CFP: Vol. 1 No. 2: The sleep of digital reason? Dreaming of a creative machine in the age of AI

 

When Francisco Goya etched "El sueño de la razón produce monstruos" (1799), he warned that reason's slumber is far from being ordered and predictable. But what is the folly and ignorance today that dreams about algorithmic rationalities and creative machines? By AI's ambiguous statistical relationship with rationalities today, large language models emerge as new monsters from old dreams of creative machines, not through the abandonment of logic, but through their hyperrational and often hyperrealistic aesthetic excess and codified automated writing. 

These computationally generated synthetic "creatures", or what some refer to as haunted media (Sconce, 2000), are trained on a vast array of humanity's textual and cultural archives, as well as digital traces. This includes images, sounds, voices, social interactions, gestures, and various forms of art, literature, and cinema, along with transmedial hauntological data (Blackman, 2019). Despite this extensive training, these entities understand nothing; they generate hyper-realistic and hyper-personalised fictions with statistical certainty. 

What results is a manifestation that could resemble thought, existing strangely between consciousness and the non-conscious, producing "dumb meaning" (Bajohr, 2023) or "mean images" (Steyerl, 2023). These creations facilitate dialogue between human and non-human encounters and lead to paradoxical productions of artefacts without a clear author (Irmak, 2024) and forms of authorship that exist independent of traditional authors.

This special issue will examine these medial shadows of reality and rational monsters of automated writing—whether genuine entities or mere accumulations of masks—exploring their genealogies, infrastructures, and

transformative effects on literary and media culture and inside (generative) media arts and philosophy. We invite scholarship that explores fundamental questions about authorship—including script and screenwriting, creativity, and literary and other forms of artistic production processes through rigorous theoretical frameworks, empirical analysis, and/or critical reflection on the implications of AI for literary and media culture.

 

We invite submissions that articulate approaches within media theory, visual studies, philosophy of technology, cybernetics, or contemporary artistic practices, addressing thematic possibilities such as:

 

- Hauntological machines and operational genealogies from characteristica universalis to contemporary Large Language Models and multimodal architectures;

- Generativity and its shadows

- The author mask & AI ghostwriters

- Cybernetic infrastructures of hyperrational monsters: statistical dispositifs beyond the slumber of reason in media theory;

- Transmedial archives and spectral traces in AI training corpora: images, voices, gestures as computational substrates;

- Stakes, substrates, and platforms: material conditions of algorithmic reasoning in media arts and automated writing;

- Tokenization as media infrastructure: technical encodings, linguistic bias, and computational constraints;

- From discourse networks to connectionist paradigms: media archaeological excavations of "machinic" epistemic ruptures;

- Performative mediation and medial negativity in automated writing systems and generative media arts;

- Machine ecologies and hypophenomenal temporalities versus human slowness and pensiveness;

- Dialogue versus AI soliloquy: the absence of intercorporeal presence in generative systems;

- Media archaeological approaches to cybernetic poetry from early computer art to contemporary neural models;

- Arte(f)actors artefacts without author  and operational images in multimodal AI: media theoretical perspectives on doing versus showing;

- Media arts interventions exposing machinic epistemologies in contemporary generative experiments.

 

 

Call for papers: until 15 March 2026

Decision communicated to authors: end of April

2nd round review and editing: end of May

Publication: July 2026

 

Issue editors: José Gomes Pinto (Lusófona University) and Alexander Gerner (Lusófona University)

 

Please find registration and submission information at https://revistas.ulusofona.pt/index.php/caleidoscopio/about/submissions.