Current reconfigurations of artificial intelligence confront us, anew, with the intimate dependency between technology and humanity to render the world intelligible, to make worlds in common. While it is not new that our social intelligence depends on varied and historical technologies, current forms of artificial intelligence—beyond the most-mentioned vilification and exultation—present us with the opportunity to politicise and de-automatise the relationship between intelligence, cognition, and technology. At this moment, the humanities and the arts intervene most critically in what can be suggested as an ineluctable progress towards an artificial intelligence harnessed by the military industry, algorithmic governmentality, and large commercial monopolies. These interventions present critical voices when they unpack the encrypted grammars and opacities configuring the current architecture of technical intelligence. And they are creative when they imagine and collaboratively write emancipatory grammars, resource-sharing circuits, and horizons for how these architectures might harbour worlds in common. Even though interventions from literary and critical theory are often overheard in today’s heated debates on AI, we consider them best positioned to apprehend the hitherto unrecognizable future rapidly approaching at this threshold moment at a planetary scale. 

This seminar seeks to concentrate leading and emergent scholarly minds on the necessary politicisation and de-automatisation of intelligence from critical, creative and expanded writing processes in Latinx America. This way, the seminar seeks to contribute to plural cosmotechnics and to worlds in common which are becoming intelligible from the current threshold we find ourselves on at a planetary level.

We welcome analyses of diverse writing processes, ranging from decolonial uses of chatbots to learn indigenous languages in threat of extinction; artistic collaborations with AI in the creation of novels, games, educational texts, digital moving images and experimental audiovisual work; struggles to crack open the code for democratic open commons; the abiding legacies of 1990s’ and 2000s’ hackfeminisms; and more. We invite abstracts on these and related issues surrounding the question of Latinx American imaginations and encryptions of changing architectures of technical intelligence.  Selected participants will meet during the online track of the Congress of the American Comparative Literature Association on May 15 and 16, 2027. We are actively considering the publication of conference proceedings, pending seminar acceptance.