HUB Open Call #3: Metabolic Media

Issue #3 / Autumn 2024

Theme: Metabolic Media

Guest Editors: Louise Carver and Jamie Allen.
Submission deadline: April 30, 2024

For the next Autumn issue of HUB, we are interested in broadening the understanding of METABOLIC MEDIA through the launch of this open call. We invite you to think about artistic, scientific, research and technological practices that consider how we show, communicate, store, transmit, analyse and experience metabolic information, as well as how these processual phenomena are taken up by creative practitioners in media, art and design.

Both media and metabolism, as epistemological categories, allow for the conflation of the signified and asignified, creating lines of engagement between the biological lifeworlds of earthly beings and their technological intermediations, as these increasingly co-constitute one another. Metabolising media, or media metabolics (Geraldine Juárez), is an inversion that serves as a way of rendering palpable the messy, domestic, seeping, oozing organic materiality flows directed and unsuccessfully dominated by technoscience (Hannah Landecker, Desiree Foerster).

Metabolic media likewise takes into consideration ongoing ‘logistical’ (Ned Rositter), ‘elemental’ (J. D. Peters, Wickberg & Gärdebo), ‘geological’ (Jussi Parikka), ‘thermal’ (Nicole Starosielski), ‘economic’ (Harold Innis, Herman Daly) studies of media, infrastructure and nature.

In the context of shifting, strained or even pathological metabolic relations across scales, forms, zones and bodies, we ask after projects, reflections and interventions at the intersection of media and metabolic flows, systems and processes.

  • What are the tools we have used to characterise metabolism through individual, collective, urban structures, nation-states and planetary scales?
  • How best to creatively intervene in, analyse and account for the repercussions that media bring to metabolic regimes?
  • What kinds of aesthetics and designed media are modulating metabolic systems and processes, and in what ways?
  • Which speculative possibilities for healing, repairing or shifting metabolic relations do media practices offer?
  • How might metabolic media help make sense of actual, grounded, material interactions between the living and nonliving?
  • Can metabolic media tie together and multiply new ways of recognising, describing and promoting either life-affirming and life-deleting local, regional, urban, rural and planetary situations?

Important dates

  • Submission deadline: April 30, 2024
  • First notification of acceptance (editors review): May 31, 2024
  • Final notification of acceptance (peer review): September 13, 2024
  • Camera ready: November 1, 2024
  • Publication: December 13, 2024

Read the full call at: https://i2ads.up.pt/hub/calls.html