Current open Call for Papers:

-Arts and Gaming, Convergent Feminism and Speculative Futures (Extended Deadline: October 15, 2023)

-Open Call for audiovisual essay submissions (always open)
Submit here: https://revistas.ucp.pt/index.php/jsta/about/submissions

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“Women, Gaming, Interaction”, Image generated by artificial inteligence, Midjourney, 2023.
 

Arts and Gaming, Convergent Feminism and Speculative Futures

Deadline: September 22, 2023

Guest Editors: Cristina Sá (UCP-EA/CITAR); Luciana Lima (ITI/LARSyS; IST-ID); Patrícia Gouveia (ITI/LARSyS; FBAUL).

For this special issue of our Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts, we search for research papers that reflect under the theme of Arts and Gaming, Convergent Feminism and Speculative Futures. Speculative arts and design-based research which inquire possibilities under the idea that we are now living on a damaged planet. Technological and analogical ecologies that enhance our ways of being in viable environments. We will be welcoming works that take advantage of playful interactive technologies and transmedia strategies to inquire how arts, play and gaming methodologies can integrate women studies to generate convergent and sustainable futures. Arts and design works that inquire the role of Artificial Intelligence and Non-Fungible Token (NFT) in contemporary visual environments and hybrid participatory convergence of analogue and digital technologies in transmedia arts are also welcoming possibilities. Internet studies that investigate how we can shape contemporary arts and interaction design to help us living with dignity in a planetary scale. Exploration and experimentation with the intricate relationships and coalitions between arts, social sciences and technologies, uniting codes and algorithms, creativity, and community engagement, in topics (non-exclusively) related to:

  • Gender inequities, and the various forms of exclusion in the STEAM fields;
  • Game art and speculative futures
  • Digital activism: theory and research methodologies
  • Digital technologies: diversity and inclusion; Misogyny and algorithms
  • Shadowbanning, machine learning and gender bias
  • Art practices for social transformation: community-based art;
  • Art, ecology and viable environments

 Submit here: https://revistas.ucp.pt/index.php/jsta/about/submissions

 

 

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Open Call for audiovisual essay submissions (always open)

JSTA aims to create a conceptual discussion around the audiovisual essay, not only as a creative process but also as a pedagogical and academic tool, to generate concepts and criteria for evaluation and scientific consideration. (Please see a version of our first audiovisual essay here). 

Therefore, JSTA is open to submissions of original audiovisual essays made with films, excerpts and other moving images. Works can have up to 15 minutes and should provide original insights in areas such as film and audiovisual studies; media studies; contemporary art; social sciences. Works submitted should not have been proposed to any other academic publication, despite the possibility of dissemination in other circuits. The call will not be restricted to academic practitioners but the process of evaluation will follow its procedures.

Each audiovisual essay should be accompanied by a research statement by the author (up to 1500 words), articulating research aims and the process of work. Each work will be submitted to an open peer-review process, in which audiovisual essay and author’s statement will be published alongside the reviewers’ critical evaluations of the work. After the submission acceptance, the author will be asked to provide a printable version of the audiovisual essay (selecting around 20 frames of the original work).

Submissions should have:
- a video file (MP4, with H264 codec), no longer than 15 minutes and with less than 500 Mb,
- a word document with the research statement (up to 1500 words). 

Possible working topics:
-The use of sound in mise-en-scène;
-Cinema and technology;
-Poetics of time and space;
-Movement, ambience and colour;
-Editing based film criticism;
-The history of cinema and its rhymes;
-Gestures and techniques of the audiovisual essay;
-Desktop cinema;
-The intersection of film and visual arts;
-New paths of contemporary cinema;
-Films inside films and cinematic universe clashes;
-Audiovisual essay as a pedagogical tool;
-Audiovisual essay and practice-based research. 

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Past Call for Papers

Animation and Comics: In-between Panel and Frame 
Extended Deadline: October 10, 2022
Editors:
Editors: Sahra Kunz (UCP-EA/CITAR); Ekaterina Cordas (UCP-CECC); Ricardo Megre (UCP-EA/CITAR).

This call aims to pioneer a cross-disciplinary discussion platform that would initiate a fruitful dialogue between the fields of Animation and Comics. Responding to a growing artistic and academic interest in these two media and to the new conceptual, practical and theoretical challenges they pose, we feel the need to provide a space for academics and artists to share ideas about these subjects.

These are very dynamic, and often under-recognized areas in the arts, even though they often underlie some of the most successful cinematic productions of our time. As such, they are moving more and more into the mainstream consciousness and attracting an extensive audience and critical acclaim.

For this special issue, we invite article submissions that critically reflect on the transformations these two media underwent throughout the years and that focus on the various meeting points and divergences between the two.  

Submission topics:

  • 2D, 3D and mixed media Animation
  • Experimental Animation and Emerging Formats
  • Subsidiary Animation (in games and interactive media)
  • Genres and Narrative in Animation/Comics
  • Characters in Animation/Comics
  • Sound and speech in Animation/Comics
  • Mainstream vs. Independent Animation/Comics
  • Political and gender issues in Animation/Comics
  • Animation, Comics and Cinematic adaptations 
  • Technological issues and production processes in Animation
  • Uncanny Valley 
  • Aesthetic languages in Animation/Comics - from stylisation to realism
  • Drawing and line in Animation/Comics
  • Colour and lighting  in Animation/Comics
  • Animation History 
  • Contemporary issues in Animation/Comics
  • Animation styles throughout the World
  • Rhythm, pacing and movement in Animation
  • Pop Culture and Animation/Comics
  • Documentary Animation
  • Post-Memory
  • Animation and subversion of norms
  • Animation as language of resistance 
  • (Im)materialities of Animation 
  • Interdisciplinary approaches to studying Animation/Comics
  • Author voice vs Market hegemony in Animation/Comics
  • New modes of spectatorship/readership of Animation/Comics
  • Medium specificity of Animation/Comics

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Photographs post-truths: private poetics vs political claims? 
Extended Deadline: June 17, 2022
Editors: 
Carlos Lobo (UCP-EA, CITAR) and Paulo Catrica (UNL, IHC).

Seemingly in our post-truth era, the drifts of contemporary photography practices operate on a global scale, trespassing local and specific cultural settings. Rooted within a plurality of historical genres, mostly Western, i.e. documentary, conceptual, street photography, post-modern, or ‘fine art’, these visual paradigms are instinctively used without reclaiming any critical stance.   

One of the prevailing trends is the depiction of the world as a self-portraiture – ‘from my porch’, as a fragmentary visual essay inscribed with poetic significance. A certain return to the modern ‘beautiful photograph’ opposed to the depiction of the world ‘outside’ with its critical and political implications. 

To frame this debate we recover, John Schott 1975’s aphorism, ‘what a picture is of and what it is about’ ? By then, William Jenkins commented, comparing Ed Ruscha’s photographs to Schott Route 66 Motels: “… they [Ruscha’s pictures] are not statements about the world through art, they are statements about art through the world". 

Engaging with the discussion of the photographs' ability to be ideological committed, and considering that myth of representation was wiped out with the rarefaction of the photographic images?We invite article submissions and visual essays that focus on photography contemporary practices in order to critically discuss the hypothetical quarrel between poetics and politics. 

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On Criticism: “Is there a place (still) for criticism?”
Deadline: September 15, 2021
Editors: Luiz Camillo Osorio (PUC-Rio), Nuno Crespo (EA-UCP/CITAR), Sabeth Buchmann (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna)

At a time when it is urgent to think about the role of art in society outside the contexts of institutions and their agents, this special issue intends to discuss how the crisis of criticism and new gestures of participation - allowed and encouraged by the intense development of digital technologies for collaboration, which seem to have made everyone an art critic -, contribute to develop critical thinking about the arts and create a concrete space for reflection and action by the spectator. 

The first question to be addressed is whether the dissolution of authority and mediation of the word of criticism, replaced by technological and digital means of participation, can (or not) replace art criticism as we know it, sometimes based on a logic of institutional or authorship authority. This is a work possibility that implies analysing the modalities and spaces of criticism in its present and past, and understanding how the spectator’s relationship with artistic creation produces new reflective spaces.

This discussion can be placed between philosophy, history, and theory, underlining the relevance of criticism as a necessary reflexive moment for the construction of the artistic object and to understand how this reflexive nature has been transformed through new modes of relationship with art modalities of the relationship with art. However, the scope of this discussion is not limited to the debate about the limits and possibilities of criticizing art as a discipline but tries to think about the way society is called to participate in the artistic field using common everyday tools, such as, for example, a smartphone and social media.

It is important to test approaches between the practices of criticism and the other practices of the art system: artistic and curatorial. This special issue intends to systematize the historical evolution of criticism and problematize the transformations it has undergone to date. In a time of crisis for institutions, it is important to define and propose new institutional formats (considering different geopolitical realities) and also new strategies and tools that take advantage of the full potential of new digital media. For this purpose, it is essential to analyse the processes of digital value attribution in the context of a quantitative regime of an evaluation society and to debate how they relate (or can relate) to the practice of criticism traditionally linked to qualitative judgments.

We are welcoming papers that address these topics:
- curatorial practices as criticism
- criticism and post-colonialism
- shifts from ‘institutional critique to infrastructure critique’
- criticism in a globalized art world
- criticism and post-media
- the relevance of digital media in the practice of criticism
- qualitative versus quantitive in art criticism
- beyond criticism

 

Bibliography

Ahmed, S. (2012). On Being Included. Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press.

Benjamin, A. (2010). Writing Art and Architecture. Re.Press.

De Boer, K. & Sonderegger, R. (eds.). (2012). Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillon.

Bishop, C. (2013). Radical Museology or What's Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? Koenig Books.

Eagleton, T. (2005). The function of criticism. Verso Books.

Elkins, J. and Newman, M. (2008). The State of Art Criticism. Routledege.

Lijster, T., Milevska, S., Gielen, P., Sonderegger, R. (2015). Spaces For Criticism. Shifts in Contemporary Art Discourses. Anagram Books.

Gates, H. L. (2014). The Signifying Monkey. A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. Oxford University Press.

Groys, B. (2010). Going Public. Sternberg Press.

Harney, S. & Moten, F. (2016). The Undercommons. Fugitive planning & black study. Autonomedia.

Hofstettler, K. (2014). Under (Post-)Colonial Eyes: Kant, Foucault, and Critique. Nikita Dhawan (ed.). Decolonizing Enlightment. Transnational Justice, Human Rights and Democracy in a Postcolonial Word. Barabara Budrich.

Joselit, D. (2020). Heritage and debt. MIT Press.

Mau, S. (2019). The metric society. On the quantification of the social. Polity Press.

McGovern, F., Johnston, M. J., & Wieder, A. (eds.). (2019). The Disintegration of a Critic. Sternberg Press.

Nesbitt, N. (2013). Caribbean Critiqze. Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant. Liverpool University Press.

Novotny, S. & Raunig, G. (eds.). (2010). Kunst und Kritik. Turia + Kant.

O’Neil, P. (2012). The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s). MIT Press.

Vishmidt, M. (2017). Between Not Everything and Not Nothing: Cuts Toward Infrastructural Critique. Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheik (eds), The Former West. Art and the Contemporary after 1989. The MIT Press.

Von Hantelmann, D. (2010). How to do Things with Art. JRP Ringier.

Critical approaches towards (a new) arts education
Deadline: April 15, 2021
Editors: Pedro Alves (EA-UCP / CITAR) & Catarina S. Martins (FBAUP / i2ADS)

Arts education, as a field of research and action in different spaces (schools, museums, cultural institutions, communities, etc.), still struggles to claim its specificity and equal importance in relation to other kinds of knowledge (Martins, 2017). In public and curricular policies and in several research discourses, it still remains subdued to purposes imposed from the outside which frame it between a rhetoric of effects and instrumentalizing practices (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013; Martins, 2018). On the one hand, there remains an idea that arts are powerful transformative agents and could save the world (Martins, 2018; Martins & Popkewitz, 2015); on the other hand, neoliberalism tends to put economic utility and usage as principles that end up capturing art under the great jargons of creativity, cultural industries, flexibility, etc (Assis, 2019; Kalin, 2018; Martins, 2020). In schools, for example, it is not uncommon to see arts - under the pretext of interdisciplinarity - being mobilized under other curricular subjects (the so-called ‘serious’ knowledge), transforming them into vehicles that merely facilitate learning and neglecting in them what is also knowledge and possibilities for critical displacement and interventional action in the world. What we do with the arts matters more than what arts do to us (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013).

However, talking about ‘arts’ is already abusive. Today, and in works that intend to be critical towards themselves, it is necessary to question the very concept and status that arts, but also education, built from European perspectives, aligned with colonial practices, the building of nations, identity constructions and a culture of taste, under a universalist idea of civilization and progress (Gikandi, 2011; Mörsch, n.d.; Varela, 2016). If we look into curricular programs from primary to high school education - and even higher education - in the broad field of arts education we understand how a history of white, mostly male and western art is inscribed in them. Arts do not appear on the margins of society, they are an integral part of it, and carry in them stories that are also responsible for the production and maintenance of social inequalities and injustice.

Thus, in this JSTA special issue we intend to pose one of the most difficult challenges that arts education faces today: how to build a place and status for arts education knowledge (in a still unequal struggle against other kinds of knowledge) and, simultaneously, how to do it from a critical standpoint, which does not assume for itself, from the outset, a privileged or exceptional place, which does not reproduce the hegemonic power relations it seeks to criticize (Mörsch, 2018), and which stimulates provocation and change instead of accommodation and homogenization. We invite authors to a place of questioning, under critical perspectives (anti-discrimination, anti-racist, postcolonial, queer, feminist, etc.), which promote alternative views and practices of action and research in arts education, committed to greater epistemological and social justice. For this special issue of JSTA we seek articles and researches that lead, from criticism or practice, to a critical, diverse and current reflection on the problems and turbulences of arts education, under any of the following topics:

- Histories of arts education
- Critical pedagogical practices and theoretical approaches in arts education
- Action and research methodologies in arts education
- Political frameworks in arts education
- Social and cultural frameworks in arts education
- Anti-discriminatory perspectives in arts education

Assis, T. (2019). Programming Creativity: Technology and Global Politics in the National Curriculum. In L. G. Chova, A. L. Martínez, & I. C. Torres (Eds.), INTED19 Proceedings: 13th annual International Technology, Education and Development Conference (pp. 5542–5551). Valencia: IATED Academy.

Gaztambide-Fernández, R. (2013). Why the arts don’t do anything: toward a new vision for cultural production in education. Harvard Educational Review, 83(1), 211–236.

Gikandi, S. (2011). Slavery and the Culture of Taste. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Kalin, N. (2018). The Neoliberalization of Creativity Education. Democratizing, Destructing and Decreating. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

Martins, C. S. (2017). ‘E agora, vai voltar tudo a ser como era?’ - Por uma crítica às artes na educação. In M. de Assis (Ed.), 10 x 10 Ensaios entre Arte e Educação (pp. 13–20). Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.

Martins, C. S. (2018). The Alchemies of the Arts in Education. Problematizing Some of the Ingredients of the Recipe. In B. Jörissen, L. Klepacki, T. Klepacki, V. Flasche, J. Engel, & L. Unterberg (Eds.), Spectra of Transformation (pp. 41–57). Munster and New York: Waxmann.

Martins, C. S. (2020). The Fabrication of the Chameleonic Citizen of the future through the Rhetoric of Creativity: Governmentality, Competition and Human Capital. In C.-P. Buschkühle, D. Atkinson, & R. Vella (Eds.), Art-Ethics-Education (pp. 26–43). Leiden and Boston: Brill Sense.

Martins, C. S., & Popkewitz, T. S. (2015). The ‘Eventualizing’ of Arts Education. Sisyphus - Journal of Education, 3(1), 7–17.

Mörsch, C. (n.d.). Approches to a Postcolonial Historiography of Cultural Education in Germany. Retrieved May 25, 2019, from https://www.kubinaut.de/de/themen/9-kontext-asyl/%0Dapproaches-postcolonial-historiography-cultural-education-german/

Mörsch, C. (2018). Critical Diversity Literacy an der Schnittstelle Bildung/Kunst: Einblicke in die immerwährende Werkstatt eines diskriminierungskritischen Curriculums. Retrieved from https://www.kubi-online.de/artikel/critical-diversity-literacy-schnittstelle-bildung-kunst-einblicke-immerwaehrende-werkstatt

Varela, M. do M. C. (2016). Pedagogic Activism v. Pedagogic Paternalism. In F. Malzacher, O. Ahmet, & Pelin Tan (Eds.), The Silent University (pp. 44–55). Berlin: Sternberg Press.

 


Audible (Art): The invisible connections between sound, music, and sound art.
Deadline: NEW DATE - January 10, 2021
Editors:  José Alberto Gomes, Miguel Carvalhais, Henrique Portovedo

This special issue of CITAR’s Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts is especially devoted to artistic expression through sound.

Musical arguments characterize the sound network richness through representational signals that need to be interpreted. Since the 1970s, the singularity impulse of the moment in music has shaped new paths and disciplines with its new grammars and wills. Art through sound, as a practice, takes advantage, describes, analyzes, executes and interrogates the condition of the sound and the processes by which it operates. Thus, any remaining musical argument is negated by a predominant extravagance of unintentionality, multiplicity, silence or noise. At the same time, the role of technology in this evolution is undeniable. The development and use of computational tools and media have become a constant and the majority of the art through sound is affected by it, in a symbiosis with technology that radically transforms the landscape for the practice of the arts.

As explored in Sonic Warfare by Steve Goodman, sound today represents much more than a musical element or even an acoustic and physical phenomenon. Travels through philosophy, science, fiction, aesthetics, popular culture. It can be deployed to produce discomfort, express a threat when at the same time, artists and musicians use it in the search for new aesthetic experiences and new ways of mobilizing bodies in rhythm. For this special issue of the JSTA, the guest editors intend to address sound as a bundle of practices that can either arise from, lead to, or use sound as a tool of world building in politics, philosophy, geography, engineering, poetry, ecology, architecture, design and arts.

We seek articles by sound artists, musicians, performers, computer scientists, new media artists, researchers and theorists from different backgrounds and geographies in order to build a comprehensive profile of sound, music and sound art in contemporary culture.

Hot Topics:
Audio Cultures
Auditory Perception
Sound and Architecture
Sonic Arts
Sonic Politics
Sound and Culture
Sound and Performance
Sound Sculptures

(Image: Comparison of the human ear with ears of various animals (detail) by Athanasius Kircher. 1650

- xCoAx 2020: August 31, 2020

 

 

Special Issue: xCoAx 2020
deadline: August 31, 2020

Computation, Communication, Aesthetics and X
Call for Papers for a special issue of the Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts (JSTA)
Guest Editors: André Rangel, Luísa Ribas, Mario Verdicchio, Miguel Carvalhais

Over the last decades, the development and use of computational tools and media have become ubiquitous and almost no aspect of our lives remains unaffected by this. In particular, this kind of technology has been radically transforming the landscape for the practice of the arts and numerous cultural manifestations.

Recognizing this, the Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics and X (xCoAx) is designed as a multi-disciplinary enquiry on arts, computers, computation, communication and the elusive X factor that connects them all.

The CoViD-19 global emergency imposed the transformation of xCoAx into a digital event, but its aims have remained the same: to explore the frontiers of digital arts with the participation of a diverse confluence of computer scientists, media practitioners and theoreticians with a focus on: the relations between what can and cannot be computed; the relations between what can and cannot be communicated; what is beautiful and how computation can capture, create, elaborate beauty; how humans and computational systems intersect and generate new directions in aesthetics.

For this issue of the JSTA, the guest editors seek to continue the discourse initiated with xCoAx, by publishing articles by computer scientists, new media artists, researchers and theorists that demonstrate genuinely meaningful interconnections between computation, communication, and aesthetics within a vast group of topics that includes but is not limited to:

Algorithms, Systems, Models

Artificial Aesthetics

Audiovisuals, Multimodality

Creativity, Design

Ethics of Technology, Epistemology

Games, Interaction

Generative Art

History

Mechatronics, Physical Computing

Music, Sound Art

Philosophy of Art

Philosophy of Computation

 

Submissions should follow the editorial guidelines of JSTA.

Timeline

Deadline for paper submission: August 31st, 2020. 

Papers notification: September 30th, 2020.

Deadline for final version: October 31st, 2020.
Special issue release: end of 2020.

Submissions are to be made through the journal’s website
For any inquiry: info@xcoax.org