CFP: New Coordinates for Creative Hybrid Space-Experiences Vol I. & Vol. 2

'New Coordinates for Creative Hybrid Space-Experiences: Environments, communities, identities, and art' and 'Experiences in Hybrid Spaces: Creation, Reception, Understanding'.

Basic Guidelines

Deadline for submissions: August 31, 2023

Language of submissions: English (British)

Length of submissions: Up to 6000 words (references included)

Reference style: Chicago Manual of Style (15th ed.) 

Format: Word (accompanied with an exported pdf file)

All submissions should be sent to: [email protected]

The calls are available below and also at the links: 

Volume I.: shorturl.at/erwU4

Volume II.: shorturl.at/eY367

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CFP / New Coordinates for Creative Hybrid Space-Experiences: Environments, communities, identities, and art

Volume I. is dedicated to Virtual reality, augmented reality, and similar advanced digital experiential environments – where human creativity has recently not only been changing our modes of perception, but also providing material for creation and language for communication – constitute a territory where cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic reflection is yet to adequately define categories, principles, and criteria for evaluating phenomena.

These new hybrid territories are ruled by their own technological capacities, while at the same time they reflect and react to different versions of habitus with which we humans train them. Their co-creative transformation involves more than just individuals’ input, as they operate differently in different professional, demographic, cultural, and economic contexts. Responding to the need of reconsidering the conceptual framework and terms that shall be used to coherently approach the ongoing technological transformation of our environment, our social and cultural life, in the face of advancing Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technologies, we would like to propose an edited volume in effort to designate new coordinates for creative hybrid space-experiences.

We want to stress the transformation of aesthetic experience and engagement in environments transformed in such a way that they become hybrid, merging online and physical layers of reality, holding the belief that environmental aesthetics can partly serve as an adequate framework for conceptualizing the aesthetic experience in hybrid environments. This is because of its focus on aesthetic experiences as forms of engagement with the environment in which one is immersed, having a sensible and conscious aspect as well as a social dimension. 

Contemporary hybrid environments can be also approached in Bernard Stiegler’s terms, as spaces where individuation (the process of forming a stable personality, separate from one’s parents and others around) takes place. This process is not unidirectional, and we want to focus on its dynamics: concerning the influence from technological reconfiguration of persons on the changing space of individuation which is social and cultural, but also material and perceptual environments that become technologically defined – and also the influence of technological transformation of environments on individuals, who absorb technology into their bodies, practices, and identities. This shows that the view of environmental aesthetics stemming out of pragmatism needs to be enriched with reflections from the field of philosophy of technology, and adjusted to the current situation, following the technical affordances of the environments to which people’s bodily activity and consciousness responds. 

The dynamic between the environment, the individual, and the community takes place within an individual’s experience and has explicitly sensory characteristics. Sensory perceptions are the basis for one’s placement in any environment in general, whether the physical environment, VR, or AR. In all these cases sensory (aesthetic) experience is similarly encompassing, and it can be reasonably expected that technology will soon provide fully immersive experiences, engaging all the senses. Searching for criteria to evaluate sensory (aesthetic) experiences we turn to art, because the experience of art embraces the overall being, starting from the sensual level through symbolic and to spiritual levels. For this reason, it can serve as a model for understanding what and how change is occurring with the technological reconfiguration of the world leading to emergence of hybrid environments. 

This will allow us to consider art creation and reception in hybrid spaces, taking art as a model for investigation of the technological transformations of environments due to its multisensory and engaging character.

The proposed book shall be divided in parts dedicated to: 

(1) Methodologies for Hybrid Space-Experiences, 

(2) New Identities in Hybrid Spaces and Hybrid Communities, and 

(3) Processes of Art Creation and Reception.

We invite contribution within the scope of following topics:

Methodologies for Hybrid Space-Experiences 

Definitions of hybridity in experience and in creation

Hybridity as a continuum between the physical and the digital

VR: an environment or a medium?

Real-world mapping of hybrid spaces

Technological affordances

Hybrid transindividuation spaces

New Identities in Hybrid Spaces and Hybrid Communities

Reconfiguration of social and individual identities in hybrid environments; hybrid and virtual identities

Digital identities

Gender, generation, and geography – democratic (inclusive) vs selective conquest of creative hybrid spaces

New kinds of personhood; legal questions on non-human personhood

Representations of the human in post- and transhuman art

Human-technology, human-animal, and human-nonhuman relations

Hybrid communities

Processes of Art Creation and Reception 

Creative frameworks of hybrid environments: “creation of” vs “creation within”, authorship, collaboration, technological accessibility

Mutual impacts and inspirations between the physical and the digital

The art object as process in hybrid spaces

Hybrid display of artistic creations: uniqueness, ubiquity, repetitiveness

Perceptual frameworks of hybrid environments: fragmentation, synesthesia, the haptic experience, mediation of other senses by the visual, immersiveness, "the unreal", AR, the "new real", positive and negative aesthetic values

Taste, aesthetic judgment, and art criticism “in” and “of” hybrid creations

Perceptual commons and private hybrid spaces

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CFP / Experiences in Hybrid Spaces: Creation, Reception, Understanding

Volume II. 

The present publication proposal continues the legacy of the previous, more theoretical volume. The motivation is now to provide a set of case studies that could illustrate the potential of a rapidly developing field based on virtualization technologies. The connection between the natural cooperation of the real and the virtual in the world of artistic production cannot be left aside, because of the impact of technological innovation in its diverse forms and functions on our everyday life.

Art, though traditionally bound with physical substratum, does not need to be an object. This was shown explicitly in the development of art in the 20th century, with conceptualism from one side and the performative turn from the other. Understanding art as not reducible to the material object has also been conceptualized in phenomenology and in pragmatism; however, nowadays we deal with new problems concerning the ontology of art. In new hybrid environments which are expanding, virtual objects or augmented objects are not (only) physical and so cannot be reduced to a concept, nor an intentional object, nor to a process. Their matter is digital, but they are not lacking some physical matter. We consider hybrid spaces and digital or augmented objects as really existing, but on different ontological levels from physical objects. 

Forms of engagements in hybrid spaces being tested within the art sphere have a certain adaptive function, because they allow for experimentation and slowly getting used to new technologies. Experiencing VR/AR spaces, we are immersed within a new kind of environment: this environment is not just visual and passively perceived, but responsive, offering ever more sensory perceptions as technological development proceeds. 

Therefore, we want to focus on creative strategies used within VR/AR art in different fields concerning visuality, spatiality, and performativity, to bring forward case studies focused on various forms and applications of VR and AR technologies in art creation, in education, and in socio-economic areas.

Creative strategies used within VR/AR art are offering new kinds of experiences, with new perceptual forms of artworks and ways of engaging with them. They constitute new practices, meanings, identities, and kinds of social relations (with different agents, human and non-human) that shall be considered. 

We invite contributions presenting strategies used in AR/VR art creation in areas of digital images, virtual and hybrid design, sculpture, installation, town planning, and performative arts, and in areas of education, commerce, and social work. 

Specific topics for contributions:

The creative strategies of AR/VR art

Visuality: Augmented and virtual visuality; Inclusiveness and hybrid space design

Spatiality: Sculpture and installation in hybrid environments; Hybrid and virtual architecture and urban environment; Transgressing physical limitations of urban spaces

Performativity: Theatre and musical performance in hybrid environments; VR opera, dance, and the possibilities of their conjunctions

AR/VR art and beyond

Hybrid spaces and education: Challenges and opportunities of teaching about, teaching within, and teaching through hybrid technologies

Development of VR technologies in art and commerce

VR/AR technologies in psychotherapy 

Bottom-up initiatives in art and technologies – new communities' technological bonds

Implementation of AR/VR technologies to contemporary tourism