[Commlist] CFP: Caleidoscopio Journal, Vol. 1 No. 1. Becoming Media: Operativity and Medialogical Structures

Call for papers.

*CFP: Caleidoscopio Journal, Vol. 1 No. 1. Becoming Media: Operativity 
and Medialogical Structures*

Deadline: June 02, 2025.


Caleidoscopio – Revista de Comunicação e Cultura is the journal of the 
Communication Sciences Department of ECATI, Lusófona University.


Now entering its second series, Caleidoscopio is being relaunched with 
the aim of consolidating its position as an open-access platform 
dedicated to critical research in communication sciences, with a special 
focus on the intersection of communication, media, and the arts in 
contemporary societies.


We invite submissions that engage with approaches from media theory, 
visual studies, philosophy of technology, cybernetics, or contemporary 
artistic practices. There are no article processing charges.



*Call*:

According to Wolfgang Ernst (2016), media only exist as operative and 
thus active—that is, agential—media. On a broader horizon, André 
Leroi-Gourhan (1964) had already pointed out that technique can only be 
understood in the form of operational chains composed of gestures and 
tools, chains organized by a syntax that articulates fixity and 
flexibility. Between these two formulations, we find the figure of 
operativity, which, beyond essentialist descriptions or binary 
distinctions, emphasizes the processes of co-constitution and 
performativity through which operations—as material ontogenetic 
forces—produce both the real and the symbolic, instantiating limits, 
interfaces, and infrastructures that constitute articulations of the 
real (Siegert, 2015).

Originally applied in the contexts of the military-security complex and 
logistics (Parikka, 2023), the logic of operativity has since expanded 
into the domains of political control (Massumi, 2015), cybernetics and 
archives, world visualization and the production of the visual, 
technological media, and the algorithmic logic of computerized culture 
(Friedrich; Hoel, 2021). Specifically, it involves measuring, 
calculating, encoding, arranging, or distributing—or, more generally, 
optimizing and abstracting, spatializing and temporalizing, planetary 
scaling and calibrating—according to certain structures, rhythms, and 
operational principles that, due to their automatism, tend toward opacity.

Harun Farocki (2004), in an analysis that can be extended beyond the 
military uses of images that serve as his starting point, proposes the 
notion of operative/ghost images—images that do not represent an object 
but instead are part of an operation. Farocki refers to images whose 
primary function is to participate in operations of control, detection, 
inspection, measurement, geolocation, tracking, targeting, supervision, 
activation, etc., forming what he considers a visible unconscious 
produced by automatic eyes. These are images that have begun 
to do things in the world rather than merely reflecting images of those 
things or simply documenting them.

In the spectral exteriority implied by Farocki lies something that 
pertains not only to images but to the entire space of technical 
operations that precedes action and connects the very possibility of all 
subjectivities—a profane space situated outside, in a non-localized 
medialogical structure and a horizon of estrangement. Alterity traverses 
this structure, which is neither fully controlled nor representable, yet 
still insinuates surfaces of desire, power, aestheticization, deviation, 
and latent signification.

Amid possible ambivalences, it is nevertheless assumed that to think 
operativity is to think the quality of what becomes media, recognizing 
that it is media and their general operativity that constitute the 
conditions under which media and the real are themselves recognizable 
and thinkable.

We invite submissions that articulate approaches within media theory, 
visual studies, philosophy of technology, cybernetics, or contemporary 
artistic practices, addressing thematic possibilities such as:

  * Cultural techniques and operative ontologies in the context of
    materialist media theory and apparatus theories;
  * Military, cybernetic, and logistical genealogies of operativity;
  * Processual ontologies in posthuman thought;
  * Diagrams, tables, interfaces, and other forms of operative mediation;
  * Algorithmic visuality, software culture, and regimes of mediation;
  * The automation of archives;
  * The role of opacity, spectrality, and alterity in the mediated
    constitution of the visible;
  * Artistic and curatorial practices that expose or intervene in the
    operative logics of images and media.


Proposals may address these themes theoretically, historiographically, 
critically, or practically, including case studies, methodological 
reflections, or visual essays. No payment from the authors will be required.



*Deadline: June 2, 2025*


Decision communicated to authors: end of June


2nd round review and editing end of July


*Publication: September 2025*



Please find registration and submission information at 
https://revistas.ulusofona.pt/index.php/caleidoscopio/about/submissions 
<https://revistas.ulusofona.pt/index.php/caleidoscopio/about/submissions>


*About the Journal:*

<https://revistas.ulusofona.pt/index.php/caleidoscopio/management/settings/context#masthead>

Caleidoscopio – Revista de Comunicação e Cultura is the journal of the 
Communication Sciences Department of ECATI, Lusófona University. Founded 
in 2002, Caleidoscopio returns in early 2025 for its second series.

Open to publishing outstanding research in a wide range of topics within 
and on the margins of the communication 
sciences, Caleidoscopio specialises in critical approaches to 
communication and media technologies. With an interdisciplinary 
aim, Caleidoscopio operates at the crossroads of philosophy of 
communication, media theory, philosophy of technology, critical theory 
and aesthetics.

The journal has a special focus the intersection of communication, media 
and arts in contemporary societies – from the proliferation of visual 
culture and developments in the cultural industries to the 
aestheticization of politics and everyday life, from questions of the 
archive, materialities to virtualization and operational media – and 
welcomes contributions that address the implications of contemporary 
media aesthetics on the theorizing of communication itself.

Caleidoscopio aims to be a worldwide multi-lingual (English, Spanish, 
Portuguese, and French) open access high-standard platform for critical 
and speculative thinking in all areas it covers.



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