Call for Papers

“On Techno-Aesthetics” and Performance: movement, dance, cinema, and everyday Life

Guest Editors: Sílvia Pinto Coelho (ICNOVA-FCSH, UNL), Liliana Coutinho (IHC-NOVA FCSH/IN2PAST); Ludovic Duhem (independent researcher, Univ. Lille III).

(Deadline: June 30th, 2024)

Submit here: https://revistas.ucp.pt/index.php/jsta/about/submissions



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“On Techno-Aesthetics” and Performance: Movement, Dance, Cinema, and Everyday Life

Deadline: June 30th, 2024

Guest Editors: Sílvia Pinto Coelho (ICNOVA-FCSH, UNL), Liliana Coutinho (IHC-NOVA FCSH/IN2PAST); Ludovic Duhem (independent researcher, Univ. Lille III).


Invoking Gilbert Simondon’s “on techno-aesthetics”—a draft of a letter never sent to Jacques Derrida and published posthumously under that name—this issue of JSTA invites us to think about artistic processes that involve performance, movement research, and performing arts processes in the broadest sense, including cinema, and that embody what Simondon refers to as “sensorimotoric pleasure.”

(…) contemplation is not techno-aesthetics’ primary category. It’s in usage, in action, that it becomes something orgasmic, a tactile means and motor of stimulation. (…)


Aesthetics is not only, nor first and foremost, the sensation of the “consumer” of the work of art. It is also, and more originally so, the set of sensations, more or less rich, of the artists themselves: it’s about a certain contact with matter that is being transformed through work. (…) (Simondon, 2012, p.3).

Techno-aesthetics is not a formal theory or a clear methodology but a proposal to reconsider the traditional oppositions between contemplation and action, matter and form, nature and culture, and overall aesthetics and technics from a new start: “There is a continuous spectrum that connects aesthetics to technics”. (ibid.).

In his unfinished letter, Simondon formulates an idea of techno-aesthetics that includes an appreciation of the intuitive relationship in the making that is perceptual-motor, sensorial and reciprocal. We are made of relations; our being is the active centre of a relationship system. “The body of the operator gives and receives” (ibid.). Appreciating the process of making in the arts and everyday life invites us to look at operative modes as forms of care that are not only related to efficiency but, above all, to the ethics of handling and the aesthetics in the making. In performance and the live arts in general, this pleasure of doing and sharing a particular way of interacting with technique (and technology) can help us think of the human as a being of palpable sensory connections that shape ethics and aesthetics, even before they are perceived as “ethics and aesthetics”.

Since Simondon does not fully define and close the concept, we would like to invoke “techno-aesthetics” as a field of open possibilities based on what it suggests today. In this sense, we envision a reflection rich in possibilities that nourish technique and aesthetics and consider the entire ecology of relationships we are part of. We also aim to discover updates of techno-aesthetical ideas in decolonial and post-capitalist reflections and imaginaries. We welcome article submissions that critically reflect on the following topics for this issue.



Submission topics:

Techno-Aesthetics;
Performance;
Movement;
Process;
Artistic Research;
Expanded Practices: Cinema, Choreography;
Aisthesis;
Affordance relations;
Intermedia;
Social Choreography;
Performance studies;
Ecologies of Attention;
Decolonial Aesthetics;



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Cotti, L. (2019). Reclaiming Artistic Research. Lucy Cotter.

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