The Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, April 8–9 2025Conference partner: The Games Studies Research Centre, The University of Silesia, Katowice
Avatars, Assistants, Chatbots.New Fictional Characters in Contemporary Culture (From Literature to New Media)
https://sdnh.uw.edu.pl/en/2024/12/conference-avatars-assistants-chatbots-new-fictional-characters-in-contemporary-culture-from-literature-to-new-media/
The Department of Historical Poetics and the Center for Digital Humanities at the Institute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences cordially invite you to the international conference “Avatars, Assistants, Chatbots. Fictional Characters in Contemporary Culture (From Literature to New Media)”.
The conference aims to reflect on the status of a technological fictional entity in various practices of contemporary multi-media culture. The collective imagination holds firmly cyborgs, androids, and xenomorphs. The interactive technological entities with anthropomorphic characteristics pose a new challenge for cultural, media, and literary reflection on fictional creations. The development of technology and the media revolution gave rise to the emergence of previously unprecedented classes of entities, starting with virtual assistants providing support in the use of digital devices, avatars as real people's identities, and ending with the famous Chat GTP. They radically change the existing concepts of ontology and the identity of a fictional character, transform the definition of fiction, and complicate the relationship between the recipient of fiction and the character immersed in fiction. Moreover, the culture of convergence has enabled the appearance of characters functioning in complementary stories across media (Thon 2016). Transfictionality (Saint-Gelais 2011) allows them to appear in various extensions of earlier fiction. We want to reflect on the ontology of these digital companions of today’s participants in digital culture and their relationships with the protagonists of printed and digital literature to recognize potential similarities between them and fundamental differences. The principles and effects of various interactions with the technological “other” also seem to demand profound discussion, starting from using avatars in digital media, through the problems of digital translation, to the consequences of these interactions for communication theory (Meadows 2008).
One of the consequences of these uses of avatars is also the process of blurring the border between participants in fictional events, and the inhabitants of fictional worlds (Maj 2019) and their recipients/ users (in video games, digital literature, virtual or augmented reality, digital applications and utility programs). The process of becoming the protagonist of a story often takes place in real time via streaming on social media, and it achieves global reach. Activating the recipient and including him in the world of narrative (in printed and digital literature (Winiecka 2020) and video games (Kłosiński 2018)) can be grasped in its fluctuating, historical forms (cf. various strategies of addressing the addressee in literary communication, narrative genres and forms based on the implied presence of the listener). Another area of reflection may be the analysis of techniques for breaking the fourth wall (Brown 2013) and metaleptic procedures (Hanebeck 2017), aimed at questioning the division of the roles of the fictional character and the recipient of fiction (in literature and the visual arts). Worth considering are also experiments with the embodiment of the recipient as a category in both the construction of a multimedia text and the environment of its reception.Literary scholars, media scholars, designers, and video game researchers interested in the practices and forms of multimedia digital culture are kindly invited to discuss these issues of contemporary culture.
Special guests include:
prof. Alice Bell (Sheffield Hallam University)prof. Jan-Noël Thon (Universität Osnabrück)dr hab. Michał Kłosiński (Uniwersytet Śląski)
