[Commlist] Call for papers: 4.0 Interface

Call for papers: 4.0 Interface
Soapbox Journal for Cultural Analysis

View the call on our website: 
https://www.soapboxjournal.net/page/call-for-papers-interface 
<https://www.soapboxjournal.net/page/call-for-papers-interface>

For the upcoming issue of Soapbox, a graduate peer-reviewed journal for 
cultural analysis, we invite young researchers and established scholars 
alike to submit academic essays or creative work that critically engages 
with the theme of interface. We are inviting extended proposals 
(500-1000 words) that follow the MLA formatting and referencing style to 
be submitted to (submissions /at/ soapboxjournal.net) 
<mailto:(submissions /at/ soapboxjournal.net)> by December 5th, 2021.

An interface is a space of contact and interconnection. Thinking within 
but also beyond a media studies framework, we can understand our lives 
to be constantly mediated by interfaces of one form or another. They can 
be understood to serve as an intermediary between individuals and 
cultural objects, or alternatively, between experience and 
infrastructure. Interfaces mediate between a body and its environment, 
the private and public, subject and object. In each instance, the 
interface enables interaction and activity. Consider the movement from 
print to digital media, the structural design of spaces and buildings, 
or the format of an academic paper: as we move through the world we 
encounter and interact with a range of interfaces that delineate the 
possibilities of experience and knowledge in profound ways. As such, 
interfaces are cultural as well as political: they connect us to a 
matrix of histories and structures while their imbrication in power can 
afford and advance the needs of one group at the expense of another.

WITHIN AND BEYOND A DEFINITION

Interface (noun/verb)
in·ter·face |  \ ˈin-tər-ˌfās \

[Mediation]
In a highly mediated world, the most immediate image of an interface is 
as a programmed screen or device that facilitates a connection between a 
real-time user and a digital non-user. Media ecologist Marshall McLuhan 
describes the interface as a place of interaction between two systems 
(1967). In computing, a mediator pattern defines an object in such a way 
as to establish a behavioural directive for its interaction with other 
objects. In each case, the interface becomes a site of communication and 
interaction, but also the boundary that differentiates bodies, spaces, 
and phases.

We invite you to think through and beyond the somatechnic view of the 
interface, allowing perspectives that explore the material, aesthetic, 
affective, and political dimensions of the interfaces that give shape to 
contemporary experience.

[Affect and Materiality]
Interfaces mediate the aesthetic experience of cultural objects. Turning 
our focus towards the materiality of the written page, a digitised book, 
the cinema screen, or a streaming service, can inflect our reading of 
their content and our responses in illuminating ways. Affective 
experiences and attachments, for example, are intimately tied up with 
the materiality of these interfaces. Historicising these entanglements, 
we can ask, how are affective attachments to interfaces disrupted by 
medial changes (Pressman)? And how and why do we form attachments to 
some interfaces and not others (Felski)?

[Infrastructure and il/literacies]
Interfaces connect us to infrastructures and systems: front desks, 
government websites, a border checkpoint. In these instances, the 
interface acts as a threshold, and questions of access, dependence, and 
trust arise. Who can become adept at interacting with interfaces and by 
what means? How does the connection between interface and infrastructure 
shape the routes we take, and the experiences we make? Relatedly, 
il/literacies with interfaces are central to the formation of political 
communities. The role of the book and the newspaper in the emergence of 
nationalism provides a historic example (Anderson). Contemporary 
interfaces are thus entangled with local, national and global 
(pre-)formations in complex ways.

[Sense and ecology]
The touch of a palm on damp grass, the sounds of typing on a keyboard, 
the taste of something sweet at the tip of your tongue: what is the 
interface and what is becoming interfaced? These are questions that are 
at once ethical and political. Amanda Boetzkes draws attention to the 
inevitable aporia that exists between the elemental world and the 
representational frameworks that we bring to it. This symbolic world is 
also necessarily material in its implications, and thinking through the 
interface allows us to probe the kind of relationships that we have 
constructed towards the elemental. How to move away from an 
incorporative logic that constructs "nature" as mere "tap" (resources) 
and "sink" (waste) (Moore)? Artistic practices that create "receptive 
surfaces" provide one such example of an ethical turn towards the 
elemental that aims to acknowledge and uphold fundamental alterity 
(Boetzkes).

We encourage submissions relating to the themes above, as well as, but 
not limited to, the following:

● Engagements with cultural objects that critically explore the concept 
of the interface.
● Reflections on the interconnections between genre, narrative modes, 
and the aesthetic experience enabled by different interfaces.
● Platforms and streaming services: economic imperatives and aesthetic 
possibilities.
● Il/literacies, agency, and the politics of access.
● The interface as a verb: what does it mean to interface with space, 
others, the world, and beyond?
● Engagements with social interface theory and German media theory 
(Kittler et al.)
● Meaning-making and translatability: the interface as a vessel for signs.
● Epistemology and/of the interface: the interface as a hermeneutic tool.
● Interfaces and perception of self/identity formation.
● Biometrics and technology in border and domestic policing.
● Interfaces in contemporary work environments and labour practices.
● Interfaces in architecture, design, and AI.
● Knowledge production and interdisciplinarity.
● Devices, screen culture and history.
● Remediation.

We invite extended proposals (500-1000 words) that follow the MLA 
formatting and referencing style to be submitted to 
(submissions /at/ soapboxjournal.com) <mailto:(submissions /at/ soapboxjournal.com)> 
by December 5th 2021. Following conditional acceptance, an initial draft 
version (3000 words) would be due two weeks after the acceptance email. 
The editing process will take place over winter and early spring 2022. 
Editing and peer review guidelines will be sent to authors individually 
upon acceptance of their submission. No payment from authors will be 
required. If you have any questions regarding your submission, do not 
hesitate to contact us.

Guidelines for creative submissions are more flexible and can be 
finished works, but please keep in mind spatial limitations: there is 
usually room for one longer or two shorter pieces in the print version. 
A sense of the formatting possibilities can be garnered from previous 
issues (open-access pdf versions are available on our website).

We also accept submissions for our website all year round. We encourage 
a variety of styles and formats, including short-form essays (around 
2000 words), reviews, experimental writing, and multimedia. These can 
engage with the theme of the upcoming issue but are not limited to it. 
Please get in touch to pitch new ideas or existing projects that you 
would like to have published by reading our submission guidelines and 
filling in the form.

Soapbox Journal website: www.soapboxjournal.net 
<http://www.soapboxjournal.net>

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and 
Spread of Nationalism. Verso Books, 1983.

Boetzkes, Amanda. The Ethics of Earth Art. University of Minnesota 
Press, 2010.

Felski, Rita. Hooked: Art and Attachment. University of Chicago Press, 2020.

McLuhan, Marshall, Quentin Fiore, and Jerome Agel. The Medium Is the 
Massage. Bantam Books, 1967.

Moore, Jason. Capitalism in the Web of Life. Verso Books, 2015.

Pressman, Jessica. Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age. Columbia 
University Press. 2020.

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