Technological advancements are exciting. It produces tools, appliances, technics, devices, and gadgets. It creates possibilities, knowledge, opportunities, and meaning. It gives us insight, thoughts, and identity. On the other hand, it challenges us to rethink our existence and threatens to lose our ability to grasp reality. One of the latest advancements in technology is artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) software. The invention has been embedded in our daily lives and will soon, as predicted, be implemented in many other factors of our reality. On the one hand, there are limitless probabilities of AI/ML applications as it is a worldwide phenomenon. On the other, it poses predicaments to two crucial human faculties: intelligence and imagination.
The Visual Culture Literacy (Literasi Budaya Visual – LBV), Bandung Institute of Technology organizes an international conference, the Bandung International Conference for Cultural Studies (BaiconFocus), as an academic and professional stage to have the conversation regarding AI/ML and their cultural impact for the society. BaiconFocus is a triennial event, and the first is planned to be held on 16 – 17 October 2024 at the Faculty of Arts and Design campus in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia.
Themes
Visual Culture
The visual field has long been the specificity of humans. Gazing at objects or experiencing visualities defines human position, identity, history, and worldview. Early in our lives, humans have been “positioned” in what French psychoanalysis Jacques Lacan calls the mirror stage (2007), which is fundamental to their psychic developmental progress. In practice, visual culture and visuality are two terms attached to the human’s abilities to create, produce, discuss, and appreciate a work of art. Art practice, aesthetics, and history have been the domains of human intelligence, imagination, and dreams. In short, the visual ties to the cultural development of an individual, community, society, or even nation, as we can identify a nation chiefly with its visual work.
Until recently, the development of AI and its ability to replicate human creativity has pushed us to question the importance of machine learning software and human imagination. Websites such as Midjourney or Dall. E has been proven to offer a range of visual fields that were previously unknown. Graphic applications, on the other hand, provide the user with the wide possibility to create a complex visual field. Despite the awe that we might have, simultaneously, we question the importance of visual culture in our everyday lives. What will happen to our visual intelligence, imagination, and dreams when the AI/ML software takes away our ability to enrich the visual culture?
This sub-theme is a deep dive into the complex interplay of AI and the visual field, exploring topics such as AI & Image; AI, Visual Culture and Ethics; AI, Visual Culture, and Reality; AI and Aura (reality); AI & Experimental; AI & Immediacy; AI & Eclecticism; AI & Authenticity; AI, Visual culture, & History; AI & Politics of visual culture. It is a call to action, urging us to comprehend the potential and challenges AI might bring to the human visual field and to engage in the discourse surrounding it.
Culture and Civilization
Culture has been largely defined by the works of human minds and their interaction with their surroundings (environment, nature, other humans, society). In Matthew Arnold’s words, Culture is “The study of perfection, leads us … to conceive of true human perfection as a harmonious perfection, developing all sides of our humanity; and as a general perfection, developing all parts of our society” (2006: 9). Culture, then, is a fundamental part that we, as human beings, should have or equip with in order to understand and experience our surroundings.
Culture also creates and defines what civilization is. What kind of society we have; its directions, purposes, goals, and aims. Who we are as humans, who we are as a part of a community, where we are, and what role we should play to support the common interests of the collective. In many aspects and fields of knowledge, humans have been trying to discuss and find solutions to cultural issues we face daily. Recently, technological advancements brought another problem that should be defined, discussed, and studied. The advancements in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) software pose challenges to our understanding of culture and, at the same time, our quest for a harmonious civilization.
The BaiconFocus 2024 conference is aiming to discuss, define, and study what factors would rise as obstacles related to culture, civilization, and AI/ML. What will the human future look like as AI/ML starts to take over the ownership of culture and civilization from human to machine? This sub-theme will address the issues of, but not limited to, AI and Human Social Life; AI and the Future Human Life, AI and human lifestyle; AI and The Future Global Culture; AI and its Challenge to Local Culture, AI and media; AI & Copyright.
Language and Literacy
Language has been the fundamental system, instrument, and tool to deliver information, develop knowledge, and contest power. Human language has been the basis of literacy as a source of knowledge and power. Through the multiplicities of their culture, humans have created a vast collection of language, idioms, dialects, and accents, while at the same time, it is manifested in various forms: novels, poetry, books, manuscripts, and many others. For the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (2001: 68).
Today, technology offers a “shortcut” to human capacity and their interaction with language. The latest developments in AI/ML software (ChatGPT, Quillbot, etc.) offer the possibility of crafting the same linguistic structure in written pages as humans do. On the one hand, we, as human beings, are being helped to put our minds into words. However, on the other, the blurry one lurks a big question regarding our capabilities to understand the language and perform an act of literacy if, in the future, our words and worlds are constructed through the help of AI/ML software. Today, we are dealing with the puzzle of whether AI will strengthen human literacy or disrupt it completely. Will our language and literacy still be what the British writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge argues as “the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests” (1840: 313)?
The BaiconFocus 2024 conference aims to discuss, define, and study issues around, but not limited to, AI and Archive; AI and language intelligence; AI, language, and emotion; AI, language, and gesture; AI, language and its contexts; AI, language, and information; AI, Language, and meaning; AI and Local Dialect: AI, Language, and Politics (Hoax, etc.); AI, Language, and Plagiarism; AI and Logics of Language; AI and the Missing of Style will be or not will be the future of human.