Artificial

The theme of the 2027 conference is Artificial. As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly pervasive—and almost certainly more so by the time we meet—we want to create space to consider it in the context of our disciplines in the Bay Area, at the heart of where much of this technology is being developed. At the same time, the idea of the artificial is broadly generative, and its reach extends well beyond this local and recent context.

At the core of the conference theme is “art”: human making, craft, and its material result; the counterpart of science. Next comes “artifice,” with its associations of ingenuity, technical skill, cunning, falsity, and deception. Our theme reaches its destination at “artificial”: fabricated, prosthetic, non-spontaneous. The artificial is the opposite not only of the natural or organic but, especially today, of the human.

Questions associated with the theme in its narrower sense might include: How do art, language, culture, media, and belief shape people's encounters with technology? Do the linguistic artificial worlds of fiction, or the visual and multimedia worlds of painting, film, and other media, offer insights into those of AI? What, if any, are the roles of AI “superintelligence” in research and teaching in the humanities, especially languages?

The conference program committee also welcomes contributions engaging more broadly with humanistic questions centered on art, artifice, the artificial, and their others. How do texts represent artworks, artists, and art-making? How and why are categories such as the natural, the human, and the organic constructed? How do artworks reflect on distinctions between originals and copies, or authenticity and imitation? Investigations of style and technique, and of the concrete physical realization or “madeness” of cultural products, also fall within the scope of Artificial.