Digital Ecologies 3 Symposium 2025

24-25 July 2025, Bath Spa University Locksbrook Campus, Bath UK

Machine / Material / Land

The Digital Ecologies 3 Symposium examines the complex material relationship between technology, society, food and energy production and the land. It is informed by Yuk Hui’s notion that the essence of contemporary technology is to ‘consider everything as a standing reserve, as a resource to be ordered and exploited’ (Hui, 2021). Along these lines Hito Steyerl identifies AI generative media as ‘Mean Images’ and looks at their reliance on ‘vast infrastructures of polluting hardware and menial and disenfranchised labour’ (Steyerl, 2023). 

We must scrutinise the material and ecological cost of production, extraction, AI and technological acts, and seek to reimagine our relationship with technology, not as a tool for exploitation, but as a means of seeing things differently and fostering care and attention towards all entities. 

Call for Abstracts

Our symposium is organised around three main themes: 

In this strand we explore how we can challenge Hui’s notion of contemporary technology as a tool for extraction and exploitation of resources. We ask how technology and our relationship with machines of all sorts can be re-imagined in creative, critical and sustainable ways.  Here we would like to expand on Hui ‘s other ideas which consider how philosophy and art can transform the concept of technology, including the imagination, invention and use of technology’ away from the conditions of exploitation. In addition, we are connecting with Artist and writer James Bridle’s suggestion that technology can be reimagined as a way of ‘seeing things differently rather than just doing things’ (Bridle, 2022).

We are interested in a range of responses that explore themes including: 
  • Speculative machine futures and imaginaries – re-imagined ethical and sustainable machines  
  • Machines that help us to communicate with, & understand non-human intelligences 
  • Non-western and postcolonial machine futurisms 
  • Organic and biological machines 
  • Caring machines 
This strand thinks about digital technologies and their entanglements with soil and food systems.  Vandana Shiva argues that the techno optimism advanced by Big Tech and Big Ag, will only exacerbate the climate emergency. How might thinking-with soil, an undertheorized body, offer fresh perspectives? 
Soil, when understood as biologically intact, interconnected and ongoing, is contingent on place. Conversely, cloud technologies and internet infrastructure have a place-less-ness – our everyday actions online, both trivial and essential, feel immaterial and weightless thanks to metaphors and abstractions like the cloud. These tools are constructed and operational through complex relationships with soil and land. 
What sense does soil make of our digital actions, what seeps in and out of soily bodies – materially, conceptually, philosophically? 
How might we create new metaphors for the digital that materialise and bring to mind these hidden realities, manifesting with mass, visibility, and place in a more authentic digital ecology?
We are interested in a range of responses that explore themes including: 
  • Soil-human relations 
  • Soil-food-data synergies 
  • Food culture 
  • Extraction 
  • Data and transfer 
  • New metaphors and stories for digital infrastructure and digital actions 
  • (Digital) compost and a (digital) lifecycle 
  • Temporality 
  • Acoustic soilscapes 
  • Belowground digital ecologies 
  • Photosynthesis and carbon 
  • Phenology 
  • Soil care practices and rituals 
This strand seeks to understand how technology has altered human interaction with the landscape and our ritualistic practices. We welcome papers that explore how we are adapting to change and uncertainty through ritualistic and folk behaviours in the face of the current climate crisis. 
The question arises: How has technology altered our interaction with the landscape and our ritualistic practices? Furthermore, in what novel or traditional manners are we exploring, celebrating, and adapting to change and uncertainty? 
We are interested in a range of responses from artists, academics, historians and technologists who are investigating the intersections of landscape and technology through ritual, folklore or performance to submit papers and present work that explore the following themes: 
  • Ritual & Rites 
  • Embodied practices 
  • Energy Production: Solar, Wind, Hydro 
  • Alchemy 
  • Technology as revered object 
  • Festival/Carnival/Rave/Music/Dance/Theatre 
  • Folk Practices and Costumes 
  • Uncertainty 
  • Celebration / Feasting 
  • Human / more-than-human 
  • Calendrical: Seasons / Harvest / Spring / May Day

Submission Process

We welcome submissions from academics, artists, researchers, and practitioners who are exploring these themes. We also welcome proposals for non-traditional approaches to papers including proposals for exhibits and moving image screenings, sound works & performances.  
Abstracts must be submitted in English by February 20th 2025 to artandtechnologyresearch@bathspa.ac.uk with the subject “Abstract DE3 2025” and should not exceed 300 words. Abstracts must include the presentation title & the author’s name. For practice based work please provide the title and a summary/description of the work. 
 
Shortly after the conference, participants will be invited to submit their work for an online publication. 
 
Applicants will be notified of the outcome of their submission by April 28th 2025. Subsequent information regarding the registration process and process for submitting work will be made available closer to the symposium date. 

About the group

The Art Technology Research Group at Bath Spa University is concerned with a critical and exploratory look at the relationship with technologies, humans and other intelligences and creative acts.

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