Deadline: 20 September 2020

Submissions to be published in issue 27 (January 2021)

 

The editors of this special issue are:

Laura Benitez Valero
Laura Benítez Valero is an independent researcher and curator based in Barcelona. Her research connects philosophy, art(s) and techno-science, focused on bio-resistance and non-human agents. Lecturer in Philosophy Master’s Degree (UOC), Lecturer in Critical and Cultural Studies (Escola Massana) Lecturer in Technology & Design (Elisava Design School). Content coordinator of Biofriction, a Creative Europe project led by Hangar in collaboration with Bioart Society, Cultivamos Cultura and Kersnikova Institute.

Erich Berger
Erich Berger is an artist, curator and cultural worker based in Helsinki Finland. His focus is set on the intersection of art, science and technology with a critical take on how they transform society and the world at large. Berger moves between visual arts and science in an area which he also investigates and develops as director of the Bioart Society in Helsinki.

 

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. Being suddenly confined to a minimum of physical interaction, we found ourselves online among a concerned but enthusiastic group of artists, hackers, activists, scholars and other practitioners who organize themselves in informal settings to share, discuss and devise strategies of coping, care and action. They aim to apply their own artistic, activist or research competence to work through the complexities of continuously shifting information and circumstances.

The pandemic is not simply an epidemiological crisis but a crisis of sovereignty. We refer here to the notion of sovereignty raised by Achille Mbembe to exercise control over mortality and to define Life as the deployment and manifestation of power. Also the question of liveability comes to mind as introduced by Judth Butler and which the pandemic spread out in a wide spectrum, starting from the bare form of Who gets to live? - when it comes to access to medical support and decisions of care, up to What is a livable life during pandemic lockdown?. In this way the pandemic makes visible and amplifies what was already there, a systemic plurality of inequalities and oppression enacted by predominant hegemonies. As Divya Dwivedi pointed out, the pandemic reveals a different sense of crisis, that is how the processes that have organized live(s) are distributed across the world and how some components of this worldwide arrangement have arrived at their functional limits. Therefore, once again, what has been unveiled are the material conditions of structural and systemic violence.

The virus as an event has confronted us with re-discovering our ontological insecurity. But it is precisely the “cruel” immanence of the virus, in terms of Rocco Ronchi, that provides a different register for thinking through the dimensions of this unfolding onto-political moment and the situation of (Necro)state failure(s) where some lives are managed as a surplus, that the virus connects and forces us to articulate common response(h)abilities, no just common solutions. In fact we can not talk about the virus as a non-human agent, coming out of nowhere and taking us by surprise, but we need to approach it as something for which human activity created the favourable conditions to raise to its full potential.

 

Topics

For issue 27 of Artnodes, 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.

• Arts, science and technology of pandemics
• Biological arts, Viral arts, Molecular arts
• Pandemics in the arts
• Post pandemic arts
• Arts as a convener of facts in a post truth world
• The role of arts in the understanding of deep time, the deep present and deep futures
• How can art practices mobilise a better understanding of possible futures?
• Fiction and speculative practice(s)
• Hacktivism - self emerging aid, care and support systems
• Pandemic (art) history
• Pandemic deep time
• The anthropocene and the trap of anthropocentrism
• Time plurality, human and non-human temporalities
• Embracing complexity
• Colonialism, racism and speciesism as driving forces of the anthropocene
• How can we understand the long- and short-term (temporal); local and global (spatial); micro- and macro-scales of more-than-human and non/living actants and the processes of the Anthropocene they are involved in (like previously unknown viruses, for example)?
• What are the conceptual and material boundaries of living and non-living as well as their potentials and limitations as actants?
• On managing death/ response(h)ability
• On Contagion: the “other(s)” as a threat
• Crisis and State of Emergency
• The body as viral frontier
• The body as ecological niche
• The body as open invitation
• The body as We
• The virus as shared body
• Living with the virus
• Virus and human evolution
• Virus and social transformation/evolution
• Agent-Actant-Agency
• The virus as human agent?
• The virus as non-human agent?
• The ambiguous condition of the virus between the ‘living’ and ‘non-living’
• The agentiality of non/living matter
• The virus as ecstatic temporality, between no-longer and not-yet
• Alliances in the space of pandemics
• The virus as an ally
• The pandemic as opportunity
• Pandemic queerings
• Pandemic language
• Pandemics and racism
• Pandemics and classism
• And your topic as you see fit

 

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 at https://artnodes.uoc.edu/about/submissions/

 

Queries

For problems with the platform: publicacions@uoc.edu

For questions about how the journal works: artnodes@uoc.edu

 

About Artnodes

Artnodes is an open-access academic journal produced by the UOC since 2002. It is published twice a year, in June and December. 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 Q2 in the Scimago Journal & Country Rank (2016), Carhus Plus+, Scopus (Elsevier), MIAR, Latindex, FECYT Seal of Quality, etc. You can find more information here: https://artnodes.uoc.edu/about/#indexing