Digital technologies have become a deeply integrated aspect of our lives. From speaking to friends and ordering food to finding our way around, all our daily acts are now mediated by the digital. This deep integration promises to expand our agency, yet it also shapes and constrains it in ways that we may not recognise or welcome. Increasingly, we are confronted with a dilemma: either to withdraw from or engage with the use of digital technologies, as these often tend to disperse our attention and hinder our self-awareness. In the space of possibilities between anti-technological suspicions and anti-human desires for assimilation, we aim to critically reflect on the creative origins and free use of the cybernetic grammar of digital computers.

The 'Hyperdigital Designs' workshop at the University of Cambridge will explore creative reflections upon the grammar of digital computers. Building upon this collaborative ‘How to Play with Fire’ project that began at the 2022 Diverse Intelligence Summer Institute, the 'Hyperdigital' announces a higher reflection on the creation and use of digital media for human freedom. Beyond the fixed opposition between the Postdigital and the Digital, the Hyperdigital exceeds so as more radically to enter and accelerate the free use of the digital — whether among the creators of digital systems, or from the oldest creator of the idea of the digital itself.

We invite abstracts of up to 250 words for a one-day workshop on Wednesday 14 June 2023 at the University of Cambridge, Alison Richards Building SG2, hosted by Cambridge Digital Humanities and co-sponsored by the William Temple Foundation, to explore interdisciplinary perspectives on thinking beyond the digital at its highest point. We are interested to host talks that explore the fundamental theoretical questions of philosophy, theology, ethics, and art, as well as applied and practical discussions concerning how technologies or designs, from video games to generative artificial intelligence, can be envisioned to mediate and emancipate human creativity.

Please send abstracts to HyperdigitalDesigns@gmail.com.