Dear Colleagues, We invite papers for our 4S panel, Nonhuman Vision: How Technologies and Animals See and Make Sense. Please submit your abstract by February 29 to: https://www.easst4s2020prague.org/call-for-papers-and-panels/ Yours, Adam Fish, Michael Richardson, Edgar Gomez Cruz, University of New South Wales *Nonhuman Vision: How Technologies and Animals See and Make Sense* Seeing—and the sense making that follows—is usually conceived as something humans alone do. Anthropocentric vision has been radically decentered by both computer vision and by multispecies ontologies, even if all-too-human biases stain the former and the latter is anything but surprising to indigenous people. And yet nonhuman vision remains under-examined and under-theorised in disciplines cognate to STS, where image and sense-making often remain the privilege of the human. This panel offers a corrective by advancing vivid case studies in non-human vision that center technologies and animals as agents of meaning-making.
From analogue photography to computer vision, technologies of vision see in nonhuman ways (Mackenzie and Munster 2019, Zylinska 2017). Photons are processed into computer readable code, filtered by algorithms, and correlated by machine learning to build so-called artificial intelligence. Animals, too, can see beyond, differently, and better than RGB, the human visual light spectrum (Barad 2007). While the chasm separating human vision from other animal vision is vast, efforts towards remembering and forging inter-species companionship are essential to responding to the species extinction and climate crisis (Haraway 2016). Seeing as non-human–technological or animal–uniquely challenges key concepts in media studies: who or what makes sense of symbols.
Across the assembled papers, this panel explores some of the crucial technical, affective, multi-species and multi-modal ways in which nonhuman vision figures in the contemporary moment. In doing so, it brings expertise in STS, new materialism, visual culture, media arts, and cultural studies to the study of communication and technology. Collectively, we question the politics of vision: who or what sees who? What, how, and when? What or who can avoid being seen, provide consent, and avoid the gaze? Awareness of how vision technologies and non-human animals see and sense–or avoid such efforts–in uncanny and alien ways not only challenges but should transform human relationships to others, both technical and animal. *Contact: **mediacultures@protonmail.ch <mediacultures@protonmail.ch>* *Keywords:* vision, animal, drone, visual, seeing, gaze *Categories: *Environmental/Multispecies Studies Information, Computing and Media Technology STS and Social Justice/Social How to apply: https://www.easst4s2020prague.org/call-for-papers-and-panels/