The Impact of the Visual Arts on Technology
A special issue of Arts (ISSN 2076-0752). This special issue belongs to the section "Visual Arts".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 1 June 2025 | Viewed by 350
Special Issue Editors
Interests: digital studies; philosophy of technology; aesthetics with a focus on performed engagements with technologies and embodied experience
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Art’s modes of production have always been interwoven with the processes of technological development. This can lead to the impression that in our moment of technological acceleration, proliferating digital media are leading artistic development, and artists are playing catch-up to new forms of technology. Yet, the modes of artistic production also mediate art’s capacity to generate critical and creative use-value, an argument famously made by Walter Benjamin in his canonical essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Recently, in his book Art and Cosmotechnics, Yuk Hui has urged us to engage with art in such a way as to support the development of un-imagined or not-yet-existing relations of social forms. He states, "Art must lead an epistemic revolution. It is not about using augmented reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence to produce new media art, but rather about how to use art to produce AR, VR, and AI. Media art, while promoting the use of digital media, may have yet to supersede the conceptual frameworks that previously structured it" (Hui 2021, 238). Hui hinges art’s transformative capacities upon its facility to expand what we can know and what we can do with technologies, which he imagines in tandem with Foucault’s notion of dispotif. Hui redefines this term with the aim "to reintroduce a form of life and reactivate a locality” (Hui 2016, 31). We argue for a reappraisal of visual arts in creating new dispotifs by informing technological relations. To this end, we frame this Special Issue around the question: How do the visual arts lead to new ways of thinking and becoming with technology?
We are seeking contributions that pertain to artistic practice, histories of art, and/or philosophical models for art and aesthetics.
Possible topics include the following:
- Visual arts as (re)activating localities for technologies;
- Art, technology, and decoloniality;
- Art, technology, and anti-ableism;
- Queering technologies with art;
- Art as speculative inquiries of technologies;
- Technoaesthetics;
- Social implications of technologies explored in art;
- Art as revealing bias in technologies;
- Anti-computing and other critiques of technologies;
- De/construction of apparatuses through critical art practice.
References:
Hui, Yuk. 2016. The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics. Falmouth: Urbanomic Media Ltd.
Hui, Yuk. 2021. Art and Cosmotechnics. Minneapolis, MN: e-flux books.
Dr. EL Putnam
Dr. Andy Broadey
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Arts is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- visual arts
- philosophy of technology
- technoaesthetics
- philiosophy of art
- speculative inquiry
- cosmotechnics
- dispotif
- critical art practice
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