The Digital Review seeks to showcase personal, artistic, and academic forms of born-digital writing. Submissions may be exploratory, provocative, critical, and/or polemical takes on any topic related to the issue theme (see below). Your work must be multimodal, interactive, and/or computational and made of HTML and JavaScript, video, audio, or any browser-friendly software. Accepted works will receive some web development and/or design assistance, if needed.
For our upcoming issue, we will also accept vaporware (i.e., descriptions of works that would exist were the requisite technology available, or that could exist today but have yet to be created).
[[ Submit using this form by March 15th, 2023. ]]
The Digital Review invites submissions for a dedicated issue on “counter-works:” pieces that – consciously or upon reflection – subvert, corrupt, queer, drag, transform, redirect, or outright revolutionize their subjects.
Practices of art and knowledge alike are rife with misreadings, misrepresentations, mistakes, and misuses. Often these misses have served a subjugating authority, given short shrift to that which they claim to do justice, or simply testified to their creators’ limitations. We need look no further than much of the canonical philosophy, anthropology, and literature of the English- and French-speaking worlds throughout the 19th and 20th centuries for that.
It’s a different story on the margins. Here, reading into and in spite of texts, following inclinations and curiosities that stand in tension with their foundations, gives us both a more comprehensive picture of their successes and failures and more creative, constructive relationships to canons as sources of knowledge, fonts of inspiration, and sites of challenge. Serving ourselves ultimately serves – not appropriates – our objects of study and artistic interventions.
We want to see pieces that force the resources of their chosen subjects to speak (out) against themselves. Drag your sources: Show us how they are dead and boring by making them do conceptual and performative work that vibrantly testifies to the truths of your own life. Meet them as you would a friend who fascinates and frustrates you. All works, questions, and material innovations contain the seeds of their own undoing – so take them there. Don’t worry about being “correct” or “complete” in doing so, but do be thorough.
Above all, we want to understand “counter-work” as an intellectual methodology and artistic practice in its own right, borne out of a brave engagement with what or whom it addresses.
Here are some examples of works we’d accept to inspire you and spark your imagination. We stress that they do not exhaust the kinds of work we’d consider publishing. Please also bear in mind the issue’s technological specifications as outlined under ‘Submissions,’ above. Feel free to contact one of the editors if you are concerned about the eligibility of your piece.
This issue will also publish winners from the Critical-Creative Philosophy competition, regardless of their relevance to the issue theme. More works that have influenced our thinking are listed there, as well as resources to help you get started.
We accept submissions from scholars, artists, writers, game developers, teachers, journalists, researchers, and others, no matter the discipline, and at varying stages of completion. We will also consider previously published pieces so long as previous uploads are taken down upon the issue’s release. Collaborative submissions are welcome regardless of affiliation.
Submissions must take at least one text -- broadly construed -- as their point of departure. "Texts" can include scholarly resources of all stripes, such as books, anthology chapters, and articles; data sets; technological platforms; historical and legal documents; works of literature; visual artworks; pieces of music; theories from the sciences or humanities; well-known thought experiments; academic and artistic practices; parts of disciplinary canons, etc., so long as these are not solely of your own creation. For helpful examples, please see the FAQ from the Critical-Creative Philosophy competition, especially #3 and #4. Please bear in mind that that competition's limitations on submissions do not apply for this CFP.
We particularly encourage submissions from persons belonging to marginalized populations (ex., due to disability, gender identity, sexuality, or race) and those who have been forced to let go of their academic or artistic aspirations due to illness, financial instability, or personal tragedy.
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Please submit an abstract or description of no more than 500 words and a link to either 1) the full, finished piece, 2) a draft, or 3) samples from a work-in-progress (ex., screenshots or videos) using this form. The deadline has been extended for two more weeks. Submissions are now due by March 15th, 2023.
For all other inquiries, please email: contact@thedigitalreview.com.