[Commlist] CFP: Vol. 1 No. 2: The sleep of digital reason? Dreaming of a creative machine in the age of AI

Call for papers.

*CFP: Vol. 1 No. 2: The sleep of digital reason? Dreaming of a creative 
machine in the age of AI
*
Deadline: January 05, 2026.


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:
When Francisco Goya etched "El sueño de la razón produce monstruos" 
(1799), he warned that reason's slumber is far from being ordered and 
predictable. But what is the folly and ignorance today that dreams about 
algorithmic rationalities and creative machines? By AI's ambiguous 
statistical relationship with rationalities today, large language models 
emerge as new monsters from old dreams of creative machines, not through 
the abandonment of logic, but through their hyperrational and often 
hyperrealistic aesthetic excess and codified automated writing.
These computationally generated synthetic "creatures", or what some 
refer to as haunted media (Sconce, 2000), are trained on a vast array of 
humanity's textual and cultural archives, as well as digital traces. 
This includes images, sounds, voices, social interactions, gestures, and 
various forms of art, literature, and cinema, along with transmedial 
hauntological data (Blackman, 2019). Despite this extensive training, 
these entities understand nothing; they generate hyper-realistic and 
hyper-personalised fictions with statistical certainty.
What results is a manifestation that could resemble thought, existing 
strangely between consciousness and the non-conscious, producing "dumb 
meaning" (Bajohr, 2023) or "mean images" (Steyerl, 2023). These 
creations facilitate dialogue between human and non-human encounters and 
lead to paradoxical productions of artefacts without a clear author 
(Irmak, 2024) and forms of authorship that exist independent of 
traditional authors.
This special issue will examine these medial shadows of reality and 
rational monsters of automated writing—whether genuine entities or mere 
accumulations of masks—exploring their genealogies, infrastructures, 
and transformative effects on literary and media culture and inside 
(generative) media arts and philosophy. We invite scholarship that 
explores fundamental questions about authorship, —including script and 
screenwriting, creativity, and literary and other forms of artistic 
production processes through rigorous theoretical frameworks, empirical 
analysis, and/or critical reflection on the implications of AI for 
literary and media culture.

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

- Hauntological machines and operational genealogies from 
characteristica universalis to contemporary Large Language Models and 
multimodal architectures;
- Generativity and its shadows
- The author mask & AI ghostwriters
- Cybernetic infrastructures of hyperrational monsters: statistical 
dispositifs beyond the slumber of reason in media theory;
- Transmedial archives and spectral traces in AI training corpora: 
images, voices, gestures as computational substrates;
- Stakes, substrates, and platforms: material conditions of algorithmic 
reasoning in media arts and automated writing;
- Tokenization as media infrastructure: technical encodings, linguistic 
bias, and computational constraints;
- From discourse networks to connectionist paradigms: media 
archaeological excavations of "machinic" epistemic ruptures;
- Performative mediation and medial negativity in automated writing 
systems and generative media arts;
- Machine ecologies and hypophenomenal temporalities versus human 
slowness and pensiveness;
- Dialogue versus AI soliloquy: the absence of intercorporeal presence 
in generative systems;
- Media archaeological approaches to cybernetic poetry from early 
computer art to contemporary neural models;
- Arte(f)actors artefacts without author  and operational images in 
multimodal AI: media theoretical perspectives on doing versus showing;
- Media arts interventions exposing machinic epistemologies in 
contemporary generative experiments.


Call for papers: until 5 January 2026

Decision communicated to authors: February

2nd round review and editing: end of March

Publication: April 2026


Issue Editors: José Gomes Pinto (Lusófona University) and Alexander 
Gerner(Lusófona University)


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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