A Call for Papers — Noema
https://noemalab.eu/memo/calls/the-wound-of-the-possible-art-futurity-and-non-human-agency/
About Noema
Noema (from Greek νόημα, “thought”, “concept”, “idea”) is an online magazine (ISSN 2283-3145) exploring the relationships between technology, science, culture, and society. Founded in 2000 — with roots going back to 1994, when a group from the University of Bologna launched NetMagazine/MagNet, the first online magazine in Italy — Noema has spent twenty-six years as a reference point for the analysis of cultural transformations at the intersection of art, science, media, and the environment. Its international network of authors, its Scientific Committee and Advisory Board, and its long-standing partnerships — including with the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (SciArt project) and the European Media Art Platform (EMAP) — reflect a commitment to rigorous, transdisciplinary inquiry. Noema welcomes contributions from researchers, artists, critics, curators, and practitioners across all disciplines.
The Call
Art is bound to the new, to the not-yet. It is an essential instrument for interpreting the world and for navigating the complex dynamics of human and non-human entanglement — a way of looking into the future in a time that makes such looking both urgent and difficult. Art is a kind of philosophy of contemporaneity: one that opens transdisciplinary horizons, remains attentive to the ethical dimension, and moves with the grain of social transformation. Not art that speaks only of itself, nor art that laments the present while facing the past — but art that generates visions of the world, that activates the future. Art that looks beyond humanism.
Every artistic act projects itself forward. It summons into existence a form that did not previously exist, and in doing so alters the space of the possible. Art does not depict the future: it produces it — incrementally, obliquely, sometimes against the will of those who commission or consume it.
The Promethean myth is not a triumphalist myth. The gift of fire is inseparable from punishment, exposure, and wound. This detail speaks to the condition of those who imagine futures beyond the given order: the capacity to project what is possible often means inhabiting a present that has not yet reached what can be imagined. Today, in a moment of technological acceleration and ecological crisis, art is again called to confront this gap between the conceivable and the actual.
Art, more than ever, is called upon to perform the work of narration, interpretation, meaning, anticipation, mourning, care, resistance, imagination, and dream.
Beyond the Human
Prometheus gave fire to human beings. But what happens when fire becomes autonomous?
Generative artificial intelligence produces or enables constructs that expand the idea of creativity and destabilise the category of authorship. Robotics stages autonomous devices that operate physically and interact with the real. Synthetic biology intervenes on living organisms that grow, adapt, and evolve as artistic objects. These disciplines can operate in transdisciplinary ways within complex devices whose activities and purposes are directed toward or can be interpreted in aesthetic terms. We are no longer the only creators. We share the space of creation with entities that are neither tools nor persons, neither fully alive nor fully inert: algorithmic systems that learn from the entire archive of human expression and generate outcomes that no individual human mind could produce alone; engineered microorganisms whose activities, visual patterns, bioluminescent signals, environmental interactions, and chemical outputs configure new artistic dimensions; hybrid beings whose ontological status resists the categories through which we have traditionally defined art and its authors.
The environmental context is equally fundamental. Since the 1960s and 70s, artists have worked with soil, water, wind, decomposition, and growth not as materials to be shaped but as agents to be listened to. What distinguishes these art forms from mere landscape representation is precisely their insistence on the non-human as participant rather than background. The artist enters into relation with it, and their intention is only one force among many. Rain, frost, waters, microorganisms, mycorrhizal networks, bird migration — as co-authors.
In the context of ecological crisis, this tradition acquires a new and urgent inflection. Making art with living systems means acknowledging their vulnerability and agency, insisting that the non-human world is not a resource to be extracted but a presence to be reckoned with. The burning forest, the retreating glacier, the bleaching coral reef are not metaphors. They are actors in a drama whose outcome will determine the conditions under which any future art will be produced. “Ecological art,” in its deepest expression, does not merely represent this crisis. It asks what it means to create consciously and in solidarity with the lives — human and non-human — that bear its worst consequences.
Moreover, artificial intelligence, living organisms, robotic systems, and ecosystems are no longer separate domains — they bleed into one another, forming hybrid assemblages that resist stable categorisation. This entanglement forces open urgent questions about responsibility, collaboration, and authorship: questions that art, too, cannot avoid, and that only art can ask in certain ways.
All of this raises questions that are not merely technical or philosophical, but profoundly aesthetic and ethical. What does it mean for the future of artistic practice to share the field of creation with non-human agents whose capacities in certain domains exceed our own?
“Art” is an exquisitely human concept — even if there are cultures that do not know what it is and manage without it — but the future of art will not be exclusively human. However, if what is considered “art” can also be created by non-human entities, what will be the role of the human in art? It is precisely in confrontation with the non-human that the question of what is peculiar to the human in art becomes urgent and interesting. Mourning, embodiment, mortality, care, the experience of time — these are not computable, and they are the substance that has always constituted the most enduring art. But now, whether chosen or not, they are also in dialogue with forms of creation that operate outside them. What collaboration between the human and the non-human will be possible? What kind of conversation — collaborative, critical, resistant, or otherwise — will human artists choose to have with the non-human entities that now share their world?
Art as Epistemic Practice
The Promethean conception of art insists on art as a form of knowledge — not only of the present but of what the future might be. Speculative narrative, climate art, bioart, AI-generated aesthetics, robotic art, post-human performance: these are not decorations applied to the surface of technological change. They are epistemological practices. They do not only ask “what is happening?” but also “what could happen, what should happen, what must be prevented from happening?” In this sense the contemporary artist inherits the double bind of Prometheus: endowed with the tools to illuminate futures that others cannot yet see, yet exposed to the risks that such illumination entails.
The publication (print and digital) and the series of related events that will emerge from this call for papers are intended as an open invitation to reflect on the relationship between art and futurity in all its complexity, including its post-anthropocentric dimensions. We are interested in art that anticipates, interprets, and imagines, but also in art that resists and keeps open the wound of the possible against the pressure of the inevitable. We are interested in the aesthetics of survival and the poetics of catastrophe, in the archive as a form of construction of the future and the algorithm as aesthetic agent. We are interested in voices from the margins of the dominant technocultural imaginary, and in the stubborn and necessary work of imagining otherwise.
Topics
We welcome essays exploring the relationship between art and futurity, including but not limited to the following:
– Art as anticipatory practice and producer of futures
– Non-human agency in artistic creation
– Artificial intelligence and creativity
– Bioart, synthetic life, and living media
– Ecological art and more-than-human relations
– Art in the context of the climate crisis
– Post-human and post-anthropocentric aesthetics
– Art as a form of knowledge production
– Speculative, critical, and experimental artistic practices
– Archives, datasets, and algorithmic memory
– Marginal, alternative, and non-dominant technocultural imaginaries
– Decolonial, indigenous, and marginal perspectives on futurity and more-than-human worlds
Submission Guidelines
Who can submit: Researchers, artists, critics, curators, and practitioners across all disciplines are welcome to contribute.
Language: English
Abstract: Maximum 300 words
Keywords: Up to 5 keywords
Short bio: Maximum 150 words
File format: Please submit abstract and bio as .doc or .odt separate files, named as follows:
Abstract: firstname_lastname.doc / firstname_lastname.odt;
Bio: firstname_lastname_bio.doc / firstname_lastname_bio.odt
Submission email: staff@noemalab.org
Selection process: Abstracts will be reviewed and selected by the editorial board. Authors of accepted abstracts will receive detailed formatting and submission guidelines concerning the text and the images for the final essay.
Deadlines
Abstract submission with keywords and short bio: 1 September 2026
Notification of acceptance: 30 September 2026
Final essay submission: 15 December 2026
Final Essay Specifications
Length: Expected final papers should be between 4,000 and 6,000 words (including footnotes and references).
An Open Fire
Prometheus is eventually freed. Not because the gods change their minds, but because the order that condemned him cannot survive without what he carries. Fire, once given, cannot be taken back. The arts, once released into the world, reshape the world that sought to contain them. There is something encouraging in this — not a promise of resolution, but a reminder that the capacity to imagine possible futures is itself a form of resistance that survives the structures arrayed against it.
The fire is no longer ours alone. But the question of what we do with it — and what it does with us — remains, inexorably, a human question. For now.
We invite you to bring your fire.
Noema Staff
noemalab.eu — ISSN 2283-3145
More: https://noemalab.eu/memo/calls/the-wound-of-the-possible-art-futurity-and-non-human-agency/