No. 27 (2022): Issue No. 27, April 2022 – Main Topic: TRANS-TACTICAL IMPACTS: The transdisciplinary, transcultural, transnational, translinguistic, transmedia, and transindividual in contemporary humanities, politics, artistic and media practices
This issue of the AM Journal of Art and Media Studies is thematically dedicated to liminal, nomadic, transformative, porous, and dynamic experimental research practices in the fields of contemporary humanities, politics, art, and media practices. We are interested in how traditional, modern, and contemporary concepts and discourses move between different disciplines, contexts, and possible worlds of philosophy, theory, writing, and artistic/media productions. At a time of crisis in global and local health, environment, economy, politics, and education, when the neoconservative and conservative demand is aimed at closing disciplines (into their 'parent' disciplines), cultures (favoring cultural homogeneity), nations (for the sake of ethnic/national homogeneity), languages (in favor of stable, standardized languages), knowledge (ontology, reontologization), communication (controlled and corrupt media), and individuality (pragmatic and self-sustaining utilitarian subjectivity), we want to start discussions about alternatives based on experimentation and searching for open, in other words, free forms of life, action, and exchange. We are looking for reasons, arguments, and challenges for experimentation in contemporary humanities, politics, arts, and, certainly, media practices. The goal is to find a foothold for an open kind of humanities and theoretical disciplines, as well as the potential for critical action, at a time when bare survival, the ideology of economic sustainability, the politics of education in skills, and technocratic fetishism have begun to suppress fundamental and risky experimental research in the humanities, politics, the arts, and media. This means that we face important issues related to the functional and dysfunctional, human and non/post-human, thinking and AI management, psychoanalysis, and cognitivism, the ontological and epistemological, free and controlled, active and inactive, closed and open, alienated and de-alienated, emotional and affective, imperial and nomadic, ecological and urban, etc. Contemporary humanities, politics, arts, and media practices are faced, as always, with the important demand of pursuing self-reflection and self-criticism that may lead to catastrophic self-destruction or an experimental way out of the crisis. Of course, this always concerns the allegorical image of the relationship between catastrophe and progress, which was posited for us by Walter Benjamin in his discussion of Paul Klee's allegorical painting Angelus Novus and which remains relevant even today. In a completely different context, the choreographer Jerome Bell produced his dance piece Show Must Go On! The important question we need to test and re-examine is how to proceed, how to go further, and how to get out of one context and enter other/different contexts?
Dr Miško Šuvaković
Editor-in-Chief
On cover: Provisonal Salta Ensemble, Dubravka Đurić i Miško Šuvaković: Eco-cut, foto-colague, 1989–2022.
