Automation's Ecologies

Rather than displacing or contesting the significance of human labor, the workshop will ask participants to theorize how technological reconfigurations of work are entangled with new spatial practices, accelerations in material throughput, and elemental displacements. As sociotechnical assemblages where humans, machines, materials, and informational elements co-evolve and interact, new technologies not only impact the environment, but form complex ecologies in themselves. Investigating how automation and informatic optimization amplify, maintain, and disrupt these ecological configurations will connect longstanding debates about the social impacts of mechanization and automation with recent questions around the environmental and environmental justice impacts of emerging digital technologies.