« Incorporer / Incorporate »

Call for papers

Intermedialités. Histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques /

Intermediality. History and Theory of the Arts, Literature, and Technologies

Issue editors :

María Andrea Giovine, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Susana González Aktories, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Roberto Cruz Arzabal, Universidad Veracruzana

Deadline for submitting a proposal : July 15, 2023

Announcement of proposal selection results : August 1st, 2023

Submission of completed texts for peer review : January 15, 2024

Publication of the texts approved by the editorial board : Fall, 2024

The verb to incorporate presupposes, by its etymology, the distinction of at least two material entities as well as a movement of assimilation or agencement of one by the other. This movement further implies introducing something external into the body’s internal space. Incorporation can go as far as homologation, subsumption, partial integration or total absorption. In the realm of experience, it takes on the sense of appropriating, or reappropriating. Like other verbs used in the arts—joining, adding, appending, including, gathering, uniting—incorporating invites critical reflections on intermedial practices and perspectives.

During the new millennium, hybridity, which in itself implies a modality of incorporation, has become a characteristic of artistic creation and of various social and cultural manifestations. Different semiotic and medial spheres have incorporated elements from distinct materialities, domains and contexts, making incorporation itself both a mode of production and a condition for the formation of many cultural objects where multiple languages, diverse articulations between orality and writing, as well as different performative modalities whose perceptible reproduction and circulation, whether real or virtual, center on the body as a device for intermedial interaction.

The notion of the body has traversed the histories of art, literature, science and the media. In the digital world, reflections on the body have been enriched with new nuances in order to understand the apparent dematerialization of the body or, it bears repeating, to incorporate it into its organic processes. These new reflections are also indicative of a rise in artistic practices aimed at questioning the limits between biology and technology, between singular life and nested organisms, between individual bodies and holobionts or parasites, between the epidermal borders and the machine’s metallic skin. The values that these practices have acquired today are undeniable, as is the way in which they have broadened the horizons of intermedia arts.

For this issue, we are interested in analyses of works that take as their starting point the return of the body to the center of perception by questioning its material and ideological configurations; in analyses that highlight the fundamental position of the body, even if certain artefacts strive to conceal or obliterate it; in analyses that problematize the notion of the body as an intermedial device; in analyses that question the idea of incarnation between human and non-human bodies, whether they be technological, animal, vegetable or fungal.

Topics of interest for this thematic dossier include, but are not limited to:

• The body as a mediating instance in a time when we increasingly have to deal with mediating instances.

• The potential of the body as an instance of mediating-creating-decoding-interacting with the world.

• The non-specificity of art as an act of incorporation.

• Artistic creation made both from the depths of the body, as is the case with bioart, or from the relationship of the body to space and other bodies, as in the performing arts.

• Works of art that are intended to be incorporated by the viewer, and the implications of the assimilation of the viewer to the artistic device (e.g. immersive art and virtual reality).

• The contributions of artistic reflection to the constantly evolving identities that are defined and experienced from the body (for example, queer theories, the problematization of bodily genders and their impact on artistic genres).

• The perspectives opened up by new agencies of looking, listening, gesturing, as well as by the various angles of a poetics of perception.

• The role of the “material turn” in the body’s new presence in artistic creation and as a reading device in a context of cultural production where the tension between materiality, virtuality and the post-digital is continuously debated.

Proposals (350–400 words) in English or French should include an abstract, a preliminary bibliography (five books or articles) and a brief biographical note (academic program, fields of interest, 5–10 lines). Proposals will be evaluated by the journal’s scientific committee, based on the originality of the approach and the relevance of the problematic. They should be sent before July 15, 2023 to María Andrea Giovine, Susana González Aktories and Roberto Cruz Arzabal at the following email address: ma.andrea.giovine@gmail.com, saktories@gmail.com and rcruz.arzabal@gmail.com

Read more at the journal’s webpage