[Commlist] Call for Papers: Counteract: practices of artistic resistance, dissidence and furtivity | Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts

Call for Papers: Counteract: practices of artistic resistance, 
dissidence and furtivity

Deadline:  June 15th 2025

Guest Editors: Verónica Metello, PhD (Faculty of Letters – Coimbra 
University) and Prof. André Rangel, PhD (Faculty of Fine Arts – Porto 
University)

Submit here:

https://revistas.ucp.pt/index.php/jsta/announcement/view/91


We appeal to those who are the operators of dissident practices, to 
those who use dominant modes to affirm them as divergent, to those who 
resort to the common to unfold it in the singular, to those who 
incorporate and underline repetition to reveal it with the difference.

We call for the submission of essays that explore practices in the scope 
of performance art and theory, of new media and autonomous and 
alternative media that operate and focus on the creative power of 
dissident, resistant and furtive modes in shaping the world in the face 
of power and normativity.

In the post-digital Anthropocene in which we live, statistical 
probability and the economies of data and attention shape the emerging 
contemporary condition in which we live – a global, computational 
digital ecosystem updated by calculation – from ecology to society. In 
this reality subjugated to algorithmic bias and data dictatorship – 
which, as Meghna Jayanth states, “robs us of agency, time, self-esteem, 
connection and fosters addiction, dependence, hatred, fear, insecurity 
and even social and interpersonal violence” (Jayanth, 2021, as cited in 
Spies, 2024) – new “luddites” are needed:  who, in an attitude of 
Marcusian “great refusal”[1] are capable of reconfiguring the 
relationship with the instruments of calculation, surveillance, 
governance and arbitration of truth, using them as instruments of 
expression and emancipation.

In this present, of simultaneous temporalities in overlapping and 
repetitive iterative rhythms, we call on those involved in radical 
artistic and scientific practices and in cultural subversion to submit 
their contributions to this issue of JSTA.

As Achille Mbembe points out and Jonathan Crary describes, the current 
landscape of experience, in a world governed by the experience economy, 
operates in the tension between the living and the machines (Mbembe, 
2021; Crary, 2022). What Mbembe called brutalism [2] affects the entire 
set of fundamental relationships between human beings and the world. 
Furthermore, in a movement of assimilation, technology and its 
coincidence with media in the structuring spheres of life has become 
central, reconfiguring the “psychogeography” [3] of encounters, modes of 
presence, the articulation of subjectivity, mobilization and social 
emancipation. The social, the artistic and the political, digitally 
transmediated and mobilized by information capital (Sierra Caballero & 
Sola-Morales, 2021), is thus configured in a hyper-controlled network of 
relations (Stiegler, 2016) in which the capacity to create the 
conditions and the experiences of dissidence is formatted, conditioned 
and blocked by the means themselves (Crary, 2022).

At the intersection of art and politics, artivism conjures up dissident 
and furtive, powerful and political articulations, operating in a fluid 
and extensive space that makes minorities visible, imposing deviations, 
shaping subjectivities, empowering and creating alternatives. 
Dissidence, as José Miranda Justo shows, more than having a 
fundamentally discursive characteristic, is, above all things – 
political (Justo, 2021), operating with experimentation and the 
exploration of difference, evolving from a decentralized or minority 
perspective, in the face of dominant modes and forms of thought and action.

Artivism, Paulo Raposo defines, results from a porosity between art and 
politics, designing a plane of inscription where the imagination of 
alternatives and a consequent intervention in the world converge 
(Raposo, 2015 as cited in Raposo 2023).  In this regard, also the 
autonomous or alternative media operate as powerful vehicles of dissent 
and stealth, subverting the social order through appropriation, 
liberating the media and public space from the private domain. 
Autonomous media are defined by their openness – in terms of content and 
accession – and their goal is to amplify the voices of groups and 
individuals who do not normally have access to the media, involving them 
in the production and dissemination of contents (Langlois, & Dubois, 2005).

The furtive mode acts as a denormalization, designing strategies and 
modes of affirmation that are estranged to the exercise of power and 
norm, operating through a destabilization and reconfiguration of the 
relations and articulations of the conceptual, the sensitive and the 
aesthetic in experience. Cynthia Fleury and Antoine Fenoglio propose 
this concept as a formalization of a way of exfiltrating oneself from 
reality, creating alternative ways of inhabiting it (Fleury & Fenoglio, 
2022).

Given the urgency and the above coordinates, we intend to highlight the 
magmatic and political power of counteracting, bringing to the 
discussion and making visible exploratory, dissident, furtive and 
resistant theoretical and artistic practices in the scope of performance 
art, new media and autonomous alternative media, in a broad field that 
crosses:

Aesthetics
Archives, memory and resistance
Art and Experimentation
Art and New MediaArtivism
Communication – digital media, alternative media and nano-media as 
artistic means of dissent and resistance
Cybernetics
Data economy
Digital humanities
Divergent identities and exploratory subjectivities
Epistemic disobedience
Emergence
Experience and experimentation
Heterotopia
Ontology, identity and technology
Philosophy and anarchism
Political aesthetics
Political philosophy
Politics and ethics of care, Politics of reparation
Resistance, dissent and furtiveness
Studies of Experience


Notes

[1] Thomas Spies evokes the great refusal described by Herbert Marcuse 
as the radical practice that involves cultural subversion and recognizes 
the mark of social repression in traditional cultural expressions and 
technological progress. Following Marcuse's line of thought, Spies 
emphasizes that for cultural subversion to drive change, it must involve 
radical political practice. (Spies, 2024).

[2] “Concretamente, o brutalismo caracteriza-se pelo estreito 
entrelaçamento de várias figuras da razão: razão económica e 
instrumental, razão eletrónica e digital e razão neurológica e 
biológica. Baseia-se na profunda convicção de que o vivo e as máquinas 
deixaram de se distinguir. Em última instância, a matéria é a máquina 
dos nossos dias, o computador no seu mais amplo sentido, bem como o 
novo, o cérebro e toda a realidade numinosa” (Mbembe, 2022).

[3] “Psychogeography sets for itself the study of the precise laws and 
specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously 
organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals” (Debord, 
1981).

[4] “Artivismo pode ser pensado como um neologismo complexo e 
polissemântico que recobre uma vasta gama de práticas artísticas com 
foco político. A utilização de inúmeras linguagens e plataformas para 
explicitar, comentar e expressar visões do mundo e de produzir 
pensamento crítico, multiplica o espectro do artivismo a partir do qual 
é possível intervir poética e performativamente e construir espaços de 
comunicação e de opinião no campo político – arte de rua, ações diretas, 
performances, vídeo-arte, rádio, culture jamming, hacktivism, 
subvertising, arte urbana, manifestos e manifestações ou desobediência 
civil, entre outras” (Raposo, 2015, as cited in Raposo, 2023).

References

Crary, J. (2022). Scorched earth: Beyond digital age to a 
post-capitalist world. Verso.

Debord, G. (1981). Introduction to a critique of urban geography. In K. 
Knabb (Ed. & Trans.), Situationist International anthology (pp. 5–8). 
Bureau of Public Secrets.

Fleury, C., & Fenoglio, A. (2022). Charte du Verstholen: Ce qui ne peut 
être volé. Gallimard.

Jayanth. (2024, March 18). White protagonism and imperial pleasures in 
game design. Medium. 
https://medium.com/@betterthemask/white-protagonism-and-imperial-pleasures-in-game-design-digra21-a4bdb3f5583c

Langlois, A., & Dubois, F. (Eds.). (2005). Autonomous media: Activating 
resistance and dissent. Cumulus Press.

Mbembe, A. (2021). Brutalismo. Antígona.

Miranda Justo, J. (2021). Heterogeneity, Experimentation and Dissidence 
in a Contemporary Understanding of Philosophy. In J. Miranda Justo, E. 
M. de Sousa, & F. M. F. Silva (Eds.), Philosophy as experimentation, 
dissidence and heterogeneity (pp. 2-33). Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Raposo, P. (2023). Arte e política: O artivismo como linguagem e ação 
transformadora do mundo? Dossiê Mundos em Performance: Napedra 20 anos, 
8, e-202989. https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2525-3123.gis.2023.202989

Sierra Caballero, F., & Sola-Morales, S. (2021). El lugar de la cultura 
en la era del capitalismo cognitivo. Notas para una discusión sobre 
ciudadanía digital. Comunicación y Hombre, 17, 253–269. 
https://doi.org/10.32466/eufv-cyh.2021.17.591.253-269

Spies, T. (2024). The special laboratory of total refusal. In (un)real 
data  – ()real effects. Aksioma.

Stiegler, B. (2016). “Ars" and organological inventions in societies of 
hyper-control. Leonardo, 49(5), 480–484. 
https://doi.org/10.1162/LEON_a_01080


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