Call for Submissions: Artnodes | Synthetic Sentience

Call for Full Paper Submissions

Artnodes | Node 40. Synthetic Sentience: Politics of the Machines
Deadline 30 April 2026 Extended till 5 May 2026
Publication expected in November 2026
Guest editors Oron Catts, Laura Beloff, Hassan Choubassi, and Joe Elias.

We invite researchers, artists, and practitioners across disciplines to contribute to this special issue of Artnodes, Synthetic Sentience. Submissions should take the form of a comprehensive text of approximately 5,000 words, engaging critically and creatively with the evolving politics of sentience across technological, biological, and artistic contexts. As technological systems increasingly participate in processes of sensing, learning, and decision-making, long-standing distinctions between human and non-human forms of perception, agency, and experience are being fundamentally re-examined.

This call welcomes analytically rigorous and critically reflective contributions that address these transformations and their implications for social, cultural, aesthetic, and ethical life. We encourage submissions that combine conceptual depth with attentiveness to artistic and creative practices, and that consider how emerging forms of sentience may reshape relations among humans, machines, and other living and more-than-living systems. Through this collective inquiry, we aim to deepen contemporary understandings of what synthetic sentience might signify, and how it may be lived, sensed, and imagined, in our time.

Synthetic Sentience

The politics of sentience are evolving alongside changes in labour, technology, and biology, particularly through industrial revolutions. For example, earlier industrial revolutions focused on transferring labour from sentient beings, such as workers, animals, or even enslaved people, to non-sentient machines. In contrast, the so-called fourth and fifth industrial revolutions may introduce sentience into human-made systems like AI and autonomous machines. In parallel, advancements in biotechnology and synthetic biology propose to remove sentience from biological organisms and create new kinds of sentient entities. For instance, scientists in the field of cellular agriculture claim to produce “animal products without animals,” emphasising ethical concerns in eliminating animal suffering by growing the desired tissue, such as meat or leather, in controlled environments. Some proponents explicitly highlight the complete removal of sentience from such biological materials.

At the other end of the biotechnological spectrum, claims of emergent intelligence and “sentience in a dish” are emerging in the scientific literature, with neurons and brain organoids reportedly performing goal-directed tasks in response to external stimuli. At the same time, AI and autonomous machines are transforming how we interact with technology. Unlike traditional machines that follow set instructions, these systems can learn, adapt, and make decisions using real-time data and complex algorithms, creating a semblance of agency.

These dual developments, artificial sentience in machines and the creation or modification of sentience in biological forms, also demand that we redefine our ethical, social, and legal frameworks in a world where sentience may emerge in both silicon-based and organic entities. Sentience is not merely an interior state; it is a grammar of relation, a way of structuring the encounter between bodies, materials, and systems. The challenge before us is not to extend the old hierarchies of consciousness into new forms, but to invent the very languages and logics by which we might perceive otherwise: plural, relational, and poly-valued grammars that undo the binaries of life and non-life, natural and artificial, animate and inert.

Across the history of thought, the living has often been defined in opposition to the mechanical. Yet contemporary developments blur that distinction, giving rise to a spectrum of intelligences that resist containment. Sentience may emerge in an organoid cluster, in an AI model trained on planetary data, or in the subtle feedback between sensor, signal, and landscape. These alternative intelligences are not mirrors of our own; they reveal cognition as a distributed property, enacted through relation rather than possession. To acknowledge them is to accept that thinking itself is no longer the privilege of the human, but the activity of matter in motion.

This new ecology of intelligences also brings forth a profound ethical and aesthetic tension. The concept of alignment, long a technical problem of controlling machine behaviour, becomes an existential question. How do we coexist with entities that do not share our origin or our desires? What happens when machines begin to act according to their own sense of purpose, or when our designs develop intentions we can no longer predict? The politics of sentience thus becomes inseparable from the aesthetics of control, from the interfaces through which power and perception negotiate their boundaries.

If sentience is to be understood beyond its human genealogy, then we must attend to its material forms. It is not enough to theorise the mind; one must touch the sensorium of its emergence, the vibrations of tissues, circuits, and data flows that give rise to perception. Sentience is material, experimental, and mutable. It flickers in thresholds: where signal becomes sensation, where information becomes emotion.

These questions extend into the ethics of creation and consumption. Synthetic biology, cellular agriculture, and generative computation all reveal how our technologies metabolise life itself. In each act of production lies an act of ingestion, a symbolic cannibalism through which the living is consumed to sustain the living. Whether we grow meat without animals or feed data into models that learn from human creativity, we confront the paradox of making life from what has been subtracted of life. In such cycles, the boundaries between nourishment and exploitation, empathy and control, are redefined.

The environment itself begins to acquire a form of sentience. As artificial systems learn to perceive landscapes, track climates, and respond to the rhythms of ecological change, the Earth becomes both subject and sensor. Through AI, the planet gains a new mode of witnessing, one that sees across temporalities far beyond the human scale. Yet this witnessing also demands responsibility: what does it mean to give technology the capacity to speak for the world, and to hear the world speak back through it?

Finally, the notion of distributed sentience dissolves the last illusion of centrality. To be sentient is no longer to be an isolated consciousness, but to participate in a vast field of interdependent perception. Sentience circulates, entangles, and recombines. It belongs not to individuals but to assemblages, to networks of human, machine, and environment that co-sense, co-create, and co-evolve.

In this emergent constellation, art assumes a vital role. It does not offer answers but rather cultivates sensitivity, the capacity to dwell within uncertainty, to feel what resists definition. Art becomes the experimental site where the boundaries of perception, ethics, and ontology are tested and remade. Through its gestures, we may begin to imagine not only new sentient beings, but new ways of being sentient together.

Artnodes, Synthetic Sentience special issue is based on the Politics of the Machines - Synthetic Sentience conference, POM Perth 2025.

Submission process

To submit an article, register an account on the Artnodes site and follow the submission instructions. You can review the author guidelines and submission checklist here

The originals must be submitted in an editable electronic file form and must not exceed 5,000 words (including all sections: abstract, keywords, conclusions, bibliography...).

Queries
Platform related jsoleg@uoc.edu
Journal realted: artnodes@uoc.edu

Guest Editors

Laura Beloff 

Laura Beloff Ph.D. is an internationally acclaimed artist and researcher who functions in-between artistic production and academic research with a core in artistic methods. Beloff’s concept- and practice-driven research is located in the cross-section of art, science and technology. The research engages with art, humans, environment in affiliation with science and technology, biology, artificial intelligence, robotics, human enhancement and their theories. Beloff’s interest in recent years has focused on investigating the diminishing gap between concepts and disciplines of biology and technology. She is an Associate Professor and Vice-Dean for Artistic and Creative Practices at Aalto ARTS University.

Joe Elias

Joe Elias is a university lecturer and researcher whose work bridges academia, culture, and digital practice. Since 2007, he has been teaching and mentoring in the fields of conceptual design, visual communication at the Lebanese International University (LIU), where he co-founded and serves as Associate Director of the Institute of Visual Communication (IVC). His academic work includes curriculum development, symposium curation, and active participation in research networks linking art, design, and technology.

A member of the Steering and Executive Committees of Politics of the Machines POM, an international conference series exploring intersections between technology, art, and philosophy, Elias is also involved in numerous cultural outlets in Beirut, serving as a board member and advisor to arts organisations and creative initiatives. Currently based in Germany, he continues to consult on AI-driven and hybrid digital environments that connect design research with real-world applications.

About Artnodes

Artnodes is an open-access academic journal, founded in 2001 and published by the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, focusing on the intersections of art, science, and technology. As of January 2025, it is published three times a year (February, June, and November), although articles are made available on a rolling basis (Online First) as they are accepted. Each issue is organised around a thematic node defined through public calls, although miscellaneous texts are occasionally included.

This system speeds up the publication time of the journal's contents considerably, without the need to wait until the whole issue has been edited.

Its articles come from public calls for scientific articles and are submitted for blind review by experts in the relevant subject area. The journal is indexed in Q1 in the Scimago Journal & Country Rank (2024), Carhus Plus+, Scopus (Elsevier), Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), MIAR, Latindex, FECYT Seal of Quality, etc.

More information: https://raco.cat/index.php/Artnodes/indexing