Call for papers (deadline 2 February 2026), international conference co-organised with Alessandro Trevisan, Eryk Salvaggio, Leonardo Impett, Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, 20-21 April 2026.
What are the temporalities of neural networks? How do machines encode time, and how do they structure our experience of time? What are the consequences of a neural network’s attempt to simulate temporal and historical ways of being?
This workshop suggests temporality as the fil rouge to pierce through the disparate levels at which critical AI intervenes; from infrastructures to neural architectures, from crowdworkers to latent spaces. The temporal is at the heart of critiques around, for instance, labour-time in training data (Malevé, Pasquinelli), the historical situatedness of AI models (Offert, Heuser), modes of temporal existence in LLMs, and many others.
We welcome papers addressing AI through a temporal lens, including in the following:
- Temporal structures in generative AI, including audio and video generation
- Narratology and LLMs
- Forms of time in cross-modal models
- Accelerationism in AI, dromology of AI
- Temporalities of labour and of infrastructure in AI, particularly with regards to the global south
- Time, work-discipline and AI capitalism
- Time-space compression in AI training
- AI, mortality and necropolitics
Papers will be 20 minutes in length; please submit an abstract of the proposed paper (max 500 words) and a short CV (max 300 words, of first author if multiple) via the following web form: https://forms.gle/XpN9MWLLb9ZunCw66.
No registration fee. Funding will be made available to assist travel and accommodation for speakers without other funding, with priority for early career scholars.
Scientific organization: Alessandro Trevisan, Eryk Salvaggio, Leonardo Impett, Violaine Boutet de Monvel — Machine Visual Culture research group.