Call for submissions: DAC vol.6, issues 1&2,"Anthropocene in the meantime"
Oslo National Academy of the Arts
Oslo, Norway
PITCH—Anthropocene in the meantime
In the era of the anthropocene the industrial vision of destruction and renewal has contracted a challenged credibility. Is this industrial vision dead? We ask this question in two issues of Design|Arts|Culture (DAC) to be published ultimo 2026 and primo 2027. We invite contributions scoping:
(1) the archaeology of the ‘industrial quality product’ [keyword: affordances & the global south];
(2) the ‘industrial lens’ as an archaeological tool [keyword: investigative aesthetics & gender];
The contributions from art, architecture, archaeology and anthropology (4A)—in making industrial society modern (Ingold 2013)—articulate the ways the industrial venture has been designed & displayed in public discourse. 4A would here define design in the expanded field (1914-1991).
On the other hand, the industrial venture itself may yet have an untapped potential in the ideas of destruction and renewal that grew, developed and expounded throughout the Romantic era, as laid out & archived in W. Benjamin’s Arcades project (1927-1940): in a period from ~1820-1870.
We call for contributions with a practical and reflective concern scoping the materiality of the product, the concept of the industrial edition and the updates on human living (posthumanism & the anthropocene): are items, manufacture and use looped together in various public parcours?
Or, have they long since fallen apart into fragments of resource extraction, manufacture, logistics, computation and end-usership? Some would find support Benjamin Bratten’s layered theory of the stack. Others would find critically object to layers with e.g. Karen Barad’s new materialism.
CONTEXT—Of the chaîne opératoire
Artists, archaeologists, architects and anthropologists are likely to have developed a different models of how materials, machines and media are bundled in their investigative practices: ways that may overlap and resemble those that are active in archives, libraries & museums.
Focussing on what—from lack of a better term—could be called ‘forensic industry’, opens a realm of investigation in art, archaeology, architecture and anthropology can allow us to focus on the professional services among archivists, librarians and conservators that are «on the house».
Or, amenable to research in the expanded field of investigative aesthetics: an invitation to look beyond a narrow conception of research to include how a search is set up—by people with material culture on their repertoire—beforethe tasks & occasions of research are settling.
Providing a lens to a landscape only dimly visible without the archival, librarian or museal setup. What is the importance of these practice when they are folding into researcher’s own design repertoire, as the services & archival knowledge base are replaced by digital apps and tools?
We are talking about a blind zone in the mainstream conception of what research is and does: it falls between the short term scope of planning and the long term scope of encounter. It features the meantime of the provisional. A blind domain confined to the proximal/contact zone of care.
The DAC-journal provides a singular opportunity to articulate experience, practices and models in this unsegmented terrain: the harvest of contributions will add to a repertoire of techniques that are ‘industrial’ to the extent that they include setting up machines for learning w/moving targets.
We invite contributions that do not seek abstraction for its own sake, but seek a an active reach of practical experience with matters that may appear profesionally trivial, yet under under challenge yield a creative impetus, shedding light on mediation in our protocols of feedback & discovery.
FRAMEWORK
UNESCOs agenda for media and information literacy (MIL)—to screen, intercept and frame the contributions—will secure a contemporary harvest from the 2 issues in 2026 and 2027. The call accordingly invites contributions with a range from portfolios, imaged essays and plain articles. We cordially invite abstracts for contributions.
Deadlines: abstract ultimo June 2025 [length ~ 450 words]; articles for peer review December 31st 2025 [if article, length between 4000 and 6000 words]; peer review Spring 2026; author's revision August 31st 2026; editing and graphic design: fall 2026. Vol. 1 published ultimo 2026, vol. 2 published primo 2027.
