CAA 2024

Technological Imaginaries: imagined futures, utopian visions, and fabulations of alternative worlds

Co-chaired by Constanza Salazar and Rene Alberto Garcia Cepeda

Friday, February 16, 2024

11:00 AM – 12:30 PM Central

Hilton Chicago – 3rd Floor – Waldorf Room

She Who Sees the Unknown: Reimagining the Jinn Figure in Oddity and Wonder

Nima Esmailpour, Concordia University

Data Collecting (Universe)

Jessica Fu, Toronto Metropolitan University

Futurism and Fabulations in Contemporary Latin American Art and Ecology

Claudia Pederson, WSU

Imagined futures, utopian visions, and fabulations of alternative worlds make up recent technological imaginaries that use science fiction, specific cultural cosmologies, and the remaking of technological tools. Based on Sang-Hyun Kim and Sheila Jasanoff’s concept of “sociotechnical imaginaries” which are “collectively imagined forms of social life and social order reflected in the design and fulfillment of nation-specific scientific and/or technological projects” (Jasanoff and Kim, 2009), I focus on the specificity of technological imaginaries that have and continue to emerge in art making practices that rethink technology away from its “technocapitalist” logic of expansion, profit, and extraction (Villa, 2009). Instead, artists and artist-collectives reimagine technology through Afrofuturist aesthetics and ideals, indigenous and African cosmologies, ecological perspectives, and alternative uses of technology for artistic ends. In this panel, we present contributions by scholars and artists that expand on the concept of technological imaginaries to help us envision possibilities, ruptures, and potentialities away from the Global North paradigm.