Call for Papers No. 30, April 2023

The Editorial Board of AM Journal of Art and Media Studies is inviting all potential contributors to send their proposals for issue No.30/April 2023.

AM Journal is structured in four sections: Main Topic, Beyond the Main Topic, Artist Portfolio, and Book Reviews. Only the first section, which is also the central one, is predefined by the main topic of the issue.

The main topic of issue No.30/April 2023 is Cosmographies of worlding and unworlding.

Across the arts and sciences – as well as that stretch Derrida calls lifedeath – the ontological turn has challenged Descartes’ founding of the modern world on human subjectivity, shaking the very foundations of aesthetic experience and experience itself. Facing global eco-anxieties of the Anthropocene, COVID, militant nationalisms, and critiques of extractive knowledge production, some seek the world’s worlding, others its unworlding; some practice universal design, others pluriversal design; some call for cosmopolitics, some cosmotechnics.

Online and off, both Dasein and design foreground technologically embodied experience in the most intimate and alienating of events, radically extending the forms, functions, and contexts of artistic and aesthetic practices of un/worlding to activists, communities, and researchers, while experiential wisdoms from the Global South and Eastern philosophy open radically new engagements with Western ontology, epistemology, technology, and aesthetics. Artists may play leading roles, supporting roles, and sometimes no role at all in emerging forms of contributory and action-based research.

The toxic effects of social media and other pharmakological platforms – and thus too their curative potential – within political, cultural, and other processes of un/worlding, demand heightened reflection and critico-creative experimentation.

Globally, the sharing of aesthetic practices at individual and collective scale increasingly unfolds via transversal network, transient ideation, and algorithmic processing by any media necessary. Given the multiple cascading crises of world-making/breaking: Who or what makes and unmakes worlds today, what composition of players constitute contemporary cosmography? Which aesthetic practices, materials, and structures enable and/or disable contemporary subject formation, sociotechnic collaboration, and shared world making? To what ends – if any – might such world-making or -unmaking proceed, and for whom or what? What signposts or onto-historical markers might guide these ways of proceeding toward or beyond the all too human?

Potential contributors are invited to submit their abstracts of 300 words and short bios (about 150 words) by October 31, 2022. Full articles of 3,000-5,000 words, formatted according to the Journal's guidelines, will be requested by December 31, 2022. All articles will undergo double-blind peer review. The issue is scheduled to be published in April 2023. Please email your abstracts and inquiries to the journal email address: amjournal@outlook.com. Thank you!

 

Guest Issue Editor

Jon McKenzie

Director, StudioLab

Professor of Practice, Literatures in English

Faculty Affiliate, Bronfrebrenner Center for Translational Research

Cornell University, 104 Klarman Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853

On the traditional homelands of the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫʼ (Cayuga Nation)