Call for proposals
10 & 11 March 2025 - Royal Conservatoire Antwerp
Initiated by Umut Eldem, Giusy Caruso, and Screen Dive
The fourth edition of the Convergence seminar will focus on technological co-creation in interdisciplinary art. Researchers, artists, and anyone currently engaging with this subject areinvited to share their practices, experiences, and historical perspectives. Lectures, performances, workshops, and installations are welcome. The seminar will take place on March10th and 11th 2025 at Royal Conservatoire Antwerp, Belgium. Our topics for this year are:
Phygital Co-creation in Extended Spaces: Novel forms of phygital art creation entail blended physical and digital experiences in extended spaces, real and virtual, online and offline. Phygitalco-creation brings a form of democratic art-making, questioning artists on strategies that can preserve artistic quality and fair practice. How can artists design inclusive and co-creative artforms that are meaningful across the novel sensory dimensions of phygital and extended spaces? What are the future strategies of co-creative art through technological interconnectionsin blended environments, online and offline? How can the aesthetic value of these art forms and practices be preserved, developed, and cultivated?
Human-Machine Collaboration in Creative Processes: The developments and the widespread adoption of AI tools in artistic creation result in the possibility of a deepercollaboration between the human and the machine during and after the creative process. This possibility may lead to exchanging, developing, and performing interdisciplinary ideas with aninterface that is not entirely human. How does this inclusion of technology change the perspectives of interdisciplinary collaboration? Can and should AI be treated as a co-creativepartner?
Ethics, Agency, and Ownership in Co-Creative AI Practices: Ethical concerns are at the forefront of co-creative practices with AI. Large-scale machine learning models provideunprecedented creative possibilities, but they also raise issues related to authorship, bias, transparency, and the potential for misuse. In human-AI collaborations, it becomes essential tocritically assess how these models are trained, which data they rely on, and the societal implications of their outputs. How can the curation of datasets and the training of smaller,specialized AI models mitigate ethical concerns such as bias and transparency in co-creative practices? What frameworks or methodologies can be developed to ensure that human-AIcollaborations in creative fields are both ethically sound and culturally inclusive?
Co-creative Encounters and Audience-makers: As different aspects of audience interaction are explored, the role and meaning of 'audience' also change. Through co-creation andinteractivity facilitated with and by the audience, the border between the creator, performer, and the audience becomes fuzzy. Is the role of the audience being transformed into that of anaudience-maker? If so, how is this transformation taking place? Which possibilities do interdisciplinary artistic practices open in co-creative encounters with the audience?
You can send your proposal with the following information tocreatieresearch@gmail.com before December 24th 2024:
- Name of the presenter(s)
- An abstract of a maximum of 500 words
- A short curriculum vitae of the presenter(s)
- A photo of the project or the presenter(s)