Call for Papers
The journal has a monographic section and a miscellany section, open all year round to any subject related to the intersection of arts, science and technology (submit your article here).
Information about the next call for papers:
2025
|
Foto: Logo of The 10th International Conference RE:SOURCE |
Nodo 36. Memory Matters: Navigating the Histories of Media Art, Science, and Technology Guest Editors: Francesca Franco and Clio Flego Deadline: 31 October 2024 Submissions to be published in issue 36 (June 2025). The purpose of this special issue is to explore the effectiveness of documentation, preservation and the integration of new technologies in relation to future collections, both within and outside institutional frameworks. Through an examination of the role of media art history within and beyond museum spaces, this issue seeks to shed light on its importance in connecting with wider societal contexts and expanding its influence beyond conventional boundaries. By bringing together a collection of thought-provoking articles from the RE:SOURCE conference, this special issue aims to deepen our understanding of the intricate relationship between memory, media art, science, and technology. We look forward to an engaging exploration of how these themes shape the trajectory of our shared histories. |
Memory matters: Navigating the Histories of Media Art, Science, and Technology
The 10th International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science, and Technology (RE:SOURCE) held in Venice in 2023 marked a significant milestone in celebrating the dynamic interplay between art, science, and technology over the past six decades. In light of the insightful discussions and ground-breaking research presented at the conference, we propose a special issue of Artnodes to consider the pivotal role of memory in media art history.
The purpose of this special issue is to delve into the field of media art history with a focus on the effectiveness of documentation, preservation and the integration of new technologies in relation to future collections, both within and outside institutional frameworks. Drawing from an archaeological approach and a digital-art-historical perspective, we aim to understand the specific context in which media art history has emerged and evolved. Despite the abundance of examples and advancements since the inception of digital technologies, scholarly studies have yet to fully grasp the significance of this field for the development of media art and for a transdisciplinary understanding of contemporary creators' use of digital technology to address broader societal issues. Through an examination of the role of media art history within and beyond museum spaces, this issue seeks to shed light on its importance in connecting with wider societal contexts and expanding its influence beyond conventional boundaries. We welcome contributions that explore theories, trends, and case studies in this field, aiming to deepen our understanding of how documentation, preservation and technological integration shape the trajectory of media art history and its impact on our shared cultural heritage.
Sincerely,
Francesca Franco and Clio Flego
Photo: Where dogs run |
Node 35. Theorizing media art in light of STS Guest Editors: Ksenia Fedorova and Silvia Casini. Deadline: 31st May 2024 Submissions to be published in issue 35 (January 2025) The aim of this special issue is to encourage theorization of media arts as an open-ended, speculative, and experimental practice bridging the fields of ASTS and media studies. |
Theorizing media art in light of STS
Throughout history and particularly in recent decades, art has developed unique media-specific characteristics to address the impact of the techno-scientific paradigm on culture and society. Parallel reflections have taken place in the social sciences, particularly within science and technology studies (STS), which have been grounded in empirical research and eager to experiment with new methods. Some of the influential methodological insights and concepts from STS include actor-network theory, nonhuman agency, boundary objects, scientific trading zones, the mangle of practice, and material heterogeneities of knowledge.
Art, science, and technology studies (ASTS) have been framed as a specific field of inquiry, signaling a need to bridge the gaps between social sciences and artistic approaches (Rogers et al. 2021; Salter, Burri, Dumit 2017). STS have also been linked to artistic research / research creation (Borgdorff, Peters, Pinch 2020; Sormani, Carbone, Gisler 2019; Daniels, Schmidt 2008) and critical design (Dunne, Ruby 2013; Ginsberg, Calvert, Schyfter, Elfick, Endy 2017). The key lines of comparison explored in these volumes include an emphasis on socio-material assemblages, experimentation as an epistemic tool, non-verbal means of making claims, and embodied skills.
This special issue seeks to bring these developments into closer relation with media art studies and media theory. We welcome contributions analyzing a wide range of practices that involve technological processes in some way. This may include experimentation with different forms of data (and the question of what counts as data), sensorial translations, original hardware and software tools, alternative modes of computing, and imaginary media. How can the concept of media in the hands of an artist be reconsidered through the lens of (A)STS methods and concepts? How does ‘the work of art’ (Jones, 2006) rather than artistic research contribute to the debate around ethical, cultural, and economic arguments for or against technoscience? This point is particularly relevant when considering whether and how media art can contribute to ‘re-enchanting the world’, as Federici (2018) would put it.
The aim is to move through and also beyond individual case studies towards new theoretical insights bridging the fields of ASTS and media studies. We want to encourage a theorization of media art as an open-ended, speculative, and experimental practice equipped with its own knowledge system. As cases of STS and critical theory more generally demonstrate, the journey of concepts across fields stimulates the emergence of new analytical toolsets. Examples include the attempt to rethink ontology and epistemology methods using scientific concepts to create new onto-epistemologies (e.g. Karen Barad's work with quantum mechanics) and the critique of the careless migration of abstract scientific concepts into other fields of knowledge that engage with perception, language, and experience (Burwell 2018). In relation to new theories, one can think of the concept of ‘metabolic machines’ put forward by artist Thomas Feuerstein (2020), the concept of ‘relational data’ theorized by the philosopher Leonelli (2015), or the method of ‘the art of inquiry’ theorized by the anthropologist Ingold (2013).
We encourage experimentation with the form of writing (e.g. in the style of Mol 2002), which in itself can instigate a new method or theory.
We also welcome perspectives on the forms of ‘worlding’ media art through its entanglements with the social structures and institutions of knowledge and technological innovation (including think tanks for policy-making and start-up incubators, or media labs, as explored in Wershler/Emerson/Parikka 2021). Finally, we invite contributions from scholars combining ASTS with the responsible research and innovation (RRI) framework to explore the role of artistic research in imagining alternative futures and in deliberative processes about technoscientific choices.
In scientific practice, any description of a phenomenon relies on some kind of language as the means of communication: how can media art studies and theory contribute to creating new languages and challenging existing ones?
2024
"Astronomy of women", en Grandville et al., Les Étoiles (1849) |
Node 34. Materiology and Variantology: invitation to dialogue. Guest Editors: Siegfried Zielinski and Daniel Irrgang Deadline: 31st January 2024 Submissions to be published in issue 34 (July 2024) The purpose of this special issue is to dialogue around the concepts of materialology and variantology of media, arts, science and technology. |
Materiology and Variantology: invitation to dialogue
A passion for media material and the irrepressible joy of multi-variant media research: this conceptual double can be used to describe what has been driving me for decades and how I understand my activity as a collector of curiosities from the deep time of media sensations, as an (an)Archaeological search movement that exemplarily investigates the relationships between art science and technology.
Methodologically, this activity is strictly transversal (Roger Caillois) or interdiscursive (Michel Foucault). It practices thinking in freestyle and without a banister (Hannah Arendt). Its operational gestures cross territorial boundaries as much as they do disciplinary ones. The greatest challenge of this activity is to unfold the dialectic of the verticality and horizontality of phenomena in such a way that this movement does not become the cross of the Occident. My research is an offer to practice departing from this cross (Dietmar Kamper).
Knowledge is never provincial and cannot be tamed nationally. The deeper I delve into the relationships between art, science and technology, the more it becomes clear that these forms of knowledge and practice can only be understood in a global sense. There is no single MediaModernity; while Europe's may stand out, there have been many MediaModernities worldwide, at different times and with different manifestations. My Matériologie and Variantology is strictly a mundane project (Michel Serres).
The prerequisite for the move into the open, which I am trying to organize as MediaThinking, is a departure from the dominance of territorial thinking that has characterized Western philosophy for many centuries. We increasingly need oceanic thinking, as expressed in jazz, for example, a poetics of relations (Édouard Glissant), for which reading and understanding the winds, as well as clever navigation, are fundamental cultural techniques.
The paleofuturism I have in mind can also be understood as a predictive consideration. By allowing the two opposing arrows of time (into past and future presences) to collide in an imaginary now, I am able to sketch future presences as potential spaces (Donald Winnicott). My media-archaeological work aims to create surprise generators (Mahlon Hoagland). In principle it is ecological, and for this I have developed the field of prospective archaeology, which works like a time machine.
Variant, variability – I have always preferred vaudeville to grand opera as an expression of the universalizing urge. Variantology is an alternative to destruction, which plays such an important role as a strategy in the European avant-garde. To vary something that exists is to give it a possibility of development in the present. Variantology lives on the utopia that the reality in which we live can be changed in favour of all subjects (technology, nature, humankind). It prioritizes the joy of projection over the horror of permanent retrospection. It thrives on a logic of multiplicity and liveliness; its form of development is multiplicity.
Diversity thrives on deviation. Lucretius' clinamen fascinates me as a poetic-philosophical figure with which I can ponder genealogies in the interplay of regularity and rule-breaking. My anArchaeologies of Media delight in the materialism of encounters (Louis Althusser), in unpredictable events. Sudden changes of rhythm in music, as danced by the Marx Brothers on the stage of the Varietés; the sudden arpeggiation of continuity in the breakbeat.
A meta-methodical principle of my work is unconditional dialogue instead of never-ending monologues. On the way from the unconditioned ego/'I' via the unconditioned 'we' to the conditional 'you' and 'we', new subject designs can be imagined and practised. The preferred medium for the presentation of my anArchaeologies/variantologies is the project, the collective film production, the symposium, the jointly edited book or magazine, the reconstructed artefact or the technical factual system. Dialogue can only be taken seriously as a gesture if it includes positions that are not identical to our own.
Speculative openness, the soft, fuzzy thinking of poetry and the precision of that intelligent faculty that can also operate in machines are related, like mathematics and imagination. Wild thinking (pensée sauvage, Claude-Lévi-Strauss) harbours a notion of order that can be seen as the result of ever new combinatorics and associations and not primarily as the consequence of abstraction and deduced rational principles.
Unstable orders, like the presences we pass through, require alternative forms of remembering, collecting and storing. In my concept of anArchives I try to do justice to the search for such alternatives. anArchives renounce any claim to leadership. They follow the principle of successful finding, not futile searching. Beyond their own practice and the artists associated with it, they have no intention of canonization.
Siegfried Zielinski
Berlin, August 2023
 |
Node 33. Media Artivism: On the Archaeology and History of Digital Culture for Social Change. Editors: Carolina Fernández-Castrillo & Diego Mantoan The purpose of this special issue is to delve into the field of activism in media art from an archaeological approach and a digital-art-historical perspective, in order to understand the specific context in which media artivism emerged and how it has evolved until the present day. Despite the prosperity of international examples since the advent of digital technologies, scholarly studies have so far failed to grasp the relevance of this autogenous field for the development of media art and for the transdisciplinary understanding of how contemporary creators employ digital technology to tackle issues in a broader societal dimension. |
Below, you can access the calls for papers of the monographs published so far:
2022-2023
|
|
Node 30, 31 & 32. Possibles. Editor: Pau Alsina & Andrés Burbano. ISEA 2022 Barcelona is one of the most important annual events worldwide dedicated to the crossroads where art, design, science, technology, and society meet, some of the questions that this theme explores are: How to open towards contingency, not only to the becoming but also its uncertainty? How to draw new Possibles to come, and not just confirming those that are there waiting to be confirmed, experienced and thought, as Possibles that can be brought to existence in our worldview? How to move from the impossible, the fable or the utopia to directly bite into our reality? |
2021
|
|
Node 29. Ecologies of the imagination. Editor: Marina Garcés. At a time of great social changes, affected by multiple crises (health, environmental, economic, etc.), the imagination also goes into crisis. If imagining is making the absent present, we can affirm that this cancellation of the imagination has to do with the difficulty that our societies have to relate confidently with otherness, with the new and with the future. More specifically, what can imagination be, as a practice of social transformation, in conditions of growing crisis and isolation? |
|
|
Node 28. In the limits of what is possible: art, science and technology. When we talk about the intersections between art, science, technology and society (ACTS) we are referring to a set of practices that tend to challenge disciplinary boundaries, entering hybrid territories between the possible and the impossible, the real and the imaginary. Sometimes multidisciplinary, sometimes interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary, and often directly a-disciplinary in an indefinite territory in which what is at stake is the eternal composition of knowledge, of what is yet to be delimited, limited or disciplined in a tremendously fertile magma. |
2020
|
|
Node 27. Arts in the Time of Pandemics. Editors: Laura Benitez Valero, Erich Berger. The Covid-19 pandemic, which manifested itself during the early month of 2020, resulted in the activation of the expected official actors on a national and international level in policy, politics, industrial military complex, pharma and medicine, among others. We are calling for articles that explore how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting, transforming and encouraging artistic practices and what cracks have opened up to rethink issues related not only to prevalent biopolitics or necropolitics, but also to possible post-pandemic scenarios. |
|
|
Node 26. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Generative Models in the Arts and Design. Editors: Ruth West, Andres Burbano. The pace of development and usage scenarios for artificial neural networks is accelerating, made possible in part by access to large-scale training datasets combined with massive parallel GPU computing. For issue 26 of Artnodes, we are calling for articles that explore the past, present, and future of generative and machine creativity, or ML and AI in all the domains of art and design. |
2019
|
|
Node 25. Art in relation to fundamental physics and the sciences of the universe. Editors: Mónica Bello, Andy Gracie. We are currently witnessing heightened interest in the areas of hard science, especially in the realms of fundamental physics and the sciences of the universe. It is in this context that we would like to approach the following questions: How might we approach knowledge and experience through dialogues of art and physics? What big questions and insights are brought about by artistic enquiries in this field? How can we explore these phenomena considering the balance and counterbalance of the current contemporary tendency towards techno-scientific discourse? |
|
|
Node 24. After Post-Truth. Editor: Jorge Luis Marzo. This call for papers invites academics, artists, designers and activists to share their experiences with and analyses of evolving truth regimes in their various fields of expertise, including the wide array of phenomena they instigate as a way to unveil, disturb or improve the health of the apparent natural order of discourse. |
2018
|
|
Node 22. Digital humanities: hispanic societies, politics and knowledge. Editor: Núria Rodriguez Ortega. This call for papers invites researchers to share their research in the field of digital humanities and its key features: society, politics and knowledge. Digital humanities practices, as a field of critical analysis, helps us to expand contemporary society and draw it towards new forms of accessing, producing and distributing knowledge. |
|
|
Node 21. Media Archaeology. Editor: Ana Rodriguez Granell, Vanina Hofman, Pau Alsina. Media archaeology is tasked with the responsibility of uncovering the new in the old and the old in the seemingly new as regards the media. This call for papers invites researchers who address one of today’s major changes – the so-called materialist shift – from a theoretical and methodological media archaeology perspective. |
2017
|
|
Node 20. Art and Research. Editor: Pau Alsina, Irma Vilà i Òdena. Many contemporary philosophers, from Heidegger to Deleuze, placed research alongside instrumental reason and art, viewing it as a way of thinking with our feelings and emotions. By doing so, they shed light on the intersection between art and research. This call for papers invites artists and researchers to tackle the intersection between art and research (otherwise known as artistic research) from a theoretical, organizational and political perspective. |
|
|
Node 19. Art and Speculative Futures. Editor: Pau Alsina, Vanina Hofman. Inciting doubt, babbling, “what ifs” and counter-memory against the ideal need of a primal origin and remaining open to discontinuity, chance and materiality in history means asking ourselves whether it is possible to make and think about art in different ways. Within this framework, this call for papers is aimed at researchers seeking to explore multiple, diverse art histories that have been otherwise ignored or excluded. |
2016
|
|
Node 18. Transmedial narratives. Editor: Pau Alsina. Intermediality, with adaptation practices at its core, crossmedia franchises and the renewed theories on fictional storyworlds, are to get a considerable attention within this volume, as a highly stimulating space of inquiry and debate where digital arts, new media and interactive technologies get blended. This call for papers is aimed at researcheres seeking to expand the terminological discussion on transmediality, visual arts and media studies in the intersection of transmediality and transmedial alphabetization. |
|
|
Node 15/16. Art and Education. Editor: Aida Sánchez de Serdio. The relationship between art and education has a long history during which it has acquired various forms that, far from following each other in a linear sequence, coexist and hybridize. This call for papers aims to open a reflection on the experimental and hybrid connections between art and education that explore both its possibilities and its limits and paradoxes, as well as its multiple genealogies and political decentralizations. |
2015
|
|
Node 15/16. Art and Materiality. Editor: Ana Rodríguez Granell. The materials and technologies used in contemporary art beckon us to reconsider not only the role they play in the execution of artistic practices, but also the theoretical frameworks that help us understand how materiality itself fits within art history. This call for papers invites the research community to address new methodological challenges and important epistemological transformations in the examination of art from this perspective. |
