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February 13, 2023

Call for Submissions: Future Café Post-X #4

Black and white photograph of dense woods with a bright white center

We’re inviting submissions from UChicago undergraduates for the fourth issue of the Future Café zine, Post-X: Spirit! 

Spirit is a concept as elusive as it is essential. It is as real as it is immaterial and as personal as it is social. It is a force that seems to guide us through the mists of our own confusion or one which plunges us deeper into them.

Spirit is seemingly timeless. Recent developments in the world of artificial intelligence technology, however, inspired us to think about its importance. Advanced language learning models like ChatGPT challenge our understanding of consciousness, human identity, and the essence of labor, leading to questions about how inimitable our notions of spirit really are.

With the rise of self-entrepreneurship in a neoliberal age, projecting a sense of internality becomes all the more important to continuing accumulation. Digital capitalism, further, tries to discern and manipulate the core drivers of our behavior via predictive content algorithms and data analytics. Faced with these radical reconstitutions of identity and selfhood, we ask: What role can concepts of spirit play in changing our individual relations to systems beyond a human scale?

If you are an artist, writer, or creative individual who is inspired by spirit, we encourage you to submit your work to this call for proposals. We accept new and existing work from any University of Chicago undergraduate.

Potential contributions could focus on:

  • Embodiment
  • Oracles
  • Artificial intelligence
  • The afterlife
  • Enchantment 
  • Vitality and virility
  • Contagion
  • Cheerleading
  • A blessing and a curse
  • Vibe shifts
  • Anything supernatural
  • Value production
  • L’esprit de l’escalier

Please submit your work here. Submissions are due Saturday, April 1, 2023.

 Image: Untitled by Hannah Yang, featured in Post-X #3.