Atlas of Care: Collaborative Assemblages and AI Futures

Dear Performance and New Technologies members and contributors, thank you for your ongoing interest, participation and support to the activities of the Working Group at the annual TaPRA conference -–your presence and contributions have greatly enriched and shaped the themes and reflections of our gatherings over the years.

As introduced at TaPRA 2025 in Warwick, we would like to invite you to consider submitting your work to the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media (IJPADM), which will publish an Affiliated Issue with the WG in May 2027.

The issue is titled Atlas of Care: Collaborative Assemblages and AI Futures and seeks to map emerging postdigital modes of performance – including VR, XR, intermedial, and transmedial practices – while critically addressing the social, cultural, political, and technical contexts in which AI operates. It intends to offer a collaborative space to examine and discuss how practices of care intersect with the collaborative and performative dimensions of artificial intelligence through posthuman assemblages.

The theme has been shaped by discussions held within the working group over several years both at recent TaPRA conferences and at the interim events at Queen Margaret University in 2022 and at Rose Bruford College in 2025.

Over the years WG contributions have explored intermedial practices in the context of collaborative relations involving both human and other-than-human phenomena; ethical questions concerning the anti-democratic mobilisations of digital technology under late capitalism; transmedial performance experiments developed during the COVID-19 lockdowns; and the evolving online performance cultures of Generation Alpha.

The issue aims to combine these critical perspectives to investigate how AI technologies and social discourses are reshaping contemporary performance practices in relation to visual aesthetics, dramaturgical composition, participatory models, and critical engagements from audiences, scholars, and artists.

It aims to capture the intergenerational new cartographies that emerged during the Working Group gatherings, shaped by members arriving from different territories of practice, thought, and technological engagement. These encounters have revealed shared, collaborative and intersecting fields of making and thinking with human and more-than-human agencies, generating a collective terrain where diverse trajectories converge, depart, and return.

The editors draw on Kate Crawford’s (2021) concept of the atlas as a tool that integrates aesthetic and epistemological paradigms, presenting the world in fragments so that new patterns of understanding may emerge. As philosopher Rosi Braidotti argues, “We need cartographies of the present that can account for our situated, embedded and relational conditions” (2013), which signals a move beyond description towards inventing the conceptual tools needed for collective navigation.

Thus the Atlas of Care offers the opportunity to create a new lexicon and to hold the freedom to move fluidly across the map – allowing for collaborative mobility, co-presence, and shared becoming. Within this framing, as editors of the Atlas we position performance as a method of mapping relational and collaborative practices that envision how we might inhabit and co-create within posthuman realities. We therefore invite contributors not only to trace what already exists, but to propose neologisms, new terms, and conceptual frameworks that articulate the relational, posthuman conditions of care, collaboration, mapping, and movement.

As Braidotti posits (2013), posthumanism and new materialism are frameworks which emphasise the interdependence, relationality, and co-agency across species, technologies, and environments, while including the missing voices and perspectives from the Global South, women, and LGBTQ+ communities. This critical approach recognises performance not simply as representation, but as a living practice of connection and transformation within these entangled systems.

Crawford (2021:8) observes that these systems increasingly shape embodied social relations, including mental health and intimacy, and that “artificial intelligence is a register of power” (ibid) therefore issues of technological advancement, computational efficiency, and economic growth continue to dominate popular discourses on AI.

However, following Braidotti’s affirmative ethics that seeks inclusion and collaboration of human and other-than-human (2022), we understand AI as a site of potential transformation – a field in which new relations of care, accountability, and co-creation might emerge between human and other-than-human actors. In this context, the components of assemblages in postdigital performances can be treated as nomadic subjects operating within the nature/culture/technology continuum and propelled by “the mutual capacity to affect and be affected by others” (ibid).

As an alternative to the anti-democratic, hyper-individualist imaginary of a Muskian society, the atlas of care engendered by performance allows us to perceive the world through ethical systems of production, experiential sharing, and collective upskilling within fragmented, multimodal, and agential environments.

As the social map of the future constructed by Generation Alpha – those born between 2010 and 2025 – is becoming more multivalent, fluid and adaptable in the interactions between human and other-than-human, according to Andy Lavender (2025) the shift from multimedia to multimodal performance holds potential for content creation to be increasingly supplanted by content curation. In this context the current atlas of AI futures charts an oscillating trajectory between hope and despair, one that performance-makers, scholars, and citizens must learn to navigate if we are not to succumb to the dark forces of future postdigital developments.

Against this philosophical backdrop, proposals for the Atlas of Care seek to recognise the heterogeneous mix of human and other-than-human others operating within the intersectional axes of analysis such as race, ethnicity, gender, age, (dis)ability, and class, thus situating performance as an active field of encounter, where difference, interdependence, and care are co-constituted through collaborative acts of making and reflection.

We invite contributions from WG members and contributors that explore care as an ethical, affective, and material practice – one that engages with mental and physical well-being, accessibility, and disability – while also questioning and challenging the dynamics of exploitation, manipulation, and labour extraction within AI-driven systems. Central to this inquiry is the question: How can performance-making engage AI in practices of care that contribute to a sustainable and equitable future?

We also invite reflections on what forms of collaboration between human performers, AI systems, and other-than-human environments might enable ethically grounded modes of co-creation and caring for the planet and its futures.

How can we read contemporary intermedial practices as collaborative relations or assemblages? How do technologically enabled performance practices confront and subvert binary oppositions as well as colonial, racist, sexist, or otherwise oppressive thinking? How might they also resist polarisation that arises from the politics of fear and the dynamics of advanced capitalism entangled within our current democracies?

Motivated by our desire to extend the Performance and New Technologies Working Group (PNT WG) discussions and share them with the readers of IJPADM, we aim to think through collaboration by practising and mapping collaboration. This reflection may take the form of co-authored articles, single-authored pieces emerging from collaborative practices, practice-research reports that involve collective making, interviews between scholars and practitioners from within and beyond the PNT WG, or media essays and dialogues that emerge from cross-disciplinary conversations. Together, these contributions will map new territories of care, collaboration, and creative ethics in the unfolding landscape of AI-driven performance.

The deadline for submitting your articles and documents to the journal is Monday 1 June 2026.

Please submit your contributions online through Editorial Manager and select ‘TaPRA Affiliated Issue’ when prompted by the system.

https://www.editorialmanager.com/rpdm/

The International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media is a double blind peer-review journal published by Taylor & Francis (Routledge) and a typical paper for IJPADM should be between 6000 and 8000 words, inclusive of tables, references, figure captions, footnotes, endnotes. The length for documents can be shorter, also depending on the visual context of the work submitted.

Before you submit your work, please make sure that it follows the journals style guidelines as published on the website.

Successful articles will appear online and in print in May 2027.

Please do not hesitate to contact the editors with any questions you might have regarding the process: Joseph Dunne-Howrie joseph.dunne-howrie@rosebruford.ac.uk, Anka Makrzanowska a.makrzanowska@arts.ac.uk, Bianca Mastrominico bmastrominico@qmu.ac.uk

We look forward to receiving your submissions.

References

Braidotti, R. (2013) The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Braidotti, R. (2022) ‘The Virtual as Affirmative Praxis: A Neo-Materialist Approach.’ Humanities, 11(3), 62.

Crawford, K. (2022) Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. New Haven, Conneticut: Yale University Press.

Lavender, A. (2025). ‘Looking Before, Looking After: The Intersecting Trajectories of Gen AI, Gen Alpha, and Concepts of Care’ [conference paper]. TaPRA Annual Conference 27-29 August, University of Warwick.