Call for Papers — Dispozitiv, Issue 2

The call remains open until the issue is filled. The print and electronic editions are scheduled for publication in December 2026.

Issue theme: Aesthetics of Uncertainty in Transition

A time of change is a time of uncertainty, but it is equally a field of potential, particularly during transitional periods when established norms lose their regulative force while new modes of action have not yet assumed their form. Uncertainty is not a condition that art encounters only today; it has been a constitutive element of numerous artistic practices for several centuries.

Nonetheless, rapid technological development and its penetration into nearly every domain of knowledge, alongside global socio-economic shifts, are modifying communicative models, the conditions for the generation of knowledge, and the field of artistic activity itself. When linear models of progress cease to be persuasive as the dominant framework, less accepted or newly established practices acquire fresh relevance. Digital infrastructures and algorithms are a concrete example of this tension: they simultaneously enable visibility and institute new forms of control and extraction, transforming the conditions of visibility, distribution, and operation of artistic practices. The uncertainties at work here are diverse and interwoven, encompassing instabilities of knowledge, of the subject, of the body, of identity, of modes of experience, as well as instabilities of institutions and of normative values.

Visual art is a domain in which social processes are articulated, but it is also a discursive field within which change is conceptualised, anticipated, and given form. The boundaries of art have historically been permeable, fluid, and continually expanding, and the field of art keeps widening. It is precisely through this dynamic of permeability that art has, within its own system, already articulated many problems that only later become visible elsewhere, including questions of authorship as well as the spiritual, symbolic, and transcendental dimensions of experience that are exhausted neither by materialist nor by semiotic frameworks.

Although the theme of uncertainty is today more frequently in the focus of literary theory and film, and although the concept of the security dispositive (dispositif de sécurité) was elaborated within the genealogy of power by Michel Foucault as early as the late 1970s, we borrow the notion of uncertainty from social theory for the purposes of writing about art in order to better understand the present moment. Here we link the concept to technological breakthroughs and socio-economic changes, that is, to the transitional processes these changes set in motion, and we pose the question of their implications for art.

For instance, the historical avant-gardes emerged a hundred years ago from deep social, political, and economic fissures, alongside a crisis within art and representation themselves. Throughout the past century, uncertainty remained an important generator of artistic innovations: from art informel and abstract expressionism, through neo-avant-garde, conceptual, performative, body-art, and participatory practices and event-based work, to post-internet and AI art. We do not reduce these practices to a single model but consider them historically distinct articulations of destabilisation, thereby opening an interpretative framework for formulating the theme of aesthetics of uncertainty today. We begin with those forms of uncertainty that have manifested themselves in art through existential crisis, through the destabilisation of the traditional art object and the status of the work, and through the crises of representation, of art institutions, of social relations, and of political representation. The contemporary conditions of technological breakthrough, ecological precarity, and the instability of the boundaries between the organic and the non-human, between the original and the generated, additionally open new zones of uncertainty.

Uncertainty in art is understood here not only as a theme or as a consequence of social, political, and technological change, but also as an aesthetic principle that shapes forms, procedures, and regimes of experience. The thematic issue dedicated to aesthetics of uncertainty raises the question of the configuration of the present moment and of the conditions for the emergence of new practices, as well as the approaches by which they might be understood and interpreted.

Nadežda Elezović, editor of the thematic issue and author of the introduction, with regard to the proposals received

Topics

The call is open for theoretical, critical, and practice-based research contributions and essays articulating the poetics and aesthetics of uncertainty through, but not limited to, the following thematic areas:

• Alternative models; communality, ritual and symbolic experience, the post-secular in art, art and utopia, futurity and imaginative projections of the future
• Art in the age of the prompt: AI in artistic production, generative systems, the automation of image and text, and shifts in the status of authorship
• Analysis, interpretation, and exegesis of art in the age of the prompt: text generation, the question of authorship, and the epistemological and methodological consequences
• Art as a processual system, open to continuous change and expansion, to destabilisations and shifts of meaning, to perpetual emergence and response
• The widening of the discourse of art in a time of transition and uncertainty
• The destabilisation of normative constraints, representational models, and regimes of (in)visibility
• Institutional uncertainty and the destabilisation of knowledge: museums, academies, the market, and criticism, together with changes in the regimes of legitimation, value, and visibility
• Epistemological uncertainty: art as a production of knowledge, artists' theories, discursive practices, the crisis of expertise, and narratives concerning the dimensions and the reverse sides of reality
• Ethical, affective, and experiential dimensions of art in the context of uncertainty
• The transformative and generative potentials of uncertainty: uncertainty as a space for the creation of new forms of knowledge, communality, and action
• Media and aesthetic transformations: new tools, hybrid media, the status of traditional formats and criteria, and the reach of the new
• Processual and formal uncertainty: relational strategies, participatory and collective practices, distributed authorship, new models of artistic production (datasets, software, user inputs), and artistic research
• Ecological and technological uncertainty, digital infrastructures, algorithms, and new forms of surveillance and control
• Art and techno-feudalism: digital platforms, the circulation of data, algorithmic governance, and new forms of power

Manuscript submission

Papers in Croatian or English are submitted online via the OJS (Open Journal Systems) platform. Submissions are made by registering and logging in to OJS at https://pub.apuri.com.hr/. Authors are required to enclose, alongside their paper, a cover letter declaring that the work is original and unpublished and that it is not under consideration for publication in any other journal.

Review process

All submitted papers undergo double-blind peer review. Reviewers are experts in the field of the article, and their identity is not disclosed to the authors.

Ethical guidelines

Authors are required to adhere to ethical guidelines for research and publication. Any paper found to be plagiarised or to fall short of ethical standards will be rejected.

Papers submitted for publication in the journal are considered to be original and previously unpublished, and not to have been submitted for review to any other journal. Authors are responsible for the content of their work, including the accuracy of data and the procurement of any permissions necessary for publishing specific data, images, attachments, and other materials subject to copyright.

Contact

For further information and inquiries, please contact the editorial board at dispozitiv@apuri.uniri.hr or visit our website at https://apuri.uniri.hr/casopis-dispozitiv/.