IPC2

Call for Papers

Contributors from diverse disciplinary backgrounds are invited to submit communications that address this theme through a high variety of possible angles:

1. Mutations in the semiotic production of truth in the current social and technological context:
   1. Critical theory and research about “veridiction contracts” New notions of realism. Ways to establish shared criteria for trust. A semiotics of suspicion.
   2. The symbolic efficacy of signs and the post-alphabetical society. Iconography as a linguistic model.
   3. Psychology of deception and cognitive prejudice. Post-truth as a conflict between a social bond and one based on emotional response competences.
2. New forms of power in a networked society, the decline of public sphere and its future:
   1. Politics and mass media in the age of post-political languages and global social media.
   2. The building of the past and tradition as fraud.
   3. Algorithmic propaganda and the technological design of misinformation.
   4. Education and post-truth.
   5. The power of data: invisible hierarchies and a political critique of transparency. The decline of a data-based public sphere and proposals for its revitalisation.
   6. The life of objects in the anthropocene: deception, opacity and material truths of socio-technical devices.
   7. Creative and grassroots activism. The political agency of masks, heteronomies, and improper identities
3. The crisis of traditional representation and new ways of seeing: the design of transparency, aesthetics of obfuscation, and user subcultures.
   1. The crisis of traditional corporate design in the age of user cultures. Shifts in emotional communication and designer’s responsibility. New non-corporate design practices (user design, unrecognisable or “brutalist” styles, camouflage, amateur professional practices, automatic design). Historicism, mannerism, revival: the use of pastiche and irony in postmodern design.
   2. The evolution of cultural industries and their criticism Objective fiction and new formats in TV and network cinema.
   3. Reality in drag: the evolution of the artistic/activist fake. Invisible art, fictions and revelations in contemporary art. Memes and user subcultures: the collapse of critical irony in dystopian times.
   4. The design of transparency. Parametric truths and fictions in algorithmic representations (objects and possible/impossible bodies, subcultures in fabrication, digitisation and maker cultures). New ways of seeing: the photography after Google.
   5. Technological disobedience, rebellion and sabotage. Counter-production of data. Infrastructure design for counter-surveillance and obfuscation. Machines to deceive other machines. Sabotage of capture devices. Artificial intelligence and its cultural biases. Blockchain technologies and the automatisation of trust. Ethics and aesthetics of trolls and bots.
   6. Learning from the copy: manipulations, versions and fakes as learning tools.