Issue 42: Thermal Aesthetics
Deadline: October 1, 2026
Please email submissions to invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu


Our 42nd issue of InVisible Culture, “Thermal Aesthetics,” is motivated by temperature extremes. Quotidian figures of speech—”temperature checks,” “things are heating up,” “a heated political climate,” “if you can’t handle the heat…” — have long invoked heat while tempering the chaotic potential of entropic energy in systems designed to control, document, regulate, and extract, all of which are becoming harder to ignore. Indeed, over the course of writing this call for papers, deadly heat waves have strained Europe’s cold-acclimated infrastructure, while in India, heat-related deaths—and the caste and class divides they betray—have been obscured by propagandistic media spectacles and questionable temperature. This year has also seen burgeoning militarization in the Arctic circle, a growing awareness of the energy-intensive cooling demands of data centers, dangerously high temperatures in ICE detention facilities, and backlash to FIFA’s regulation of personal water bottles in World Cup venues during (what is almost certainly going to be) another record-shattering summer in America. These are some of the most overt, if not recent, large-scale manifestations of what Nicole Starosielski calls “thermopower,” meaning the disciplining, or, one could say, air conditioning, of biological, geological, and energetic subjects through processes of temperature mediation and control.


Temperature can legitimize systems of domination through the artificially constructed binaries of hot/cold, inside/outside, access/egress, self/other, and seen/unseen, bringing multiple sensoria to bear upon the dispersive relationship between subject and object. “Thermal Aesthetics” considers the visual and cultural production of climate control, as well as the systems of domination, exploitation, and exclusion that subtend such thermal regulation. Within these conditions it becomes imperative to understand temperature less as a property of discrete entities than as a process of heat exchange through which matter may congeal or break apart, melt or freeze, evaporate or combust, live or die, and become visible or invisible—stabilizing some places (and platforms, datasets, environments, people, and regimes) while collapsing others. With these problematics in mind, we ask: how are thermal regimes represented, aestheticized, and thereby normalized or subverted through visual mediums? How do thermocultures reproduce themselves through physical systems of distribution as well as through metaphor?undefined Finally, how does thermopower inform, or deform, the task of visual studies?


With our 42nd issue, InVisible Cultures offers up the analytic of thermal aesthetics to consider thermopower, and its aestheticization:


as conditioning of visual and sensorial regimes, such as gallery and film viewing norms, art conservation practices, and digital infrastructures;

as processes of racialization, with a history rooted in climate determinism, carceral punishment, and surveillance through thermal imaging;

as enablers of capitalist extension, with the creation of homogenized, atemporal interiors such as office spaces and shopping malls;

as, finally, disavowed agents of climate change.


InVisible Culture invites articles and artworks that address the conditions of thermal regulation, representation, and domination through visual and sensorial culture, broadly construed. We invite works from the disciplines of film studies, media studies, art history, anthropology, visual studies, and sound studies on topics including but not limited to:


Critical temperature studies

Arctic Studies

Cold Studies

Climate control in conservation

Energopolitics

Ecohorror (and temperature)

Environmental art

Research-based art and temperature

The aesthetics of climate data

Atmospheres

Temperature and critical race studies

Metallurgy

Thermodynamics in visual culture

Thermal imaging

Infrared imaging

Representations of climate catastrophe, atmospheric phenomena

The aesthetics of predictive climate modeling

Thermoacoustics

Haptics and temperature

Sweat onscreen, sweat as medium

Humidity

Solar aesthetics


Articles

Please send completed papers (with references following the guidelines from the Chicago Manual of Style) of between 4,000 and 10,000 words to invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu by October 1, 2026. Inquiries should be sent to the same address.


Creative/Artistic Works

In addition to written materials, InVisible Culture accepts works in other media (video, photography, drawing, code). Please submit creative or artistic works along with an artist statement of no more than two pages to invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu. For questions or more details concerning acceptable formats, go to or contact the same address.


Reviews

InVisible Culture is also currently seeking submissions for book, exhibition, and film reviews (600-1,000 words). To submit a review proposal, go to https://www.invisibleculturejournal.com/contribute or contact invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu


About the Journal

InVisible Culture: A Journal for Visual Culture (IVC) is a student-run interdisciplinary journal published online twice a year in an open access format. Through double-blind peer-reviewed articles, creative works, and reviews of books, films, and exhibitions, our issues explore changing themes in visual culture. Fostering a global and current dialogue across fields, IVC investigates the power and limits of vision.

Each issue includes peer-reviewed articles, as well as artworks, reviews, and special contributions. The Dialogues section offers timely commentary from an academic visual culture perspective and announcements from the editorial board.