Ornament Now: Re-Thinking Ornament in Art, Philosophy, and Everyday Life

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue, ‘Ornament Now: Re-Thinking Ornament in Art, Philosophy, and Everyday Life’, continues and expands upon the recent scholarly work re-examining ornament as a philosophical, aesthetic, and social concept (Fišerová and Mácha 2025 & 2026). This Special Issue invites artists, architects, theorists, and historians to explore ornament as a dynamic principle that structures aesthetic, social, and material life across periods and media.

In this new conception, ornament is no longer a derivative embellishment, but rather a generative process of articulation that joins aesthetic form with social rhythm and affective life. Ornament is understood as an immanent rhythm, that is, a movement of thought and matter that connects individual and collective becomings. It is a material sign of relation rather than separation, a mode of thinking that operates through pattern, resonance, and return. Such a view displaces the classical hierarchy between structure and surface: ornament is not an excess added to form, but rather the very principle through which form becomes expressive, social, and world-constituting. As a ruminative and rhythmic activity, ornament manifests how repetition sustains both aesthetic composition and communal life.

Rather than treating ornament as a mere decorative surplus, this Special Issue approaches it as a mode of thinking in form: a performative and rhythmic articulation of relation, territory, and desire. Ornament appears here not only as an aesthetic category, but also as a medium of thought, social practice, and mode of repetition that traverses visual culture, architecture, and the everyday. This Special Issue therefore aims to reclaim ornament as a form of critical imagination, that is, a site where aesthetic autonomy meets ethical and ecological interdependence.

Topics of Interest

We welcome theoretical and practice-based contributions addressing, but not limited to, the following areas:

• Theories of ornament and repetition: Contemporary re-readings of Loos, Kracauer, Freud, or Deleuze (cf. Vrahimis 2021, Fišerová 2025a).
• Ornament and social form: From ritual repetition in subcultures to algorithmic patterning (cf. Fišerová 2025a, Lee 2025).
• Digital and parametric ornament: Computation, AI, and generative design (cf. Mácha 2025).
• Ornament and ecology: Vegetal, mineral, and animal architectures; interspecies cohabitation, environmental aspects of symbiosis and sympoesis, “bio-ornament”.
• Gender, identity, and ornament: Queer, intercultural, and postcolonial perspectives; simulation, imitation, and mimicry.
• Ornament and the everyday: Craft, ritual, and domestic aesthetics; care and cultivation; taming and training (cf. Fišerová and Lee 2025; Fišerová, 2005b, Sluková 2026).
• Continental, primarily phenomenological, poststructuralist, and deconstructive approaches to ornament: Arche-writing, spectre, iteration, (de)territorialization (cf. Fišerová 2025a, 2026b, Lee 2025, Sluková 2026).
• Analytic approaches to ornament: Exploring ornament through the lens of analytic aesthetics, philosophy of art, and conceptual analysis (cf. Metzger 2026).
• Delimitation, rhythm and territory: The ethical and political dimensions of ornamental behaviour, inclusion and exclusion, hospitality and hostility (cf. Fišerová 2024a, 2024b, 2026a).
• Cross-cultural ornament: Non-Western and hybrid approaches to decoration and form.
• Ornament between construction, destruction, and repair: Order and chaos, (de)composition, questions of recycling and sustainability (cf. Fišerová 2025a, Fišerová and Lee 2025).

The editors invite contributions that blur the boundaries between theory and practice, encouraging experimental visual essays, artist statements, and cross-disciplinary reflections alongside traditional research articles.

References

Ahani, Fatemeh, and Iraj Etessam. “The Distinction of Ornament and Decoration in Architecture.” Journal of Arts and Humanities 6, no. 5 (2017): 25-34.

Casey, Christine. “Surface Value: Ways of Seeing Decoration in Architecture.” Journal of the European Architectural History Network (2021). https://journal.eahn.org/article/id/7630.

Chapman, A. G. “Ornament and Distraction.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 51, no. 1 (2017): 1-13.

Fišerová, Michaela, and Jakub Mácha, eds. Thinking in Ornaments: Gilles Deleuze on Territoriality and Repetition. Special issue of Deleuze and Guattari Studies 19, no. 1 (2025). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Fišerová, Michaela, and Jakub Mácha, eds. Metaphysics and Aesthetics of Decoration: Ornamental Thinking. London and New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2026.

Fišerová, Michaela. “Kant and Derrida: Two Ethical Ornaments of Peace.” Studia Philosophica Kantiana. 13, No. 2, pp. 157-178, 2, 2024 (a).

Fišerová, Michaela. “Outsiders or Insiders? John Berger and the Ethical Reframing of Animals." Visual Resources. 38, No. 1, pp. 87-99, 2024 (b).

Fišerová, Michaela. “Composing and Decomposing: A Deleuzian Account of Ornamental Repetition.” Deleuze and Guattari Studies 19, no. 1 2025 (a).

Fišerová, Michaela. “Ornamental Gardening: Idioms of "Cultivation" in Derrida’s Reading of Kant.” In Fišerová, Michaela, Adrian Kvokačka, eds. Posthuman Aesthetics. Special issue of ESPES, forthcoming 2025 (b).

Fišerová, Michaela, and Lenka Lee. “Gilles Deleuze and Everyday Aesthetics: Ornamental Repetition as a Means of Maintaining Everyday Territories.”, Culture and Dialogue, forthcoming 2025.

Fišerová, Michaela. “Truth in Ornament. Aesthetics of Repetition between Derrida and Kierkegaard.” In Fišerová, Michaela, Jakub Mácha, eds. Metaphysics and Aesthetics of Decoration: Ornamental Thinking. London and New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2026 (a).

Fišerová, Michaela. “Decorum in Interspecies Communication: Hume, Deleuze, and Becoming-Ornament.” In Fišerová, Michaela, Jakub Mácha, eds. Metaphysics and Aesthetics of Decoration: Ornamental Thinking. London and New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2026 (b).

Glăveanu, Vlad Petre. “The Function of Ornaments: A Cultural Psychological Exploration.” Culture & Psychology 20, no. 1 (2014): 82-101.

Mácha, Jakub. “The Mimesis of Difference: A Deleuzian Study of Generative AI in Artistic Production.” Contemporary Aesthetics, Special Volume 13 (2025). Published July 14, 2025. https://contempaesthetics.org/2025/07/14/the-mimesis-of-difference-a-deleuzian-study-of-generative-ai-in-artistic-production/.

Metzger, Vanda. “Ornament as Conceptual Form: Analytic Aesthetics and the Limits of Decoration.” In Fišerová, Michaela, Jakub Mácha, eds. Metaphysics and Aesthetics of Decoration: Ornamental Thinking. London and New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2026.

Necipoğlu, Gülru, and Alina Payne, eds. Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.

Sluková, Tereza. “Crafting an Ornament: On the Craft Emancipation Myth.” In Fišerová, Michaela, Jakub Mácha, eds. Metaphysics and Aesthetics of Decoration: Ornamental Thinking. London and New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2026.

Vrahimis, Andreas. “Wittgenstein, Loos, and the Critique of Ornament.” Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics 58 (2021): 5-27.

Prof. Dr. Jakub Mácha
Guest Editor

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• ornamentation
• repetition
• rhythm
• material culture
• architecture
• craft
• digital design
• ecology
• assemblage
• everyday aesthetics
• affect
• pattern
• bio-art