Deadline for full papers: 31 th December 2025

Submissions to be published in issue 39. Un-disciplinary (July 2026)

The guest editors of this node are Anca-Simona Horvath, Anna Nacher, Viola Rühse, and Morten Søndergaard.

This special issue invites discussion and inquiry that challenge, redefine, and theorise established disciplinary boundaries, and ways of knowing, doing, and seeing. Addressing today’s multi-dimensional crises — environmental, social, economic — requires engaging with complex entanglements that escape disciplined and disciplinary study. It is now widely accepted that holistic worldviews require us to unsettle standardized modes of knowledge production (Vermeulen and Keitsch, 2020). British artist and researcher Ian Biggs (2018) argues that our current disciplinary system is partly responsible for the crisis caused by the Anthropocene as it fails to engage with the planet as a complex whole. Therefore, the aim of this special issue is to add theoretical, conceptual, and empirical wealth to work that sits in-between established disciplinary traditions.


CALL FOR PAPERS

Today artists, designers and architects themselves have more interdisciplinary skills and collaboration between artistic or design-oriented work and science is increasingly popular and encouraged (Rogers 2022). This exchange and interaction has been recommended to promote creativity, inclusion, and even sustainability (Padmanabhan 2017). Nevertheless, the intersecting fields of art, design science and technology are still presented as different (and often separate) modes of inquiry and practice. They therefore require not only new ways of viewing and communicating but also special institutional support. Research in this hybrid area also requires interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary or even post- and un-disciplinary competencies. However, while all knowledge production can be understood as a cultural object, science and technology proper deal with ‘matters of fact’, whereas the arts (including design and architecture) deal also with ‘matters of concern’ (Latour, 2004). Yet critiques of such matters of fact, which emerged from the work of science and technology studies, have sometimes been weaponized and used against science, thus becoming unproductive. Following Donna Haraway’s (2016) call: “Alone, in our separate kinds of expertise and experience, we know both too much and too little, and so we succumb to despair or to hope, and neither is a sensible attitude”, we invite contributions that discuss productive ways of staying with the trouble in uncertain times through entangled, un-disciplined practices.

The focus of this special issue is on the various streams of knowledge transfer between art, architecture, design, and science and technology in their many facets. We invite researchers and practitioners (including collectives and communities of practice) in the emerging field of Art, Science and Technology Studies (aSTS) to present theoretical and conceptual reflections as well as case studies that sit at the intersections between art/design/architecture and science today or in the past.


Possible questions/topics include:

How is art, design and architecture influenced by science and technology and how do their modes of theory- and research-informed practice influence science and technology today? How do artists, architects, and designers utilize current technological advances in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and sensing technology, and how do they contribute to the development of such technologies? How can their engagement with genetics and biology contribute to sustainability? And how have scientists benefited from such collaborations? What impact have they had on the perception of scientific work and on critically engaging with it?

Has critical thinking been supported by these junctions of art and science? What interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, or even post- and un-disciplinary methodological frameworks are still missing and/or need to be further developed? Does this lead to a critical awareness of the limitations of science and creativity in other siloed fields? What challenges and new opportunities arise in relation to curating, archiving, communicating, and teaching about projects in the hybrid field of art and science? How can such communities of practice be institutionally supported, and what kind of power structures do they challenge? What special organizational aspects need to be considered?

Submission process

To submit an article, register an account on the Artnodes site and follow the submission instructions. You can review the author guidelines and submission checklist at https://artnodes.uoc.edu/about/submissions/

The originals must be submitted in editable electronic file form and must not exceed the 5,000 words (including all sections: abstract, keywords, conclusions, bibliography...).



Queries

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