Performative Imaging: Post-Digital Medialities in Contemporary Moving Image Practices
A special issue of Arts (ISSN 2076-0752).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 May 2026 | Viewed by 111
Special Issue Editors
Interests: philosophy and history of technology; contemporary, performance, and media arts
Interests: audiovisual artistic practices; performance; documentary practices; post-digital culture; post- and decolonial theory
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The development of post-digital practices has accentuated the operational dimensions of moving images. In their banality, media objects such as graphic user interfaces and virtual environments invite us to look past screens and reflect on the uses of imaging beyond a means of representation. Images are increasingly becoming gestures to make, places to inhabit, and tools to manipulate. This shift signals a turn toward complex modalities of performative imaging, where images do not merely depict, but actively do stuff, enabling cultural vocabularies that intertwine different approaches to space, subjectivity, and experience. As such, images constitute major socio-connective and creative devices that reconfigure the participation of artists, audiences, and other technological actors in legacy artforms while giving rise to new ones.
This Special Issue invites articles that explore instances of this phenomenon from various angles, covering the use and aesthetics of multimedia installations, online and offline performances, computer movies, programming languages, artificial agents, immersive worlds, videogames, and other interactive media from both artistic and curatorial angles. We particularly welcome contributions attentive to embodied, material, and decolonial perspectives, sensorial and epistemic diversification, data sovereignty, and marginalized subjects.
We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the Guest Editors (gabriel.menotti@gmail.com) or to the Arts editorial office (arts@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.
Dr. Gabriel Menotti
Dr. Cornelia Lund
Dr. Ana Carvalho
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Arts is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- performance
- installation
- moving image
- embodiment
- participation
- environmental
- spatiality
- post-digital
- archives
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