estrema: interdisciplinary journal of humanities, a digital and open access journal from the Centre of Comparative Studies, at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon (CEComp-FLUL), has an open call for submissions for the 1st issue of its 5th volume, until June 9th 2026. The previous issue featured reflections around the theme of Speculative Fiction. In 2026, we are launching estrema’s first call for papers specifically oriented towards the potentialities of art and images in technical contemporaneity.

shooting
1. the action of filming or photographing a scene, film, etc.
2. the action or practice of shooting with a gun.
3. an occasion when something or someone is injured or killed with a gun.

Shooting images may refer to the practice of creating objects and ideas, launching them into the world as cries of resistance and revolution. At the same time, it may refer to an act of power and control, triggered by more or less violent processes of seeing and showing. In fact, it is perhaps by producing and looking at images that wars are waged and the trenches of a polarised world defined. Simultaneously, the technics themselves “shoot” at art and images, distancing them from an ontology exclusively tied to the mysteries of representation. Inhabiting assemblages between human and machine, visible and invisible, error and system, hack and code, contemporary art and images emerge as territories of tension—lines of fault and territorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) through which the dispositifs that shape the present become perceptible.

To think about the image’s violence , then, is to think about its presence in current warfare technologies, as part of automatic systems of perception, analysis, and destruction. These operational images—to employ a term coined by Harun Farocki in his installation Eye/Machine (2000–2003), which includes images from American missile cameras during the Gulf War—are images that act rather than represent, being devoid of any meaningful social purpose. Concealed between the lines of binary code, these images are not always visible to the human eye since many are made by machines for machines.

Furthermore, contemporary visual violence also concerns the way in which the conditions of image production and consumption affect, move and exhaust us. Reflecting mainly on social networks and the marketisation of the symbolic, perhaps no image truly escapes the jaws of capital, circulating in a system that exploits and reifies human attention and cognition (Berardi 2009; Crary 2013). Today, it is the very violence of images—and not just violent, strong, historicised images (Groys 2010)—that strike us. Images kill.

At the same time that it kills, however, the image finds itself in a terminal state. If the illusion of art was the miraculous representation of the absent, this illusion is interrupted in contemporary times. Art and image no longer exist as such, because they mediate nothing (or everything), becoming too transparent, too real (or hyperreal) (Baudrillard 1991; 2005). Considering the countless masterpieces stored in freeports, far from public and cultural view (Steyerl 2015; Backsell 2025), perhaps art persists above all as a financial asset—image and mediation of capital.

The failure of the dispositif can be seen as a possibility for dissent. Beyond artivism, artistic movements such as Glitch Art work precisely with dispositifs’ faults and errors, that is, with what lies hidden somewhere between input and output. By embracing error as aesthetic material, these practices call into question the quest for absolute cybernetic control and the production of increasingly homeostatic representations. Image and visuality thus become territories where the ideal of technological perfection is simultaneously desired (for its artificial strangeness) and undesired (for its sterility). Rosa Menkman’s work (2011) addresses precisely this glitch aesthetic, suggesting how malfunction can expose the hidden materiality of digital systems and open up space for an immanent critique of image technologies.

Malfunction acquires an algorithmic dimension when transferred to the field of artificial intelligence, as exemplified by the work of Sougwen Chung, particularly the series Drawing Operations (2019). In these artworks, the artist develops machine-learning systems trained on her own archive of drawings, enabling the machine to learn and reproduce patterns of her painting gestures. This human-machine collaboration, however, is structured precisely through the deviations that emerge between the artist’s intention and the system’s predictions. Error appears as a difference between the human trace and its algorithmic modelling, highlighting both the limits of machine learning and the singularity of the human gesture.

Finally, the emergence of the internet as the most extensive and accessible space for archiving and reproducing images reveals itself to be rich in potential, challenging the traditional place of museums and permanent art collections (Groys 2022) furthermore giving rise to dissident visualities, such as “weak signs” (2010) and “poor images” (Steyerl 2009). However, the piece Medusa Head (2017), by Kurdish-Iranian artist Morehshin Allahyari, reminds us that such dissidences must be considered in light of the problems of digital archiving as well as reproduction. Based on the iconoclasm of the Islamic State, Medusa Head consists of a reproduction of an Iraqi Medusa head shot by IS with an AK-47. Transforming this reproduction into a hard drive with numerous images related to the destruction of the original, accessible to anyone, Allahyari suggests that Medusa’s gaze, once petrifying, is now blinded and paralysed by the saturating weapons of archival cyberspace, by the death of art and image as they once were, by digital colonialism and by the hypermediation of war.

In a context where the symbolic is progressively assimilated by algorithmic infrastructures that anticipate desire, we are witnessing the risk of a collapse of shared sensibility, resulting in profound symbolic and political misery (Stiegler 2018; Rancière 2019). Thus, it becomes urgent to raise, once again, the question: what can art and images still do? What is the role of contemporary archives and curatorship? And finally, as W. J. T. Mitchell (2006) asks, what do images want and what agency do they possess?

estrema welcomes contributions from students and academics alike interested in critically rethinking art and images in technical contemporaneity, focusing on the following possible, although not exclusive, themes:

- Art and Technology
- Aesthetics and Politics
- Art History
- Image Theory
- Image and Capitalism
- Technological Violence
- Media and Digital Culture
- Creation and Revolution
- Prediction, Algorithm and Failure
- Archive, Museum and Curatorship
- Media Ecology
- Cyborg Bodies

Submission deadline: June 9th 2026

Notification of acceptance for peer review: by August 2026

Submission email: estrema.cecomp@letras.ulisboa.pt

Languages: Portuguese and English


All submissions must be sent exclusively to the email provided and must include the author’s full name, email address, academic affiliation, ORCID code (if applicable) and a short biographical note (maximum of 100 words).

Submissions should be formatted in Times New Roman, size 12, with 1.5 spacing, and must be between 4,000 and 7,000 words (including footnotes and references). Page numbering, indexing, and/or any other form of automated formatting are not permitted. All citations and references must follow the Author-Date system of The Chicago Manual of Style: 17th Edition.

It is essential that all submissions adhere to the Author Guidelines, available here. Submissions that do not comply with these guidelines will be rejected without further comment.


References
Allahyari, Morehshin. 2017. Medusa Head. 3D printed sandstone and electronic components, 22.9 x 28.6 x 8.9 cm. Kunsthalle Mannheim. https://morehshin.com/material-speculation-isis.
Backsell, Jessica. 2025. Provoking the Freeport Magic: Art Assemblage in Late Capitalism. Sternberg Press.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1991. Simulacros e Simulação. Translated by Maria João da Costa Pereira. Relógio D’Água.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1995. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Translated by Paul Patton. Indiana University Press.
Baudrillard, Jean. 2005. The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, edited by Sylvère Lotringer. Translated by Ames Hodges. Semiotext(e).
Belting, Hans. 2011. An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. Translated by Thomas R. Dunlap. Princeton University Press.
Berardi, Franco “Bifo”. 2009. Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-alpha Generation. Translated by Arianna Bove, Erik Empson, Michael Goddard, Giuseppina Mecchia, Antonella Schintu e Steve Wright. Minor Compositions.
Berardi, Franco “Bifo”. 2011. “Time, Acceleration, and Violence.” e-flux Journal (27): 31–5. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/27/67999/time-acceleration-and-violence.
Carrière, Ulysse. 2024. Technically Man Dwells Upon This Earth. Becoming.
Chung, Sougwen. 2019. Drawing Operations. Co-creations. At the Expression Gallery in Singapore’s ArtScience Museum.
Crary, Jonathan. 2013. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Verso Books.
Deleuze, Gilles, e Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minnesota University Press.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2017. Diante do tempo: História da arte e anacronismo das imagens. Translated by Luís Lima. Orfeu Negro.
Farocki, Harun, dir. 2000–2003. Eye/Machine I, II e III. Video Data Bank. Video, 00:25:00.
Groys, Boris. 2010. “The Weak Universalism.” e-flux Journal (15): 3–12. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/15/.
Groys, Boris. 2022. Arte em Fluxo. Translated by Pedro Elói Duarte. Orfeu Negro.
Haraway, Donna J. 2016. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Manifestly Haraway. University of Minnesota Press.
Menkman, Rosa. 2011. The Glitch Moment(um). Institute of Network Cultures.
Mitchell, W. J. T. 2006. What Do Pictures Want? The University of Chicago Press.
Mouffe, Chantal. 2013. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. Verso Books.
Kunst, Bojana. 2015. Artist at Work: Proximity of Art and Capitalism. Zero Books.
Paić, Žarko. 2021. Aesthetics and the Iconoclasm of Contemporary Art: Pictures Without a World. Springer.
Parikka, Jussi. 2023. Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual. University of Minnesota Press.
Rancière, Jacques. 2019. Estética e Política. Translated by Vanessa Brito. KKYM.
Sbordoni, Alessandro. 2025. Semiotics of the End: Essays on Capitalism & the Apocalypse. Becoming.
Steyerl, Hito. 2009. “In Defense of the Poor Image.” e-flux Journal (10): 86–92. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/.
Steyerl, Hito. 2015. “Duty-Free Art.” e-flux Journal (63): 24–41. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/63.
Stiegler, Bernard. 2018. Da Miséria Simbólica: I. a era hiperindustiral. Translated by Luís Lima. Orfeu Negro.
Tello, Andrés Maximiliano. 2018. Anarchivismo: Tecnologías políticas del archivo. La cebra.
Virilio, Paul. 2007. The Original Accident. Translated by Julie Rose. Polity.