CFP: Vol. 1 No. 1: Becoming Media: Operativity and Medialogical Structures
Call for papers open until June 2, 2025.
Between Wolfgang Ernst’s (2016) notion of active operative media and André Leroi-Gourhan’s (1964) operational chains composed of gestures and tools, we find the figure of operativity, which emphasizes the processes of co-constitution and performativity through which operations—as material ontogenetic forces—produce both the real and the symbolic, instantiating limits, interfaces, and infrastructures that constitute articulations of the real (Siegert, 2015).
Originally applied in the contexts of the military-security complex and logistics (Parikka, 2023), the logic of operativity has since expanded into the domains of political control (Massumi, 2015), cybernetics and archives, world visualization and the production of the visual, technological media, and the algorithmic logic of computerized culture (Friedrich; Hoel, 2021).
Harun Farocki (2004), in an analysis extendable beyond the military uses of images that motivate it, proposes the notion of operative/ghost images—images that do not represent an object but are part of an operation. Therein lies a profane space situated outside, in a non-localized medialogical structure and a horizon of estrangement.
We invite submissions that articulate approaches within media theory, visual studies, philosophy of technology, cybernetics, or contemporary artistic practices.
Call for papers: until 2 June 2025
Decision communicated to authors: end of June
2nd round review and editing end of July
Publication: September 2025
Please find registration and submission information at https://revistas.ulusofona.pt/index.php/caleidoscopio/about/submissions.
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