[artinfo] CFP: Media Archaeology

[Artnodes]

Call For Papers: Media Archaeology

To be published in issue 21 (July 2018)

Deadline for submissions: 15 February

Uncovering both the new in the old and the old in the seemingly new 
of the media is one of the most recognized tasks of Media 
Archaeology, a theoretical and methodological perspective on history 
itself that, among other displacements, reconfigures the historical 
causalities and agencies involved, offering alternative narratives to 
reflect on our contemporaneity. Today some of these displacements, 
extensively studied over recent decades, also align with the 
so-called material shift that for some years philosophers, artists 
and theoreticians in many disciplines have endeavoured to point to in 
all fields and particularly in the arts and media, as we have seen in 
previous monographic issues of the journal Artnodes.

This material shift aims to complement the pre-eminence of semiotic 
analysis with an emphasis on analysis of contexts, uses and 
experiences, as well as the agency of the machines, artefacts and 
other non-human agents linked to the media. This epistemological 
renewal, which also connects with the calling into question of 
historical causalities and the need for counter-narratives - although 
we could trace it back to the times of Walter Benjamin - was promoted 
in the mid-1980s by departments of Cultural Studies and departments 
of Communication through the reading of Michel Foucault, the New 
Historicism of literary studies and the later influence of Cultural 
History.

In this way, a renewed interest emerged in the contexts of change and 
development of technologies linked to expanding and challenging our 
field of knowledge, auditory and visual technologies, recording and 
playback devices, and so on. The area of interest called Media 
Archaeology brings together a whole set of researchers (be they 
historians, artists or theoreticians) interested in these issues that 
concern our way of seeing and understanding a world mediated by 
viewing and computation machines. 

Topics

For issue no. 21 of Artnodes we are calling for articles that propose 
theoretical, practical and methodological research and, particularly, 
analysis of case studies from the perspective of these theoretical 
currents.

Some of the subjects can deal with (although not exclusively):

- The impact of the scientific-technical transformations on the 
reconfiguration of museum institutions, knowledge institutions, 
archives, and so on.

- How the accounts of development (progress, colonialism, 
industrialism, and so on) were articulated with the emergence of 
certain aesthetics, visual regimes and technologies associated with 
the media.

-  How material culture contains our desires for progress, utopias 
and dystopias, ruins and failures, and which myths persist and which 
myths are transformed throughout history.

- How the perspective provided by Media Archaeology provides 
counter-hegemonic accounts in contrast to the narratives 
characteristic of the technophile or technophobic account of the 
(new) media.

- Analysis of case studies, their contexts and the material 
conditions in which media, artefacts or devices propose a reflection 
on their capacity for agency.


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About Artnodes

Artnodes is an open-access academic journal produced by the UOC since 
2002. It is published twice a year, in June and December. Its 
articles come from public calls for scientific articles and are 
submitted to blind review by experts in the
subject area of articles. The journal is indexed in Q2 de Scimago 
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