seemingly unresolvable. Within this context, we consider how Extended Reality may be used as a theoretical framework and navigational toolkit to facilitate the social dreaming of alternate futures in reimagining our shifting cosmologies. In doing so, we pivot from an anthropocentric reality to one encompassing ecocentrism worlds beyond the human experience. By gazing back at the human from the viewpoint of the other, we uncover new perspectives.
This track calls on researchers, practitioners, and scholars to consider reality media within the digital sphere, biosphere, ecosphere, and geosphere to critique the limitations of current XR technologies and practices. We seek novel interventions within reality media that present actionable approaches to non-anthropocentric utopias through (1) papers, (2) workshops, and (3) hybrid presentations that embrace XR technology for knowledge creation and transfer.
Through the track, we incite ideas and concepts that can be developed into guides toward a future all-inclusive and ethical practice of immersive technology.
Submit your 500-word abstract and learn more about the conference at https://www.pomconference.org/pom-aachen-2024/
The foundation for this work was developed by the XResearch Cluster, a collaborative research cluster between V2_Lab for the Unstable Media and the [DTRM] Design, Technology, and Radical Media Lab. We aim to generate sustained conversations about non-human-centric XR at the intersection of philosophy, creative practice, sciences, and technology.
Benjamin Bacon (Duke Kunshan University, the Design, Technology and Radical Media Labs (DTRM))
Vivian Xu (DePaul University, the Design, Technology and Radical Media Labs (DTRM))
Boris Debackere (LUCA School of Arts, V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media)