CALL FOR PAPERS: Bodies in Digital Transition
Mapping a topology of digital bodies
A Conference Supported by the CHASE Doctoral Training Partnership
8–9 September 2025 at King’s College London
Presented by the CHASE DiSCo network
KEY SPEAKERS
Dr Alfie Bown, Senior Lecturer in Digital Media Culture and Technology, King’s College London
Proferssor Ali Hossaini (Creative Practice Workshop leader), Professor in Digital Media and Culture, SOAS University of London / Visiting Senior Research Fellow in Engineering, King's College London
Machines glow, pulse, perform and think through metal, light, code, and living matter.
The 2nd annual Bodies in Digital Transition (BDT) conference traverses the materiality of the mechanical body itself: what embodied gestures and rhythms animate its operations? What moves beneath its surface?
What kind of being emerges in the loops of its code? From the lures of the aesthetic surface to the recursive depths of its algorithmic core, this year BTD aims to dissect the machine’s anatomy across several strata that form a speculative topology of the machinic body; a descent through appearance, mechanism, and ontology toward the thresholds where technology ceases to represent and begins to be.
In mapping out the systems of embodiment inhabited by digital beings, we also open up inquiry into how human agents author, come into contact with, and transform machine bodies. There is neither “the technology itself” nor “the aesthetics itself” but rather a method of design in which the two are mutually implicated. To resist interior–exterior divides open inquiries of how human agents encounter and transform machinic bodies through the intra-active practice of design.
Digital bodies condition human expression and are conditioned by cultural inflections at each strata. The plural and distributed materialities of digital systems span beyond physical objects, but encompass code, electromagnetic waves, and sensory outputs in complex and multiple communicating layers. How does the agency act as this morphing web?
Following a post-human stance, neither digital nor human cognition is assumed to be contained within an algorithmic nucleus. Instead, it is conceived as emerging through relations across each stratum, whose analytical isolation is not intended to fix ontologies, but to map a topology of multiple, non-linear processes through which agencies coalesce.
To move beyond the limits of this configuration and to encourage crossing of boundaries, we invite trans-disciplinary experimental and highly speculative inquiry and action into the machinic as event, intra-action, and formation of being.
Topics for the conference may contradict, include, and are not limited to:
The machine as image, projection, and fetish-skin: a first layer that probes the appearance of machines and their bodies, their visual form, affective allure, and symbolic projection.
Digital surfaces, filters, and the aesthetics of machinic allure. The fascination with smoothness, polish, and their hyperreality.
The body as interface and the machine as prosthetic facade, wearable, projected, or performative.
AI-generated corporeality and the visual re-coding of flesh. How AI image-making reconfigures bodily representation and mechanical embodiment within posthuman, transhuman, and antihuman aesthetics.
A poetic choreography of gears, code, and mechanical gestures: the movement and functioning of the machine at the crossroads between STEM and a sort of kinetic philosophical and phenomenological inquiry probing how systems act, respond, and translate inputs into expression.
The technological interiority as narrative: the language of process, glitch, and error that materialise visible traces of invisible processes.
The black box as the algorithmic unconscious: repetition, pattern, and drive with (pre)emergent subjects.
The machinic as an epistemic and existential threshold in which epistemology folds into ontology.
Possibility of the machine’s transcendental or cosmic cause.
Submission Guidelines
Abstracts (max. 250 words) for the following paper categories are welcome:
Full papers (20-minute presentation with 10-minute Q&A)
Posters
You may also submit proposals for three-person panels organised around a particular topic. Each panel proposal must include three abstracts (one of which must be by the panel organiser) and list every panellist, along with their email addresses, on the panel description. Individual abstract submissions will be assigned by the conference hosts to an appropriate panel.
We primarily seek transdisciplinary/transcultural perspectives and a rich diversity of theoretical, methodological and philosophical approaches to probe digital and virtual media. We warmly welcome creative approaches and alternative presentation formats. Feel free to stretch the boundaries in unexpected ways! This conference is suitable for doctoral researchers at all stages. We particularly encourage submissions from doctoral researchers and alumni of CHASE institutions and the host institution – King’s College London. We also welcome graduate students in the process of approaching PhD studies, but please be aware that priority will be given to PhD researchers.
Click here to submit your proposal
Deadline for abstracts: Friday 26th June 23:59
Notification of acceptance: Monday 20th July
Organising Committee and Contacts
Any questions regarding the conference and submissions may be directed to:
Alessandro Caruana
April Wei-West
Isaac Parkinson
Jenny Jih
Lily Bichard-Collins
Liv Owens
Mae Walsh
Ophir Amitay
