Description
We live in a world where interfaces play an increasingly central role. Interfaces are our means of engaging with both technical and social realities; gradually, they become not only conditions of access to the world of technology but also intrinsic structures of our experience. The interfaces designed by major corporations, game developers, and social application creators set standards of perception and self-awareness, disciplining us and determining the measure of control. This makes it all the more crucial to continue experimenting with interfaces, developing a new semiotic, symbolic, and bodily grammar—a challenge embraced by digital artists, gamers, science fiction writers, and neuromancers of media reality.
In this issue, we invite readers to reflect on the boundaries of reality set by interfaces and the possibilities of mapping them differently. Interfaces are often seen as an extension of “pure reason”; in their orientation towards the user, they appear open and accessible, promising clear experiences and instant results. Yet, in reality, interfaces are performative, pre-predicative, and affective; they are not understood so much as lived through in experiments, bodily techniques, and practices of ecstasy. Thus, to approach the problem of the interface, we must consider not only the programmatic texts of behaviorism and pragmatism but also the strategies of body horror, the challenge of the performative gesture, the ethics of the trickster, the aesthetics of glitch, and all forms of “praise of folly” and “learned ignorance” that continue the tradition of mimetic dyspraxia in the design of speculative worlds.
List of topics proposed for discussion:
– Unconventional game controllers, interfaces, and practices in computer games;
– New technologies: from VR headsets to Neuralink;
– Biointerfaces;
– Artistic experiments, performances, and art projects in computer games;
– Biopolitical design of the body in the digital age;
– Media archaeology of interfaces: recovering forgotten cultural trajectories;
– Pre-predicative experience in the age of "surveillance capitalism" and big data technologies;
– UX research on interfaces and philosophical analysis of the digital subject;
– Algorithmic aesthetics and the expansion of perceptual experience;
– Ecstasy and affect in the era of artificial intelligence;
– Weird interfaces and the liminal experience of digital media.
Submission
Please use our Guide via the link for formatting the manuscript and accompanying documents: https://galacticamedia.com/index.php/gmd/instructions
Materials should be submitted to the editorial email (admin@galacticamedia.com and galacticamedia@gmail.com) with the subject line “For the Special Issue ‘Experimental Interfaces: The Invention of the Digital Body.’”
Deadline for Acceptance of Manuscripts
March 15, 2025