MCCT - Midlands Conference in Critical Thought, 2026
University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
Conference dates: May 21st to May 22nd, 2026
VCAS is organising a conference stream with the theme: "Artistic Practice in the Age of Technology: Fatigue, Failure, and Resistance."
We're looking forward to interesting papers/presentations that will challenge the theme and the format of conference presentations.
*Unfortunately, no funding is provided if selected.
**A limited number of submitted proposals will be able to be done via Zoom/video conferencing, so presentations can be done remotely.
Theme/Topic: Artistic Practice in the Age of Technology: Fatigue, Failure, and Resistance
“I use technology in order to hate it properly. You have to become familiar with something before you can develop a genuine antagonism.”
— Nam June Paik, interview with Calvin Tomkins, 1975
This stream explores how emerging technologies reshape creative practice, artistic production, and aesthetic experience. From digital tools and immersive media to collaborative software and networked systems, technology increasingly mediates how artists conceive, create, and circulate their work. These developments raise pressing questions about originality, imagination, and innovation in an age when human creativity is increasingly entangled with technological infrastructures.
Platform aesthetics, standardized toolkits, and algorithmically managed workflows carry the risk of creative homogenization, creating patterns of creative fatigue and normalised practice that may constrain experimentality. At the same time, our deepening involvement with digital technologies also defines the context in which creativity takes place. While the internet offers access to endless sources of inspiration, the incessant stimulation, connectivity, and habitual scrolling of contemporary life mean we rarely sit with our own minds and lose the unstructured, spontaneous moments when flashes of creativity happen. Yet, gamification, data-driven design, and technological collaboration platforms also introduce new types of creative work. Technology, then, both unsettles and expands ideas of authenticity, identity, and cultural perception in creative practice today, as well as challenging inherited models of authorship, work, and value.
This stream calls for contributions that challenge both the potential and the perils of technology for creative work. We aim to bring performances, participatory formats, workshops, and traditional scholarship into shared conversation, inviting cross-disciplinary responses that explore how technological systems are reshaping the creation, circulation, and cultural value of creative work.
Potential submission topics:
• What new art forms have emerged as a result of new technologies and platforms, and how do these new aesthetics fit within our cultural landscape?
• How do contemporary technologies reshape originality, imagination, identity, authorship, and cultural value in creative practice?
• With phones giving us access to instant entertainment in our pockets, boredom is a thing of the past. How does this constant stimulation affect our capacity for creative and innovative thinking?
• Digital platforms are increasingly flooded with “AI slop.” How does this affect our cultural landscape, and how can artists respond?
• How do automation and AI in creative practice navigate the tension between expanding human capabilities and the potential for deskilling by outsourcing essential creative and critical thinking processes?
• Is the glitch the last space where the human can still be felt? Can error, friction, noise, and malfunction still mark human presence—or has the machine taken away those, too?
• How might artists and designers resist or reinterpret the homogenization, fatigue, or formulaic workflows produced by digital systems as opportunities for experimentation and renewal?
• What ethical responsibilities do artists, institutions, and audiences have in technologically mediated creative production?
• How can slow, reflective, or embodied approaches serve as resistance to efficiency- or metric-driven creation?
By situating technology within broader debates about contemporary creativity, this stream encourages critical reflection on both the challenges and possibilities of technologically mediated artistic practice.
This stream, for us, represents a unique opportunity to invite participants to observe, reflect, and reimagine the possibilities, good or bad, of pursuit without a goal. We aim to bring together a diverse community of artists, academics, theorists, and writers for transformative discussions and innovative thinking that can help precipitate developments across the realms of art, academia, and beyond.
Call-out for papers / presentations!
Deadline: 21st January, 2026
Application:
Applications are to be submitted directly to the larger MCCT organisation, which will then forward the submission for our stream "Artistic Practice in the Age of Technology: Fatigue, Failure, and Resistance," to our team at VCAS.
Application Process:
Please submit an abstract of your proposed presentation/paper, up to 500 words—PLEASE SUBMIT VIA A WORD DOCUMENT
Include in your abstract the name of our stream: "Artistic Practice in the Age of Technology: Fatigue, Failure, and Resistance."
Email your abstract to midlandscritical@gmail.com
Deadline:
The deadline for submissions is January 21st, 2026.
Contact:
For questions related to our stream specifically, please contact us directly at office@vcasvienna.com
For questions about larger MCCT conference, you can reach the organisers at midlandscritical@gmail.com
You can view the full list of streams here from the MCCT.
About the MCCT conference:
The MCCT is an annual interdisciplinary conference that provides a forum for emergent critical scholarship, broadly construed. The conference is free for all to attend and follows a non-hierarchical model that seeks to foster opportunities for intellectual critical exchanges where all are treated equally regardless of affiliation or seniority. There are no plenaries, and the conference is envisaged as a space for those who share intellectual approaches and interests but who may find themselves at the margins of their academic department or discipline. The MCCT is an offshoot of the London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT) and shares its approach and ethos.
There is no pre-determined theme for the MCCT. The intellectual content and thematic foci of the conference have been determined by the streams outlined in this document.
For more information about the ethos and structure of the conference please visit http://londoncritical.org