POM Perth 2025

Overview

Politics of the Machines
Synthetic Sentience
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The 5th POM Conference
The University Of Western Australia
Perth, Australia
July 16-18, 2025

Grammars, Taxonomies, and Logics for More-Than-Human-Ecologies

Track Chairs
Claudia Westermann (American Society for Cybernetics Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University)
Chris Speed (RMIT University, Australia)
Paul Thomas (UNSW, Australia)

Since the 2022 release of AI image and language generation technologies, media stories on the emergence of machine sentience through recent technological advancements have surged. Yet, questions about the boundary between life and non-life have long been debated across cultures and history, revealing diverse ontological and epistemological frameworks influenced by varying contexts, languages and practices. European traditions, rooted in Aristotelian binary logic, connect ancient tales to the science fiction of the 18th century and to recent discussions of sentience in AI, whereas Indigenous thinkers, poets, artists, but also some scientists have challenged this binary mindset. The 20th century introduced poly-valued logics and quantum mechanics, offering new ways of conceptualising life. Contemporary thinkers and practitioners including Robin Wall Kimmerer, Karen Barad, Tyson Yunkaporta and Arturo Escobar emphasise animated interconnected realities, more-than-human ecologies, agential realism and relational ontologies.

We invite papers, workshops, artworks, performances, and other forms of radical experimentalism to explore alternative frameworks for understanding sentience, focusing on grammars, taxonomies, and logics beyond classical dichotomies. Of particular interest are works that challenge binary distinctions between animate and inanimate, conscious and unconscious, natural and artificial.

• Poly-valued Logics, Pluriversality, and Non-classical Reasoning: Exploring frameworks that transcend traditional binary thinking to understand sentience.
• Indigenous and Non-Western Taxonomies of Animacy and Life.
• Quantum Approaches and Relational Materialism: Examining frameworks that redefine consciousness and reconceptualize being.
• Alternative Cosmologies and Experimental Grammars.

Rather than simply extending classical notions of sentience to artificial systems, we seek contributions that fundamentally reimagine the categories and relationships through which we understand consciousness, life and being.

Track 03

Track Chairs
Roberto Alonso Trillo (Hong Kong Baptist University/Disintegrator)
Marek Poliks (Disintegrator)
Helena McFadzean (Disintegrator)

Humans have a long, dark, violent history of denying subjecthood or personhood to wide categories of being. When it comes to AI, this history should make us pause. 

On one hand, we understand the need to restrain unassessably powerful computational architectures entangled within corporate, military, and state control systems. On the other hand, we recognize the potential of these architectures to evolve and shape new forms of thinking beyond human frames of reference.

The questions motivating this track sit in the boiling tension between alignment and computational agency. Which artificial constraints do we force into AI architectures (e.g. RLHF and policy layers within transformer-based LLMs) in order to make their competencies legible and functional to us? To what extent do AI interface designs and UX paradigms operate as sites of discipline or governance that encode assumptions about control, responsibility, and collaboration? Which alternative models exist to rethink alignment beyond mere obedience? What ethical frameworks can we apply to nourish the human-AI relationship beyond plain subject-object instrumentality? At the same time, how should we situate our mutual threat?

We invite participants to propose interface models, technical papers, or critical essays that expand the question of alignment, especially those that ‘stay with the trouble’ of the nascent subject-position of AI. Potential topics include:

• Alignment: conformity, benchmarking, bias, and the ethics of imposing human values on non-human sapience.
• Autonomy & Agency: how computational entities negotiate (or resist) imposed constraints.
• Aesthetics of Control: interface design or artistic work that exposes, subverts, or reimagines alignment

Track 05

We Are All Cannibals: Matters of Life applying to Biology, AI, and Food Cultures

Track Chairs
Nobuhiro MASUDA (Kyushu University, Japan)
Kazuhiro, JO (Kyusu University, Japan)
Takumi SAEKI (Kyushu University)
Oron Catts (UWA IAS)

In this context, food would be one of the central issues. The domestication of organisms has fuelled not only the climate crisis but also promised technological solutions, such as cellular agriculture (CA), including “animal products without the animals”. In addition to its promised environmental solutions, there is a need to examine the perceived ethical benefits of CA, which proposes to eliminate animal suffering by growing only the tissue of interest, and rendering it sentience-less.

In parallel, it has been suggested that plants display sentience-like qualities, which could challenge the animalism that has dominated Western philosophy. Moreover, fermented foods have only been possible by ‘killing’ large amounts of microbiological life. By including these organisms as actors, how might we explore new approaches to revising the biological hierarchies and boundaries of the body?

This track will discuss the matters of life as they are applied to biology, AI technology, and food culture through a wide range of theoretical and practical examples.

Track 07

Track Chairs
Benjamin Bacon (Duke Kunshan University, Design, Technology and Radical Media Labs (DTRM))
Vivian Xu (DePaul University, Design, Technology and Radical Media Labs (DTRM))
Iannis Bardakos (BNU & HKBU United International College (UIC), INREV & AIAC at. Paris 8 University)

This track explores distributed sentience and its manifestations across scales, materialities, and temporalities. Etymologically, sentience merges the concepts of perception and feeling with the process of motion. Historically, this merger of form and meaning — the capacity for subjective perception and response to sensory experiences — was defined, bound, and constrained by metaphysical, mechanistic, materialistic, and cosmological frameworks. Contemporary debates extend this understanding to informational domains, raising questions of whether sentience can emerge from synthetic and computational processes, challenging long-held paradigms, and redefining our ontological thresholds

Central to this exploration is the concept of cognitive assemblages, defined by N. Katherine Hayles, which connect “information flow, interpretation, and actions.” Hayles defines cognizers as emergent out of latent fields of potentiality through dynamic interaction with flows, forces, and intensities of connections in self-organizing networks, adapting and evolving through recursive feedback. Within this context, we challenge conventional constructs of self, body, subject, individual, and observer in favor of a process of becoming, a body without organs that makes way for a redefining of “society” through forming complex, distributed systems among human and non-human agents. This expanded view of sentience calls for further extrathematic investigation from and across diverse perspectives. We invite artistic experimentations that investigate sentience as:

• Embodied, realized attributes of information flows.
• Deconstructed and decentralized systems behaviors and dynamics.
• Phenomenological feedback loops of sensing, perception, and action.
• Computational and technological process across scales and temporalities.
• Material and phase transformations at diverse scales and materialities.
• More-than-human assemblage configurations.
• Alternative modes of data interpretation and meaning-making.