art theory, media studies, cultural studies, general art sciences, philosophy of art, contemporary aesthetics

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Issue No. 31, September 2023 – Main Topic: The Concept of ‘Influence’ in Art and Aesthetics
No. 31 (2023)

Editor’s Note

The question of influence in art and aesthetics can have both positive and negative aspects. It can facilitate certain particulars in the discourse on artistic production, but can also challenge aesthetic judgement. On the one hand, we can establish connections between artists and/or artworks through the investigation of one influencing the other. On the other hand, however, this could also imply that the later artist’s oeuvre or artwork’s quality is not entirely singular but depends on, or even ‘owes’ something to, the earlier. There are also other segments in the notion of ‘influence’. We can, for example, scrutinize numerous details and factors that have an ‘impact’ and even ‘interference’ in the actual perception and appreciation of artworks. How do these obstruct and hinder, or – to the contrary – help the aesthetic effect and efficiency of the exhibited pieces? It can thus again be a positive or negative influence.

Further aspects in the examination could also include the analyses of the possible modifications and even of distortion coming from, for example, the art market, from the shifting accents in the classical infrastructure of art and from the novel technologies that can all influence the making, exhibiting, ‘consuming’ and evaluating art. How can large-scale art events, biennials, powerful galleries, and collectors influence the canon of art? How do digitalization, AR, and VR modify the modes of connecting to and through art? What influence are they and will they be playing in the art world? What challenges do these pose to our classical concepts of the work of art?

The thematic section of AM Journal of Art and Media Studies is investigating these and similar questions through different types of texts.

Guest Issue Editor

Zoltán Somhegyi, Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary

On the cover: Milorad Krstić, DAS ANATOMISCHE THEATER / The Simultaneous Games of the 20th Century, 1917.
Issue No. 30, April 2023 – Main Topic: Cosmographies of Worlding and Unworlding
No. 30 (2023)

Editor’s Note

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?

Guest Issue Editor

Professor Jon McKenzie
Issue No. 29, October 2022 – Main Topic: Contemporary Aesthetics of Art and Technology
No. 29 (2022)

Contemporary developments in both art and technology are currently challenging many of the traditional ways of seeing, thinking, feeling, and being. Technological and technology-enabled developments such as digitalization, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, robotics, virtual (VR) and augmented (AR) reality, Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, GPS, 5G, 3D printing, and biotechnology are examples of complex developments that are notoriously difficult to grasp without specific context and selected examples of their application. Art as another broad field of human activity plays an increasingly central role in raising awareness of new and emerging technologies but also, and perhaps more importantly, in asking the important questions that need to be asked when designing and using technologies. Art has thus, besides its quintessential link to aesthetic value, also significant cognitive and ethical value when dealing with technology, whether as its material, medium, or topic.

By examining some of the latest developments that bind together artistic and technological developments, the issue highlights the role of contemporary philosophical and applied aesthetics in making sense of the many intersections of art and technology. How new and emerging technologies mediate creativity, meaning-making, and artistic intentionality is one set of possible questions. Another way to approach the theme would be through how technology is changing experience, reception, and interpretation of art. Art has the ability to concretize values but also to show alternative trajectories for technological development. The aim of the issue is thus to move beyond mere presentation of current forms of technology-enabled artistic phenomena towards a richer understanding of the changing human and nonhuman art-interpreted agencies in the technologized world.

We are excited to call together contributions taking a closer look at the links between contemporary aesthetics, art, and technology to the 29th issue of the AM Journal of Art and Media Studies.

Guest Issue Editor

Dr Sanna Lehtinen

On the cover: Provisional Salta Ensemble, Virtual Parameters, photocolague, 2019–2022.
Issue No. 28, September 2022 – Main Topic: Rare, Bound, Cheap, Inserted – The Evolution of Photobooks
No. 28 (2022)

The history of photobooks is closely linked to the history of photography. By shedding light on their evolution, this edition aims to encourage the examination and interpretation of the disparately treated cognitive and visual sequences published in editions over the course of different periods.

Do we accept linearity as an almost indispensable approach to a sequence of images, expecting a potential narrative? How do we interpret the empty gaps and the layout of photographs on the pages? Do we yearn for a verbal text that would clarify the circumstances in which the photos were taken and elucidate their meaning; are we capable of adopting words that function as an additional form of the image, which are impossible to visualize in a way other than through language? Are photobooks “expanded photo-essays” (Parr, Bedger), and to what extent, in order to understand the medium, do we have to consider typography, the choice of paper and other elements of design? Is the institutionalization of photobooks favorable; does digitization increase their visibility, or does it take away relevant aspects that are impossible to access while looking at a screen? What are the differences between books with photographic illustrations and recently created ones that defy existing classifications? Have women conceived a different form of photobooks, and, if so, what are their peculiarities?

Hand-made books created outside of the standard Western artistic canon, which are often found within the practice of “artist’s books” in Central, Eastern and Southeast Europe, exemplify conceptual strategies often incompatible with standard narratives. Moreover, their content is often directed at the complex political circumstances, reacting to the ideological discourse in different ways, depending on the political and social situations, which, in this vast geopolitical area differ significantly from the rest of the world. Sometimes they contain parts written in by hand, while other editions reveal archaeological traces of sorts – objects that address the nature of the medium and its history.

In recently published photobooks, photographs are often laid out in a way that they partly extend to the next page, making the viewing more difficult and setting new challenges before the viewers. Traditional hierarchies are abandoned, the content is no longer necessarily bound within the book but simply inserted, surrendered to rearranging by the observer. Photobooks increasingly become hybrids between the printed medium and sculptural objects, arranged spatially in a completely arbitrary way that might be reminiscent, for instance, of Petar Dabac’s Cube. Books become a game, an intellectual enticement for the re-examination of established structures and finding ways of working outside set formats and editorial decisions.

Photobooks have become more akin to artist’s books. Therefore, we propose an investigation – of the chronological development, geographical, historical, cultural, and other aspects, as well as the contemporary divergences from previous stylistic and formal standards – as the focus of the 28th issue of the AM Journal of Art and Media Studies.

Guest Issue Editor

Dr Sandra Križić Roban

On the cover: Provisional Salta Ensemble, Collages: Photo Books, 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
No. 27 (2022)

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.
Issue No. 26, October 2021 – Main Topic: Brazilian Aesthetics and Art
No. 26 (2021)

This issue of the AM Journal of Art and Media Studies, dedicated to Brazilian contemporary aesthetics, gathers papers on some of the main figures that contributed decisively in the 20^th century and beginning of the 21^st to the development of research on aesthetics in Brazil, as well as articles focused on relevant topics of Brazilian culture, in the considered period, which had an impact on the philosophical reflections about art and culture in general and particularly in Brazil. Covering important themes related to Brazilian popular music (The Tropicália movement and the style known as MPB), literature (Clarice Lispector and Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagy) visual arts (Maria Martins and Hélio Oiticica) art criticism (Mário Pedrosa) and the approach of the new media (Vilém Flusser), the set of articles of this dossier draws an outstanding panorama of the realm of Brazilian aesthetics in the considered term. The individual figures focused upon in these articles include Brazilian-born thinkers such as Benedito Nunes, Gerd Bornheim, Gilda Mello e Souza and Mário de Andrade, as well as the naturalized Brazilian, Czech-born Vilém Flusser. The authors of these papers are elder and younger researchers in the field of aesthetics and philosophy of art, based in some of the best Brazilian universities and active in outstanding research groups devoted to this matter.

Guest Issue Editors

Rodrigo Duarte and Rizzia Rocha

On the cover: Helio Oiticica’s installation Tropicália (1967) & Provisional Salta Ensemble Tropicalismo Col, 2021.
Issue No. 25, September 2021 – Main Topic: Acoustic and Visual Ecology of Damaged Planet
No. 25 (2021)

Editor’s Note

Acoustic and Visual Ecology of Damaged Planet

This special issue of AM Journal of Art and Media Studies invites scholars in the environmental and energy humanities, media studies, film studies, musicology, sound studies, and cultural studies to probe climate change and environmental degradation from the visual and sound perspectives and their intersection. We are particularly interested in how various visual and sound media, including film, TV, art, and music, address the problem of the invisibility of the current environmental crisis and censure our insufficient action to save the planet, even as these media are ultimately seeking to make these issues visible and audible to audiences worldwide. The special issue also examines the ways in which images and sounds of the degrading planet formulate the cultural understanding of the environmental crisis. How, through various kinds of visual and acoustic performances, do authors, artists, and activists challenge the existing socio-cultural and political attitudes to climate change, ecological decline, environmental degradation, and the destruction of the planet, so that their works emphasize the urgent necessity to act in order to preserve the life of humans and nonhumans on Earth? The articles in this special issue not only foreground the power of visual and acoustic texts to re-envision climate change, the planet, and the role of the human in the current environmental crisis but also illustrate how visual and sound media can be effectively used to directly tackle climate change and environmental destruction.

Guest issue editor

Dr Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad

University of Vienna, Austria

On the cover: Igor Grubić, Do Animals...? (2017 ongoing)
Issue No. 24, April 2021 – Main Topic: How to Do Things with Speculative Pragmatism: Pedagogy, Politics, Philosophy
No. 24 (2021)

Texts gathered in this issue are the second part of the How to Do Things with Speculative Pragmatism double themed issue of AM: Journal of Art and Media Studies. While the previous issue, number 23, dealt with art, aesthetics, and Anthropocene, this issue concerns itself with pedagogy, politics, and philosophy. We wanted to provide a forum for academics, theoreticians, artists, and those who complicate boundaries between disciplinary regimes to enter into a dialogue with speculative pragmatism, its ontology, politics, and aesthetics, along with the multiplicity of lines of inquiry, and see what kind of new material–semiotic configurations might emerge. In his book Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002), Brian Massumi refutes the notion that a thing is when it isn’t doing. For the thing is always doing, so much so that the thing, any-thing, is constituted through the doing. Every-thing is fundamentally relational. Since the starting point has changed, the key terms of the onto-politico-aesthetic debate change and they are affect, immanence, movement, intensity, emergence, becoming, event, virtual, thinking–feeling, nature–culture, space–time. Speculative pragmatism, a term Massumi introduces in Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (2011), points to the fact that the processual nature of event is always already immanent, so instead of fundamental binary oppositions there are disjunctive syntheses: speculative–pragmatic, aesthetic–political, thinking–feeling.

Those familiar with Massumi’s and Manning’s conceptual apparatus and theoretical platform will object that we performed violence by deciding not only to separate issues according to academic fields but to consider separate academic and non-academic fields at all. According to Massumi and Manning, aesthetics and politics are inseparable; they are two aspects of a single event. We argue that the same can be said of other “fields”. In response to that imaginary accusation (and self-accusation) that to separate the fields is exactly what we are not supposed to do, we can say – that is true. However, the difference itself forces us to do so and without posing disciplinary identity exactly. The authors gathered in this double issue do not yield to such disciplinary identitarianism either, as texts in previous and this issue testify in a redemptive manner for us editors.

This issue, then, deals with pedagogy, politics, and philosophy. Many of the authors contributing to this issue come from various academic fields. Meanwhile, several authors are artists themselves, and we are glad to have had the opportunity to read their texts wherein they attempt to produce concepts from their own practice and put their practice in dialogue with speculative pragmatism and other theories and philosophies.

Ties van Gemert, in his text “Sequencing and Scrutinizing a Line of Thought: Epistemological Questions for a Speculative Pragmatist”, engages in a critical dialogue with the epistemology and metaphysics of speculative pragmatism focusing on Massumi’s synthesis of the subject–object distinction, his theory of judgment, and his deflationary notion of truth. By analyzing Massumi’s conceptualizations in the book Semblance and Event (2011), Gemert argues that speculative pragmatism can be reformulated as a philosophy of panperceptionism.

Marija Bulatović, in “Those Who Want to Play: Pursuing Animal Politics in Upbringing and Education”, problematizes the defined modes of existence of a child, an adult and an elderly individual, and the ways in which play is established in education. Bulatović attempts to find in the human lifespan the moments when, after childhood, an adult gives him or herself over to play, and to propose the manners of overcoming the intergenerational differences in formal education as a space for surpassing the given in the entanglement of education and life.

Nevena Mitranić, in “The Tales of Death and Kindergarten: Becoming in Dark Encounters [COVID-19 Edition]”, autotheorizes her experience with children during her research of kindergarten practices. Mitranić engages herself in the pursuit of thinking and living educational practices in an ethico-aesthetical manner encountering the deeply-hidden secret of death in preschool practices intersected with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

A group of seven authors, Lima, Germano, Campesato, Esteves, Mapurunga, Bonafé, and Reis, in their text “Between Control and More-than-Human Events: The Listening Experience in the Light of Speculative Pragmatism”, provide an analysis of the relationship between listening and power in a context of information warfare through the concepts of lived abstraction and subjectless individuation. They aim to propose a possible understanding of listening as an act of thought that is potentially articulated outside the noological register of narcissism through the appreciation of a mode of artistic operation that works in a manner of designing listening experiences.

Vinícius Portella Castro, in “From Polyphasic Latency to Polyrhythmic Concretion: Rhythm and Relation in Simondon and Whitehead”, follows the work of Brian Massumi, Luciana Parisi, and Steve Goodman to point out that both Simondon and Whitehead offer implicit rhythmic ontologies, albeit radically distinct. Castro intersects Whitehead’s generalization of subjectivity throughout all scales and Simondon’s generalization of the notion of individuation for all scales by analyzing polyrhythms of African music.

Matthew Newcomb, in his text “How to Make Your Child Sleep: Designing Rhetorical Experiences”, makes an effort to help parents prepare their children for a night’s sleep by bringing design further into the discussion of rhetoric, adding a design-based angle to new materialism, theorizing rhetoric as an experience, and considering John Dewey’s notion of experience and Brian Massumi’s work on affect in light of design and material rhetoric.

Diego Gil, in his text “Processual Creativity and Partial Incorporations”, follows Deleuze’s perspective of knots and Massumi’s notion of body–environment to propose three series of questions about how to think–feel the entanglements of processual philosophy and somatic practices that do not have just one answer but do have a potential incessant displacement – knot of curation, knot of somatics, and knot of research–creation.

Anthony Reynolds, in “Becoming Animal of Philosophy: Pragmatism, Pragrammatology, Speculative Pragmatism”, writes about similarities and differences in Derrida’s and Massumi’s appreciation of Charles Pierce’s theory of abduction. Reynolds argues that American pragmatism initiates an effort to recuperate a sense of the animality of thought, that it constitutes a philosophical example of the process that Deleuze and Guattari call “becoming animal,” and that its progress along these lines can best be seen within Massumi’s speculative pragmatism.

The writings collected within the double issue How to Do Things with Speculative Pragmatism enter into processes of becoming with the world and creating new relations, however impermanent they might be. The authors gathered here also provide readers who may be coming freshly to Massumi’s and Manning’s philosophical line of disjunctive syntheses with a sense of both resonance and divergence between speculative pragmatism and the thinkers more familiar to their own fields. Hopefully, edited volumes and other journal issues dealing with this theoretical platform will come to life soon.

Issue Editors

Marija Bulatović and Andrija Filipović

On the cover: Ivana Bašić, I will lull and rock my ailing light in my marble arms #2, 2017.
Issue No. 23, October 2020 – Main Topic: How to do Things with Speculative Pragmatism: Anthropocene, Aesthetics, Art
No. 23 (2020)

exts gathered in this issue are the first part of the How to do things with speculative pragmatism double themed issue of AM: Journal of Art and Media Studies. What things do we want to do with this double issue? Firstly, we wanted to try to gather academics, theoreticians, artists, and those who complicate boundaries between disciplinary regimes, from both within Serbia and the rest of the world, and who engage in any way with the work of Brian Massumi and Erin Manning just for the sake of seeing what can happen. What will happen remains to be seen, but we hope the authors, their texts, and ideas will enter into the unexpected processes of becoming and create new relations however impermanent. Secondly, and more academically, we wanted to address the dearth of academic engagement with Massumi’s and Manning’s work. As of the writing this introduction to issue number 23, in July 2020, there are no edited volumes or issues of other journals dealing with their books and texts. Speculative pragmatism remains to be critically, theoretico-practically, addressed and this double issue aspires to be the first small step in that direction.

Those familiar with Massumi’s and Manning’s conceptual apparatus and theoretical platform will object that we performed violence upon deciding not only to separate issues according to academic fields but to consider separate academic and non-academic fields at all. Thus, this issue deals with art, aesthetics, and the Anthropocene, while issue number 24 concerns itself with pedagogy, philosophy, and politics. Whoever has even chanced upon any of Massumi’s and Manning’s texts will know that aesthetics and politics are inseparable, that they are two aspects of a single event. The same can be said of other “fields”. So, in response to the (so far imaginary) accusation that to separate the fields is exactly what we are not supposed to do, we can say: that is true. However, the difference itself forces us to do so and without posing disciplinary identity exactly. The texts themselves do not yield to such disciplinary identitarianism easily either, as texts in this and the next issue testify. However, the force of academic custom obliges us to follow certain rules, hence the decision to roughly define certain disciplinary fields. Hopefully the text themselves will redeem us in that regard.

This issue, then, deals with art, aesthetics, and the Anthropocene. Many of the authors are artists themselves, and we are happy to have had the opportunity to read their texts wherein they attempt to produce concepts from their own practices and put their practices in dialogue with speculative pragmatism and other theories and philosophies. Louisa Bufardeci in her text “Tacktical Aesthetics: A propositional aesthetic language starting from philosophies of relationality” presents what she calls “partial declarations” about art based on Indigenous and feminist philosophies of relationality as well as on idea of resingularisation. Bufardeci ends the text open-endedly, asking how one can develop artistic practice from tacktical aesthetics. Valéria Bonafé and Rogério Costa in “Sounds, Memories and Affects: Double Capture in a Relational Artistic Experience” present and discuss the nos{entre}nós project, which stems from an artistic collaboration between them. They pay particular attention to concepts like zone of indiscernibility, disjunctive synthesis and double capture. The article also deals specifically with the creative processes involved in producing the first artistic work of this collaborative project, Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte. Jasna Jovićević in her “Composing the Actual: Brainwave Sonification as Materialized Intensity of Virtual Relations” theorizes her experimental music performance “I Sit and Worry About Her” that explores the function of large-scale cortical networks and application of EEG, monitoring the brainwaves in the making and perceiving of music. The project aims at understanding the activity of the brain and its electric impulses as an affect or intensity of virtual relations. Jovićević wonders whether it is possible to actualize the virtual open-social identity, even while involved in a social collaborative interaction. Eldritch Priest in “Melodies, Moods, and The Zone as a Hole” draws on his zonal meanderings and a speculative-pragmatic form of acoustic ecology to develop a “fabulation that takes a stroll through a forgotten cemetery, an improvised melody played beneath a secret radar array, and a daydream had in a dilapidated post office as expressive of a thought experiment whose meaningful result is more a fictional achievement than a factual reckoning”. Ana Ramos in “Enter the Event: How is Immanent Participation?” takes the body as a “body-worlding” and then articulates the concepts affective immersion and incorporeal materiality in order to think affect embodiment, and embodiment itself. The paper argues for a materiality real but abstract that has been called “incorporeal”. Corine van Emmerik in “Speculative Pragmatism and Minor Practices in Palestine: The Art of Living and the Cultivation of Futures” considers the aesthetic-political dimension in Palestine and in particular looks at possible Palestinian futures that emerge from it. By taking the example of a women’s embroidery co-operative in the West Bank, van Emmerik demonstrates that speculative pragmatism enables us to attend to the moreness in minor practices, aesthetics, and life itself.

The Anthropocene series of texts deals with the questions of environment, ecology, and the relations between humans and nonhumans in art and outside it. Andrija Filipović in “How to do things in the Plasticene: Ontopolitics of plastics in Arendt, Barthes, and Massumi” develops three models for understanding plastic in the Plasticene epoch through readings of Arendt, Barthes, and Massumi. In the Massumian model, plastic is affective; it is a relational body in the process of becoming, simultaneously intensive and multiple in its eventfulness, posing a problem of de-linking other bodies from it. Andrew Goodman in “Wilding Consciousness: Towards a Speculatively Tentacular Thinking-With” writes about a tentacular life that is relational and sticky, a moving-creating-living-with and that is at heart sympoietic and entangled. Wilding, as a speculative pragmatic and tentacular practice, involves thinking with the world in ecological terms and involves a tactic of embracing an entangled and multi-storied approach to thinking. David Lombard in “Toward a Speculative-Pragmatic Sublime: A Narratological Analysis of the Toxic Sublime and the Unnarrated in Contemporary U.S. Literature” provides a close narratological and comparative analysis of Rachel Carson’s short story “A Fable for Tomorrow” (1962) and Susanne Antonetta’s memoir Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir (2001), which both highlight the pragmatic and ecocritical potential of literature as a source of cultural responses to the Anthropocene challenge.

Issue Editors

Andrija Filipović and Marija Bulatović

On the cover: Provisional Salta Ensemble, Life/NonLife (Amsterdam/Riga), colleague, 2012.
Issue No. 22, September 2020 – Main Topic: Vertigo Aesthetics: Between Art – Resistance – Technology – Politics
No. 22 (2020)

If we carefully re-read some of the fundamental aesthetical texts written a long ago, we may find many references that can help us to highlight and understand the different states of the present. Thus, traditional aesthetical platforms can lose their stable historical and philosophical position through ‘dizzyingly’ changing its orientation towards the fields of contemporary art, technology, politics, and resistance theorization. The ten articles of the section “Main Topic: Vertigo Aesthetics: Between Art – Resistance – Technology – Politics” bring together the issues of the contemporary worlds and the long-ago established aesthetical platforms, thus reflecting the possible historical and geographical vertigo of aesthetics.

On behalf of the Journal Editorial Team

Sanela Nikolić

On the cover: Provisional Salta Ensemble, VERTIGO 4SV, photocolague, 2019. (Appropriation and transformation: Marina Apollonio, Dinamica Circolare 4S, 1968/2019)
Issue No. 21, April 2020 - Main Topic: The Worlds beyond European Aesthetics
No. 21 (2020)

Western philosophy and aesthetics have always been aware that there are many cases of sensible distributions that belong to the worlds beyond modern European philosophy. That awareness was sometimes raised from the position of European logocentrism and the idea of meta narrativity. In other cases, that awareness was raised from the intention to criticize the universality of Western thinking and to find alternatives to the philosophy of the Western world in the times of its crises. As it was already the case with AM Journal Issue No. 13, 2017 (section “China and the West: Zhuyi and –isms”), our awareness here is shaped by the view of equality in difference, value, and the legitimacy of many possible worlds of contemporary aesthetics. We would like to express the warmest gratitude to our colleagues from Africa and South America for being so willing to participate in theoretical connections, exchange, and discussions.

On behalf of the Journal Editorial Team

Sanela Nikolić
On the cover: Nataša Teofilović, s.h.e. - artikulacija, 2020.
Issue No. 20, October 2019 - Main Topic: Contemporary Aesthetics of Media and Post-Media Art Practices
No. 20 (2019)

In the light of the previous journal issue, the current number of AM Journal of Art and Media Studies – with the main topic contemporary aesthetics of media and post-media art practices – tends to challenge the request of identifying and discussing the possible worlds of contemporary aesthetics, that is posted to the theoreticians from different continents during the 21^st International Congress of Aesthetics that was held in Belgrade, on July 2019.

While in the September issue the possible worlds of contemporary aesthetics of the visual arts have been discussed, this issue joins theoretical reflections on contemporary media and post media practices. The common thing for all the articles in this journal issue is that their authors are dealing with artistic and theoretical manifestations that belong to the era of dominance of computer technologies, multimedia platforms, global networking and media-transmitted (artificial) reality.

Specific philosophical and aesthetics questions are in the focus of the first three papers: the different examples of philosophical views about the sensible configuration in both artistic and non-artistic realm are discussed; the actual phenomenon of art and life science collaborative projects are highlighted as the opposition to the historically prevalent approach to art and science as the autonomous fields of practices; the question of what is subversive in aesthetics is analyzed through the case study of ecofeminist aesthetics in literary art.

The next group of papers could be described as the one dealing with the different phenomenological, poietics, and esthetical aspects of contemporary film, cinema and television practices: modes of multisensory immersion from the beginning of 20^th century are confronted with those of the 20^th/21^stcenturies; the examples of post-media art practices as the hybrid audiovisual genres conducted in the digital environment are critically observed in relation to historical media of representational film; the intersection of humor and politics are discussed through the lens of television aesthetics; the phenomenon of the transformation of visual art through digital technology and social media transposition of images is analyzed.

The last group of papers belongs to the field of post-digital aesthetics and deals with the issues of artificial reality and artificial intelligence: the New aesthetics is defined as the one examining new forms of art and aesthetic experience as the products of artificial intelligence; the exemplary case study of artificial intelligence creative activity is presented; the thesis that both artificial reality and art have a common means of working on the senses is emphasized and the question connected to this is posed: where is a borderline between artificial reality and art and can artificial reality technologies have an impact on the definition of art?

This journal issue in whole shows that the worlds of contemporary aesthetics critically problematize both the cases of media and post-media sensual configurations from the historical and current times. But, it also suggests that – connected with the aesthetical aspects of artificial intelligence – the new world of aesthetics phenomena just has been opened that are waiting yet to be fully theoretically identified and discussed.

Sanela Nikolić

On the cover: Jale Erzen, Amazon 1 (135 x 181 cm) oil on canvas, 2019.
Issue No. 19, September 2019 - Main Topic: Contemporary Aesthetics of Visual Arts
No. 19 (2019)

In choosing the aesthetics of visual arts as the main topic of AM Journal of Art and Media Studies No. 19, we were inspired by the 21^st International Congress of Aesthetics that was held in Belgrade, in organization of the University of Belgrade, Faculty of Architecture, the Society for Aesthetics of Architecture and Visual Arts Serbia and the International Association for Aesthetics. The general congress topic – “Possible Worlds of Contemporary Aesthetics: Aesthetics Between History, Geography and Media” – implies a question of how contemporary aesthetics deals with the visual aspects of actuality? In finding the answers to this question we presuppose the thesis that there are not only many possible worlds of contemporary aesthetics, but also the many possible worlds of contemporary visual arts. Because of that, every possible case of visual arts aesthetics appears as an individual theoretical text that needs to solve problems of the relationship and conflicts between the distribution of sensible, visual arts, visual culture and many other aspects of the contemporary worlds.

Within the contexts of the late neoliberal capitalism and the manifestations of nationalism, postcolonialism and globalism, the aesthetics of visual arts today deals with contemporary visual art practices that tend to cope with different social problems (feminist, activist, political, ecological, participatory, appropriative practices). At the same time, aesthetics today mainly theoretically intersects with the art practices that are persistent in crossing the traditional artistic media boundaries. Thus, the contemporary theoretical reflection about visual arts is defined by the self-request to permanently re-define itself in regard to its research objects, theoretical approaches, methodologies and research issues taking into account morphological and ontological plurality as well as the plurality of specific social goals of artistic practices. In the light of all above mentioned, this AM Journal issue should be regarded as a small sample within many possible solutions to theoretically deal with the visual aspects of contemporary worlds and to problematize the actuality through visual arts.

Sanela Nikolić

On the cover: Susan Bee, Votes for Women, 2018, 30” x 40”, oil, enamel, sand on linen.
Issue No. 18, April 2019 - Main Topic: Corporeal Archives
No. 18 (2019)

Editors’ Note

“Corpus: a body is a collection of pieces, bits, members, zones, states, functions. [...] It’s a collection of collections, a corpus corporum, whose unity remains a question for itself” Jean-Luc Nancy

Technological advances have enabled a vast array of achievements, satisfying our insatiable need to collect, store and preserve. They have also allowed us to go beyond the institutional repositories of information. Jacques Derrida’s claim that “nothing is less clear today than the word ‘archive’” proves accurate and convincing in present-day society. Within a discourse of individual/micro/macro archives, the body has been established as a crucial “artefact” – it is a bio-cultural record which engages both data production and accumulation.

Contributors to this issue are rethinking the body, or bodies, from the archival perspective, from various and multiple starting points of the imaginary body, bearing in mind the normative and normalized ending points of the bodily archives. Regarding the relation between aesthetics and ethics, the following texts deal with the archival bodies further challenging the status of canonical knowledge of the flesh. To imagine the body from the archival perspective is to re-write and to re-member – to safeguard the openness of the questions of/on the body.

This issue of AM Journal of Art and Media Studies intends to disrupt the ever-present corpuses of knowledge on the body (cultural, ethnographic, political, historical and alike), and more so to attempt to imagine alternative productions of new epistemologies of corpus, i.e. different bodily registries. Corporeal archives aims to probe the subversive tendencies within corporeal archives, and to engage in the re-evaluation of the notions of (de)construction, (re)organization and bio-thanato-political control of bodily matter. Therefore, this collection of essays addresses various and alerting cultural politics and practices that are reshaping our understanding of the body, and examines the new forms of the archival impulses. In this sense, this edition’s focus is critical evaluation of the ambiguity of access to the corporeal caches.

Ana Došen and Mirjana Stošić, guest editors
Issue No. 17, October 2018 - Main Topic: Television Series
No. 17 (2018)

In the last two decades, television series have grown extremely popular. This popularity rises from the phenomenon called complex television, which was made possible thanks to what media theoreticians, among the first of which was Jason Mittell, call narrative complexity. Narrative complexity developed thanks to the technological transformation of production, broadcasting and especially of the ways of watching television programs. The term revolution in watching is used to denote this transformation, made possible especially by DVDs and downloading. The narrative complexity of television series can be seen within the broader context of the contemporary digital revolution, globalization, neoliberalism, consumerism, media imperialism and narrative imperialism.

The main characteristic of these TV series is hybridity: they are usually realized as a mixture of ‘a series’ and ‘a serial’, as well as by mixing various genres. Some theoreticians, as well as the makers of the series, directly connect the narrative complexity of the TV series with the complexity of novels by writers such as Dickens, Trollope and Zola (Brett Martin, David Simon). Another points to the fact that the TV series have drawn from the already developed literary genres within which they operate (Jean-Pierre Esquenazi). Others, like Mittell, insist that these TV series and serials are an inherently television genre and that they should be considered as such.

Narrative complexity can also be considered within the context of the commercialization and appropriation of avant-garde strategies by the creative industries. As a consequence of this appropriation, television audiences are used to watching complex audio-visual media representations and narrativizations. Therefore, it is no surprise that audiences of the TV series now enjoy, not only the story told, but also, and even more, trying to understand the way the story is constructed. This creative mechanics has been labeled metareflexive by Jeffrey Sconce, while Mittell writes of narrative special effects, and Neil Harris writes of operational aesthetics.

The TV series enter into dialogue with contemporary political, economic, social, and cultural tendencies (the economic crisis, the war on terrorism, the decline of the welfare state, the function of mass media in the process of the normalization of contemporary political tendencies, global politics, the decay of medical insurance and all levels of education, along with the culture in general, of drugs and crime, racism and misogyny, violence, and so on). There is some debate, however, about who is genuinely criticizing elements of neoliberalism in these series. Many theoreticians like Fredrick Jameson and Slavoj Žižek have written about the engagement and criticism towards the many aspects of neoliberalism in television serials like The Wire, while others like Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro question whether there is a complicity in their advocacy, which should itself be criticized.

These television series provoke us to think about the narrative mechanics by which they are constructed, as well as about the way they represent globalization, neoliberalism, post-feminism, etc.

guest issue editor: Dubravka Đurić
Issue No. 16, September 2018 - Main Topic: Re-Thinking Modernity
No. 16 (2018)

“All that is solid melts into air...”

Those words, quoted from Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, were used by the American philosopher Marshall Berman in the title of his book on modernity and modernist culture, which was first published in 1982. Berman’s book originated in a kind of opposition to postmodernist theories that were prevalent at the time, whose advocates saw in the idea of modernity only a traditional ‘meta-narrative’ that should be ‘deconstructed’. For Berman, however, modernity was a kind of dialectics that carried a utopian promise. In this regard, modernity was at first a crisis: this crisis came about when traditional knowledge that rested on eternal and universal truths and all a priori criteria finally became unsustainable. It was the point when people realized that there were no longer any objective values and that nature was not an unchangeable order with its own goals. For modern people, values are not a given – they are something that has to be found; there is no a priori structure of things or the world – rather, the world is something to be created; art is not a representation of a universal ideal – it is a value that the artwork creates through itself. Modernity is therefore a dialectics in Marx’s sense – a crisis, a feeling of groundlessness, a state wherein everything seems conceited and constantly “melts into air”. However, precisely because of that, it is also an unbroken series of attempts to overcome the crisis, to resolve those internal contradictions of capitalist society.

In our own time, we are witnessing an era of new permanent crises, irreconcilable internal tensions that capitalist society continues to generate. However (and maybe this is part of the legacy of postmodernism), it also appears to be a period of epochal resignation regarding our ability to imagine different, utopian alternatives, of the kind that modernity formerly implied. Our age sounds like parts of Marx’s manifesto but without the hope of a new universal class emancipation: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air...” Is there anything that modernity, precisely due to our epochal apathy, could tell us? What do Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, or Wittgenstein mean to us today? Or abstract painting and atonal music? What kind of significance do the concepts of modernity and modernism bring today to contemporary aesthetics, theory of arts, and philosophy? Are those concepts still relevant to current politics, political economy, or social theory?

Nikola Dedić

Sanela Nikolić
Issue No. 15, April 2018 - Main Topic: Experimental Film
No. 15 (2018)

From the flicker and heartbeat of silver-based film, to a bit-map grid of pixel-size slots in a digital medium, experimental film tried to subvert conventions of the medium itself and explore its properties and materials. Since the major theorists have been film-makers themselves, with incompatible views about the purposes and formal possibilities of film, and due to the fact that the majority of film theoreticians did not focus on experimental film, it comes as a minor surprise that comparing to the mainstream film, its experimental relative remained and remains theoretically overlooked and critically underexposed.

Questions about the proper location of the experimental film – is it cinema or art gallery? – or those concerning the advantages and disadvantages of its marginalized position, the existence of a proper genre, the ideological and political implication, and so on, helped to shed some light on it, nevertheless, did not result in an all-embracing interpretation, let alone an all-encompassing theory. Definitions of experimental film have always been controversial, and even more so, when they attempted to include its avant-garde or underground traits. Several interpretations follow the oppositional distinctions: non-commercial vs. commercial; non-narrative vs. narrative; formalist vs. political; abstract vs. representational; exclusion of language vs. use of language; film-as-art vs. entertainment industry, sometimes even anti-Hollywood vs. Hollywood; and so on. Such distinctions have been challenged by film-makers, who used went beyond seemingly simple dualistic interpretations in order to explore cinematic innovations and created their own idiosyncratic histories. Among them were, for instance, Vertov, Kuleshov, Dovzhenko, Epstein, Delluc, Léger, Clair, Deren, Brakhage, Markopoulos, Kubelka, Frampton, Gidal, Mulvey, but also Eisenstein, Dreyer, Bresson and Godard, but also others. Their common denominator, if there is one, is that they actually question the very possibility of a definition or a general theory.

The focus issue of the AM Journal sets to examine the evasive arena of experimental film, its history and theory, its authors and their works. With the advent of video, experimental video and video installation on the one hand, and the digital revolution that notably changed its production and reception, on the other, experimental film found itself in a situation, which differs significantly from one at beginning of 20^th century and demands a closer examination. Contributions covering experimental film from different disciplinary fields are welcome and interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged.

Guest issue editor: Ernest Ženko
On the cover: Provisional Salta Ensemble, Traces of the Experimental Film, 2018.
Issue No. 14, October 2017 - Main Topic: Sovereignty, Migrants, and Culture
No. 14 (2017)

This issue of AM Journal of Art and Media Studies consists of fourteen contributions by predominantly younger theoretical positions, philosophers, and researchers that are all active in the territory of the former Yugoslavia; though they were or are studying, working and living in many different places. The majority of the contributions were prepared and presented in a shorter format at the 2^nd International Colloquium on contemporary theory, philosophy, esthetics, politics, society, new media technology, and economics with the title Sovereignty, Migrants, and Culture, organized at ZRC SAZU (Scientific and Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts), Ljubljana, Slovenia, in November 2016. Additionally we invited for this publication a guest, artist and filmmaker Yosef-Joseph Dadoune that lives in Ofakim in Israel to contribute an innovative artistic-critical text on his work. He prepared it in collaboration with artist and writer Mikel Touval.

Sovereignty, Migrants, and Culture aims to present analysis of dispossession, exploitation, coloniality, racialization, and subjugation in order to tackle what is central today to Europe or more precisely to the European Union and the refugee crisis. This is not a crisis provoked by the refugees, but instead the outcome of a management of death conducted for the sake of the biopolitical sovereignty of the EU nation-states, performed through necropower procedures of abandonment, banning, exclusion, and racialization. The interest is to bring reflections of these topics through theory and politics, but also culture and technology, philosophy and esthetics, while not forgetting political positions formed through feminism, queer, black studies, and anti-racist and anti-capitalist political movements, historically and presently.

Gest Issue Editors: Marina Gržinić & Aneta Stojnić
On the cover: Provisional Salta Ensemble, Liminal Sovereignty, 2017
Issue No. 13, September 2017 - Main Topic: Yugoslav Studies
No. 13 (2017)

On the cover: Provisional Salta Ensemble: Appropriation − JAT, 2017.
Issue No. 12, April 2017 - Topic of Issue: Architecture with(in) Art and Theory
No. 12 (2017)

Looking back at high modernist art theories, we might recall Clement Greenberg’s well-known view that experience precedes theory. Apart from advocating certain formalist solutions as more acceptable than others, this claim also postulated a sort of model for making and observing art. Among Greenberg’s many, undoubtedly complex premises, there were two significant implications that – in terms of autonomy – defined poetic relations between different artistic disciplines and theoretical relations between art and society. When neo-avant-garde practices challenged this kind of modernist aesthetic hermeticism, it opened experimental and in-between space for work, while art retrieved – once again, after the historical avant-gardes – its ability to make critical commentary on the disciplinary conditions and society in general. As a result, medium-specific art was widely replaced by mixed-media art, which was welcomed and assimilated by postmodern pluralist theories.

The topic of this issue is to examine the role of architecture in this art-theory complex. The reference to Greenberg should be (just) a metaphor for a similar, but by no means identical process in architectural discourse. In architectural terms, this story goes something like this: in its (hermetic and, conditionally speaking, autonomous) domain of engineering, technology, and ergonomics, high-modernist architecture was largely disconnected from the other arts and theory. Still, some theories, such as rationalism, positivism, pragmatism, functionalism, and behaviorism appeared in architecture from time to time, and the formalist language of avant-garde abstraction remained. After decades spent in its modernist enclosure, the postmodern era saw the opening of architectural discourse to the contamination of art and theory. During the late 1960s and 1970s, the first wave of postmodernism introduced leftist strains from structuralism and phenomenology as a means of building a theory around a privileged architectural object. In the mid 1980s, the second wave of postmodernism showed a desire for artisticness in architectural practice, as well for sophisticated readings in theory. Literary genres (dirty realism and cyberpunk), sculpture in an expanded field (minimal art and land art), ambient art, performance and so on, became topics in architectural project, while the critical cutting edge of postmodern hermeneutics (weak thought) and poststructuralism (deconstruction) became embodied in the domain of interpreting architecture.

We were looking for papers that might theorize different historical and contemporary models of making and thinking architecture outside the framework of its own discipline, emphasizing interaction with the domains of other arts and theory, positing those interactions in a broader social context.

Guest Issue Editor: Vladimir Stevanović
On the cover: Irena Gajić, Paper Architecture
Issue No. 11, November 2016
No. 11 (2016)

The aim of this issue is promotion of PhD students of Transdisciplinary Stadies of Contemporary Arts and Media from Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade, Serbia.
Issue No. 10, October 2016 - Topic of Issue: Cultural Studies
No. 10 (2016)

Being interested in the very wide field of social and cultural practices, relations and dynamics which opens up a vast number of questions on lived, thought and engaged realities, identities, communities and individual approaches, cultural studies draw the attention of numerous writers and thinkers in the contemporary humanities spectrum, thus engaging some very important theoretical issues reflected in art, consumerism, media and the politics of everyday living. The cultural realm thus becomes a contested place of performances and performatives of different identities, postidentities, bodies, texts and motions in flux. Having been immersed in the world of interactive and multiple media realms, the cultural subjects and communities are invited/pressured to produce themselves in the contexts of contemporaneity, however it may be defined, blurring the lines between everyday life, performance, art and media realms.
Have firm lines ever existed?

Focus Issue Editor: Dragana Stojanović
On the cover: Vladimir Miladinović, Record (from the Rendered History Project), 2016
Issue No. 9, April 2016 - Topis of Issue: Ordinary Language Philosophy
No. 9 (2016)

The great linguistic turn performed by the philosophical platforms that took language as their focus of research marked much of 20th Century intellectual history:this turn started in analytic philosophy, which became part of the Anglo-American philosophical tradition, while structuralism, semiology, and poststructuralism dominated the so-called Continental tradition. Ordinary language philosophy was an important episode in this turn: it was shaped by the philosophers gathered around the so-called “Oxford school” (Ryle, Strawson, Austin) and under the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s late works. As such, ordinary language philosophy performed an internal critique and revision of logical positivism and logical atomism. Ordinary language philosophers, referring to Wittgenstein’s self-critique in his Philosophical Investigations, repudiated the argument about logic as the basis of human cognition of the world, and began exploring the grammatical structures of language. Philosophers such as Austin, but also his followers, such as American philosopher Stanley Cavell, repudiated the claim of the possibility of an ideal, non-historical, and logically completely coherent metalanguage and instead promoted their thesis of the historical determination of language, i.e. its variable criteria; in certain respects, ordinary language philosophy thus came close to deconstruction and poststructuralism.
With this focus issue, titled Ordinary Language Philosophy, the AM Journal wishes to examine the currency of ordinary language philosophy’s main thesis. We welcome all interdisciplinary contributions reinvestigating the philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s late works, John Austin, Stanley Cavell, and others. What was the unique place of ordinary language philosophy in the linguistic turn mentioned above? How did ordinary language philosophy influence contemporary debates in ethics and aesthetics? What is the relation between ordinary language philosophy and deconstruction, i.e. poststructuralism? We will especially welcome all texts on the relevance of ordinary language philosophy for contemporary art theory – the visual arts, as well as performing arts, film, music, and media and media culture.

Topic Issue Editor: Nikola Dedić

On the cover: Doplgener (Isidora Ilić i Boško Prostran), Fragments Untitled, since 2011
October 2015 - Topic of Issue: Postfeminism, Transfeminism and Feminist Subjectivities beyond Identity Politics
No. 8 (2015)

On the cover: Provisonal Salta Ensemble, Beyond Postfeminism, 2012-2015
Issue No. 7, April 2015 - Topic of Issue: Art and Politics: Agency, Autonomy, Emancipation
No. 7 (2015)

After the end of Soviet hegemony and the fall of socialist regimes in Central and Southeast Europe, the consideration of the relationship between art and politics seems urgent. The experience of more than two decades of political and structural changes toward the development of institutions of global capital also contributes to this urgency. The debate over the (political) nature of art becomes necessary, taking into account that this question has been superseded by a marketplace wherein all designations and forms of Art are available. It shows (itself) to be the best vehicle for manipulation and instrumentalization towards the current doxa that ‘everything is possible’. Moreover, the issue of the political aspect of art has been complicated by the dominant intellectual opinion and denunciations that all forms of utopian and social dimensions of art, as in the case of revolutionary and emancipatory perspectives of the avant-gardes, are responsible for the horrors of totalitarianism and terrorism. The aim of this issue therefore is to address the question of how to constitute and affirm an active Art today without slipping into essentialism.

Focus Issue Editor: Bojana Matejić

On the cover: Ana Krstić, Happy New Democracy, 2012

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