Indeterminate Futures / The Future of Indeterminacy

13 – 15 November 2020

Keynotes: Karen Barad, Franco Berardi, Gregory Cajete, Leroy Little Bear, Sha Xin Wei, Vladimir Tasić

View or download the day-by-day programme here, or a single-page outline of the programme here. All times are GMT.

The full programme with speaker abstracts and bios can be downloaded from here.

You can register for the conference on Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/124062427059.

When you are on the conference platform all introductions and keynotes will take place on the ‘main stage’ and all panels in ‘sessions’.

Friday 13 November

Cameron MAIN STAGE
09:30-09:40: John Rowan, Vice-Principal Research and Knowledge and Exchange: Welcome to the University of Dundee
09:40-10:00: Natasha Lushetich & Iain Campbell: Indeterminacy in the 2nd and 3rd Decades of the 21st Century (Introduction to the Conference)

Cameron SESSIONS
10:00-11:15:
Panel 1a: Perspectives on and from Physics
Adrien De Sutter, ‘Dark Matter and the Indeterminacy of Existence’
Cristian Mariani & Giuliano Torrengo, ‘The Metaphysics of Passage in Dynamical Reduction Models of Quantum Mechanics’
Ashley Woodward, ‘Tyche and Ananke’

Panel 1b: Probability & Agency
David Zeitlyn, ‘Schrodinger’s Spider in the African Bush: Coping with Indeterminacy in the Framing of Questions to Mambila Spider Divination’
Lukas Grießl, ‘Statistical Controversies and the Indeterminacy of Inference’
Martin Zeilinger, ‘AI Art and Post-Anthropocentric Agency’

11:15-11:30: Break

SESSIONS
11:30-12:45:
Panel 2a: Cybernetics & Entropy
Daniel Nemenyi, ‘The Conflicting Determinations of Norbert Weiner and Leibniz’
Wolfgang Muench, ‘Reconfiguring Reality: Indeterminacy in Times of Counter-Culture’
Joel White, ‘The Determinacy of Heat Death Versus Life’s Entropic Indeterminacy’

Panel 2b: Transversal Architectures
Stavros Kousoulas, ‘Synaptic Passages: Architectural Technicities and Margins of Indeterminacy’
Andrej Radman, ‘Architectures of the Superfold: Unyoking Coherence from Congruence’
Xinyi Xie, ‘Matrixiral Architectures’

12:45-14:00: Lunch

SESSIONS
14:00-15:15:
Panel 3a: Energetics & Time
Cat Hope & Louise Devenish, ‘Performing the Digital Facilitation of Indeterminacy in the Percussion Works of Cat Hope’
Hannes Schumacher, ‘How Long is Now? – Or the Event of Chaos’
Matthew Lovett, ‘Making is Measuring: Indeterminate Musical Creativity as Topological Production’

Panel 3b: Precarious Entanglements
Isla Cowan, ‘Theatre and Indeterminacy: A New Eco-Dramaturgy’
Desiree Foerster, ‘Experimental Environments and the Aesthetic Experience of Metabolic Processes’
Marcel O’Gorman & Jennifer Clary-Lemon, ‘Swallowing Indeterminacy: Turning Otherwise towards Precarious Species in the Sixth Extinction’

15:15-15:30: Break

SESSIONS
15:30-16:45:
Panel 4a: Human-Machine Assemblages
Hadi Mehrpouya & Afshin Mehrpouya, ‘Re-assembling the Cyborg: An Exploration of the Analytical and Emancipatory Potentials of Cyborg Diseases’
Andreas Pirchner, ‘Entangled Realities in Ergodic Musical VR-Performances’
Kevin LaGrandeur, ’21st Century Art, Emerging Technology, and Indeterminacy’

Panel 4b: Perceptibilities
Undine Sellbach, ‘Two Painted Flies: Improvised Arts of Perception in Uexküll’s Picture Book of Invisible Worlds’
Christina Jauernik, ‘Correspondences with Erratic Bodies’
Becca Rose Glowacki, ‘Learning on the Edges: Exploring Methods for Technofeminist Literacies in Nonformal Contexts’

16:45-17:30: Break

MAIN STAGE
17:30-18:30: 
Keynote 1: Gregory Cajete & Leroy Little Bear, ‘Developing Resonance with the Sky Spirits of the Cosmos: Flux and Native Astronomy’

MAIN STAGE
18:30-19:00:
Keynote 1+1: Karen Barad, ‘In/Determinacy’

Saturday 14 November

SESSIONS
10:00-11:15:
Panel 5a: Uncertainties and Irreversibilities
Peeter Müürsepp, ‘Irreversibility and Uncertainty: Revisiting Prigogine in the Digital Age’
Gi Taek Ryoo, ‘Quantum Poetics: Robert Frost and the Nature of Uncertainty’
Olga A. Moskvitina, ‘A Psychologist’s View of the Human Path from Chaos through Order to Uncertainty’

Panel 5b: Plasticity
Stephen Dougherty, ‘Plasticity’s Indeterminacy: Catherine Malabou on the Brain, Temporality and Change’
Linda Aloysius, ‘New Model Army and Morphological Activism: Material and Sculptural Indeterminacy for Combatting Embodied Screened Oppression’
Amélie Berger Soraruff, ‘Stiegler and Malabou on the Politics of Design: Cultivating an Aesthetic of Technology’

11:15-11:30: Break

SESSIONS
11:30-12:45:
Panel 6a: Indeterminate Affects
Jernej Markelj, ‘Indeterminate Futures, Paranoid Temporalities’
Mantra Mukim, ‘The Exhaustion of Future: Beckett and Derrida’
Georgia Perkins, ‘Dizzying Swamp Protocols and Con-fusing Indeterminacy’

Panel 6b: Shifting Subjectivities
Hadi Mehrpouya & Dominic Smith, ‘There’s Rue for You, and Here’s Some for Me’
Lilly Markaki, ‘Notes Towards an Erotics of Indeterminacy’
Mijke van der Drift, ‘The Materials of Social Change: Towards a Pluriversal Trans Ethics’

12:45-13:30: Lunch

MAIN STAGE
13:30-14:30:
Keynote 2: Franco Berardi, ‘Freedom, a Philosophical Fake: The Virus, (In)Determination, Techno-determinism and the Problem of Free Will’

14:30-15:00: Break

SESSIONS
15:00-16:15:
Panel 7a: Datification
Erica Deluchi, ‘Technological Re(form)ulations of Land/Nature Market Ontologies’
Franziska Pilling & Haider Akmal, ‘Researching and Designing Uncanny AI to Legible AI’
Jennifer Gradecki, ‘By Any Metaphor Necessary: Artistic Counterpoints of the Surveillance State’

Panel 7b: Acceleration, Crisis, Catastrophe
Filip Vostal, ‘The Great Acceleration: A “Deflationary” View’
Ingrid M. Hoofd, ‘The (Un)determined University? On the Limitless Limits of Academic Research’
Teelin Lucero, ‘Cartographies of Catastrophe’

16:15-16:30: Break

SESSIONS
16:30-17:45:
Panel 8a: Algorithmic Politics
Alesja Serada, ‘The Historical Determinism of Blockchain (and Its Limits)’
Derek Curry, ‘Artistic Defamiliarization in the Age of Neural Networks’
Stephanie Polsky, ‘Aspirational Theft: Technocapitalism, Cognitive Augmentation Devices and Algorithmic Coloniality’

Panel 8b: Futurity
Valentin Balanovskiy, ‘Acausality as a Principle for Indeterminate Future: Carl Gustav Jung and Nikolay Lossky on the Acausal Connecting Principle’
Christian Schwinghammer, ‘A Future Felt in the Present? On the In/actuality of What is Yet to Come’
Dylan Vaughan, ‘Indeterminate and Indifferent: Lyotard’s Late Speculations’

17:45-18:00: Break

MAIN STAGE
18:00-19:00:
Keynote 3: Sha Xin Wei, ‘Indeterminacy and Ontogenesis’

Sunday 15 November

SESSIONS
10:00-11:15:
Panel 9a: Aleatoric Procedures & Instruments
Clare Lesser, ‘Deconstruction and Indeterminacy: Radio as Aleatoric Instrument in the Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen’
Martin Patrick, ‘Iconoclastic and Irreverent (Buddhist-inflected) Simplicity in Fluxus Performance and Artworks’
Radek Przedpełski, ‘ “Stochastics, Topology, Emanuel de Witte”. Cosmotechnical Indeterminacy in Marek Konieczny’s Neo-Avant-Garde Intermedia (1962 ⁠— ∞)’

Panel 9b: Visual Temporalities
Kristupas Sabolius, ‘Beyond Determination and Adaptation: Imagination as a Function of Life’
Sascia Pellegrini, ‘Determinate-Indeterminacy: The Flux of Time-Film. A Comparison Between the Work of Andrey Tarkovsky and Ingmar Bergman’
Mitra Azar, ‘(Dis)orientation and Center of Indetermination’

11:15-11:30: Break

SESSIONS
11:30-12:45:
Panel 10a: Cultural Memory
Gary Charles, ‘Potentiality ≠ Probability’
Mayu Iida, ‘The Ghosts of the Atomic Past, Present and Future, and the Afterlives of Ephemeral Memory Objects’
Zainab Aliyu, ‘Death as a Moment of Radical Continuity’

Panel 10b: Rules of the Game
Luciana Galliano, ‘ “People are still looking for definitions, but” ’
Doug Stark, ‘Bateson, Croquet, and Embracing Ludic Indeterminacy Through Computer Gaming’
David Cotter, ‘2020 Vision: Music, Indeterminacy, and Virtual Reality’

12:45-13:30: Lunch

MAIN STAGE
13:30-14:30:
Keynote 4: Vladimir Tasić, ‘The Pasts of Determinacy’

14:30-15:00: Break

SESSIONS
15:00-16:15:
Panel 11a: Text, Context, Subtext
Juno Hoay-Fern Ooi, ‘Death of the Author/Death of the Reader: Textual Indeterminacy in Kenji Siratori’s Blood Electric‘
Helen Palmer, ‘Synvariance: Queer Defamiliarisation and the Axes of Language’
Michael Greer, ‘Reclaiming the Pejorative: Imaginable Futures and Socially Situated Knowledge’

Panel 11b: Computabilities
Nancy Mauro-Flude and Jo Pollitt, ‘Expanding Liminality: We Live Inside the Interstices of the World Located Between Folds of the Red Fibres’
Emiddio Vasquez, ‘Materialist Synthesis’
Aden Evens, ‘Computation and Contingency’

16:15-16:30: Break

SESSIONS
16:30-17:45:
Panel 12a: Liminality, Aesthetics and the Practice of Theory in the work of Dick Higgins (Curated Panel and Performance)
Owen Smith, ‘Seeking New Horizons with Dick Higgins, or How Blank Structures, Boredom and Danger can Help Us Stop Worrying About the Virus and Enjoy the Cacophony of the Unknown, the Unforeseen and the Indeterminate’
Simon Anderson, ‘Fluxus cum clinamen’
Craig Saper, ‘Indeterminacy As/Of Intermedia: Instructions’

Panel 12b: Resilience and Resistance
Douglas Basford, ‘If we resilient: The Racial Politics of Neuroplasticity and Indeterminacy’
Anthony Gritten, ‘Indeterminacy in the 1970s: Cage Meets Lyotard’
Dominic Smith, ‘Common Resilience: Philosophy of Technology as Future-Oriented Philosophy of Education’