Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

ack to Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, a polymath who lived and worked in 9th century Baghdad
during the so-called “Golden Age” of Islam. Al-Khwārizmī is considered by many observers to have founded
algebra, and to have introduced the West to Arabic numerals. His surname is also the source of the word,
“algorithm.” Focusing on significant details about Al-Khwārizmī’s origins and intellectual output, the essay
illuminates seven main senses of the word algorithm: (1) a person; (2) a place; (3) a textual system; (4) a
number system; (5) a code; (6) a technology; and (7) a moment of reckoning. The essay concludes by
reflecting on what this expanded semantics might suggest about the politics of contemporary algorithmic
culture.
Michael O’Driscoll
Talking Computers: Chatbots, Procedural Poetics, and the Ideology of Agential Media
The next step in the evolution of the internet, chatbots swarmed into popular consciousness in 2016 with
promises of easier access to ecommerce and information. A chatbot is a basic form of artificial intelligence
that simulates human conversation while providing automated services. The evolution of chatbots dates
back to 1960, a moment that also saw the emergence of procedural poetics by avant-garde artists, such as
Jackson Mac Low, who created systems that reworked extant texts to produce new poems, systems that
were ultimately translated into computer algorithms such as Travesty and Diastext. Mac Low then spent his
career reminding audiences that the resulting artworks were not products of chance void of human ego, but
were rather the effect of pre-determined processes. On the premise that the illusion of machine agency is
both pervasive and dangerous – think of chatbots as a kind of Mechanical Turk that masks human intention
and labour – I’ll focus on one example from Mac Low’s Stein Poems (produced through the Diastext5
program from 1998-2002) and consider how computer-generated artforms can challenge the ideological
presuppositions of agential media.
Chris Rodley
Theory Bot: Can Digital Culture Theorise Itself?
How to theorise digital cultures has been the focus of a diverse range of cultural scholars from Lyotard to N.
Katherine Hayles. This experimental session turns that question on its head: rather than asking how can we
theorise digital culture, it examines whether the Internet assemblage itself is generating its own emergent
theories. What latent philosophies are already encoded within today’s networked culture, and how do such
“non-human theories” differ from their familiar human-authored counterpart? To answer such questions, I
have created my own autonomous “bot” which generates original cultural theory derived from real-time
social data. This builds upon my significant experience in creating successful generative bots such as
MagicRealismBot, which was featured in Slate, Fusion, Dazed, TheNextWeb, Huffington Post and elsewhere.
The presentation begins with an introductory talk to contextualise the bot and explains how it was devised.
This is followed by a live demonstration, and discussion and Q&A.
4I
Film cultures and national imaginaries (Chair, Alifa Bandali)
Roberto Castillo ‘Made-in-China’ Nollywood: the new geographies of African diasporic imagination
Recently, governments in China and Africa have vowed to increase funding for film-makers as part of the
One Belt, One Road initiative. China’s particular interests include: promoting its cinema and culture across
Africa; and tapping into the enormous economic opportunities offered by Nollywood and other regional film
industries. Beyond the official discourse, independent entrepreneurs have also been laying down the
foundations of a budding Sino-African filmic universe. In the last decade, West African film-makers and
musicians have used China as a backdrop for their stories about success, fortune, failure and Sino-African
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