An unusual book involving many, many agencies edited by Ceyda Yolgormez, Bart Simon, and Fenwick McKelvey
Apply here: https://ebauche.facil.services/form/#/2/form/view/XQWW408A0dpbofoXRHhwfOAnywKvckhQVq6S8YwXkCo/
Applications open until 1 April 2026.
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Where is the artificial intelligence? With AI included in every job talk, abstract commentary, or refrigerator, our edited book, Many, Many Machine Agencies, challenges contributors to present encounters with many kinds of artificial intelligences in a more curious fashion than the hyped search for the artificial intelligence so far has been able to amass. The book theoretically eschews the instrumentalizing language of artificial intelligence in favour of an open-ended call for more experiential understanding that advances a posthumanistic and materialist method of critical cultural AI through experience design, critical making, and research-creation.
We seek contributors for this unusual, edited collection of machine agencies, asking for recipes, instructions, or games that center the problem of agency and interaction and the importance of new kinds of encounters with machines. Constructed, found, or haphazard encounters define our approach rather than any presumed intelligence, utility, or efficacy. This collection brings together agencies that must be worked out through documented interactions rather than named as an a priori aptitude or benchmark. As such, this is a call for all the hybrid maker-thinkers who dabble in different theories of machinic agency including artificial life, digital games, interaction design, robotics, ubiquitous computing, expert systems, virtual life, simulation, and neural networks.
Prospective authors are invited to propose recipes for human-machine encounters that actualize machine agencies and intelligences. Many, Many Machine Agencies is a kind of a cookbook for engaging critically with machines, and as such, we take inspiration from celebrated cookbook authors like MFK Fisher who provides recipes and instructions for dishes, while embedding them in a broader biographical and cultural narrative. Certainly, we want to teach readers how to get on cooking with AI, but we also do not want to be too prescriptive in the kind of instructions they dispense. Essentially, the chapter-recipes are descriptive accounts of interactions and experiences that the reader can reproduce for themselves in their own setting, and they provide the pretext for the articulation and understanding that arise from the encounter.
An encounter refers to an interaction between humans, machines, and environments. The prompt, for example, can be an encounter, one highly scripted in the history of computing where machines guess/predict what we expect. Often our roles in interactions with machines are prescripted, and we find ourselves reproducing encounters within frames of client/server, sender/receiver, core/periphery. Our book challenges these expectations that are inherited from the instrumentalist logics that curtail stories of other kinds of encounters with machines. Encounters can be simple games, thought experiments with technologies, reflections on artistic praxis that produce agencies in the experience.
We have an open call for participation until 1 April 2026 to prepare a proposal for an academic press. Thinking around the different facets of agency, we encourage submissions to consider one of the following themes:
- trust and mutual dependence
- recognition and feedback
- independence and will
- fragility and care
Accepted contributors will be expected to submit 3,000 to 4,000 words that should include:
- Title
- Needed materials for construction (e.g. hardware requirements, software use, skills needed)
- Instructions and project description (approx. 1500 to 3000 words)
- • Reflections, Lessons, and Warnings (approx. 2000 words)
Our call is meant to help us decide contributions meant for readers to replicate in the comfort of their homes and labs as well as advance writing on AI and research creation.
Interested contributions should answer this form asking for:
• Title
• A tentative list of ingredients / required Materials?
o Please note that we are not looking for repeatable experiments per se, but the technical and material conditions that enabled this encounter
• Project Description, please try to explain to reviewers what is your sense of the agencies involved in the encounter? (relational; distributed; communicative; responsive etc.) (around 300 words)
• Which theme(s) are you closest to?
• A relevant photo of an output, the environment, or the lab
• An alt text description of the image
Submissions will be accepted on a rolling basis until 1 April 2026. We will update once we confirm a publisher.