CfP 4S AI Art, Agency & Value – 4S Toronto 2026 Open Panel: Careful Boundaries of AI Art
Hanna Sipos
If you are researching AI-assisted art, cultural production, or related questions of agency, authorship, and valuation, I warmly invite you to submit an abstract to the Open Panel Careful Boundaries of AI Art at 4S (Toronto, Oct 7–10, 2026).
Please submit by April 30th via the official submission portal:
https://www.4sonline.org/call_for_submissions_toronto.php
PANEL TITLE: Careful Boundaries of AI Art
SUBTITLE: The Negotiation of Creativity, Agency, Authorship and Value under Algorithmic Opacity
PANEL ABSTRACT:
Generative AI has become an increasingly present actor in contemporary artistic and cultural production, reshaping how images, texts, sounds, and performances are created, circulated, and valued. AI-assisted art practices raise foundational questions about agency, authorship, creativity, and ethics, particularly as these practices utilize opaque models, hidden datasets, and distributed forms of labour, while simultaneously mobilizing cultural expectations of creativity, intention, and authorship. This panel invites contributions that examine AI art as a critical site for exploring how cultural production is reorganised under conditions of algorithmic opacity.
Rather than treating AI art as a discrete genre or novelty, the panel approaches it as a boundary object (Star & Griesemer, 1989) that brings together actors, practices, and epistemic commitments. Across these contexts, AI art exposes tensions between human intentionality and machine behaviour and how meaning emerges in relations where intention is unevenly distributed (Haraway, 2007). It also reveals friction between creative vision and algorithmic constraint (Boden, 2010), and between established cultural norms and emerging sociotechnical arrangements (Pickering, 1995).
By foregrounding AI art as a lens onto broader questions of cultural production, this panel aims to create a space for dialogue between STS, Art Studies, Valuation Studies, Digital Anthropology, and Critical Algorithm Studies. It seeks to explore how AI art not only reflects but actively reconfigures contemporary understandings of creativity, agency, authorship, and value in algorithmically mediated cultures.
The panel welcomes papers investigating these concepts as a matter of concern (Latour, 2004) and as a matter of care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011) without oversimplifying their complexity, highlighting how algorithmic opacity shapes creative practice and its interpretation. It aims to begin carefully defining the boundaries of AI Art across different contexts, while being attentive to their provisional and contested nature. Empirical, methodological, and theoretical contributions drawing on ethnography or practice-based research are welcome.
Possible questions may include (but are not limited to):
How is agency distributed and recognized in AI-assisted artistic practices?
How are authorship and creative intention negotiated when technical processes remain partially inaccessible?
How do valuation practices adapt to AI-generated or AI-assisted works?
What ethical concerns (e.g. data extraction, invisible labour, environmental cost, bias) emerge in AI art, and how are they addressed in practice?
How can AI art serve as a site to rethink broader STS concerns around sociotechnical systems, creativity, and knowledge production?
The panel aims to foster dialogue across STS, Art Studies, Valuation Studies, Digital Anthropology, Museum Studies and Critical Algorithm Studies.
DETAILS:
Submission link: https://www.4sonline.org/call_for_submissions_toronto.php
Submission deadline: 30 April 2026
Notification of acceptance: 29 May 2026
Conference: 4S Annual Meeting, 7–10 October 2026, Toronto
Panel convenor: Hanna Sipos (University of Basel)
Please feel free to share this call with colleagues or networks who might be interested. I would be very happy to receive your submissions and to bring together a diverse set of perspectives.
Warm regards,
Hanna Sipos
Doctoral candidate for Cultural Anthropology | University of Basel | Rheinsprung 9 | 4051 Basel
hanna...@unibas.ch