Visual Arts Research

Call for Papers

Unseen Mattering: Indeterminate Perception, Relational Being, and Practices of Making

Guest Editor: Dr. David Herman Jr., Associate Professor, Temple University

Anticipated Publication: Winter 2027 (Vol. 53, Issue 2)

Overview

At a moment marked by ecological crisis, accelerating digital and artificial intelligence systems, and renewed scrutiny of authorship, labor, and creativity, practices of making are being reconfigured. Claims to truth, authenticity, mastery, and human-centered agency are increasingly unsettled through material agency, technological mediation, and entangled relations between human and other-than-human actors.

Within art education and related fields, including visual culture, material culture studies, and transdisciplinary creative practices, these shifts call for renewed attention to perception, embodiment, and making as ethical and ontological concerns. The matter of mattering is not simply a question of what counts, but how things come to register, take form, and exert force within processes of making.

This special issue invites work that rethinks making as crafting, an ongoing relational process shaped by indeterminacy, shared emergence, and distributed agency. Crafting here is not fully authored by any singular participant, but unfolds through dynamic entanglements among materials, tools, environments, histories, bodies, moods, and computational systems.

Orientation

Within these entanglements, how can the imaginary be accounted for as more than a diversion from reality, but as an agentic force that plays a significant role in the crafting of matter?

In Kristupas Sabolius’ (2017) reading of Gaston Bachelard, imagination interrupts ordinary sequences and reroutes experience such that “imagination allows us to leave the ordinary course of things” (Bachelard, as quoted in Sabolius, 2017, p. 66). This drifting away is not a failure of attention but a critical dimension of crafting and mattering. It is marked by verticality, ephemerality, and spirit, in which a lift or rupture of the given situation is suspended for a time, and something else enters.

Drift (space coasting) also names the way imagination can move ahead of what is given, where “an image may precede perception, initiating an adventure in perception” (Bachelard, as quoted in Sabolius, 2017, p. 71). In other words, drifting can feel like a dodging, a doddle, a daydream, a temporal reorientation, where something other-than becomes present.

This agency of the drift is not only a human happening. Consider a potter at the wheel. You begin with intention, shape, texture, and glaze, yet clay responds. Its limits, moisture, plasticity, and timing make suggestions. The wheel and tools enter. The kiln enters. Even the company inside the kiln enters. What emerges is never only the maker’s plan, but a co-authored event in which the imaginary, the relational novelties of entanglement, show up as material imagination.

Technologies participate in this same uneven way. Cameras, editing workflows, platform interfaces, datasets, algorithms, and generative systems do not merely assist. They condition attention, offer form, constrain choice, introduce latency and artifacts, and reshape what counts as skill, evidence, and authorship. Drift, then, is not only a human wandering, but also a state of being. It can be engineered, amplified, constrained, or repatterned through interfaces and infrastructures that participate in what becomes perceptible and makeable.

Outcomes often arrive through uneven contribution across materials and machines, habits and interfaces, memory and speculation, such that making becomes, in Erin Manning’s (2019) terms, “a collective field of making thinking that does not know in advance where it might lead” (p. 2). Mattering names the consequences of these contacts and emergent conditionings. What takes form through partial contributions and shared authorship?

This orientation invites contributors to stay close to these entanglements across studio practice, pedagogy, theory, and even the everyday, and to ask what craft becomes when imagination, matter, and technology drift together.

Guiding Questions

Contributors may consider questions, including, but not limited to

●       What becomes of claims to authenticity and originality when agency is distributed across human and other-than-human actors?

●       How does authorship shift in collaborative, materially shaped, technologically mediated, or artificial intelligence-assisted practices, especially when outcomes exceed anyone’s full control or capacities?

●       How does making become a site of ethical, political, and pedagogical negotiation with materials, tools, systems, environments, and institutions?

●       How do indeterminate forces, including affect, memory, intuition, imagination, speculation, and drift, shape making and learning through temporal flux and unstable beginnings and endings?

●       How do technological systems platforms, interfaces, datasets, algorithms, and generative tools participate as co-contributors, redirecting attention, reorganizing processes, and reformatting what counts as evidence, craft, or authorship?

●       What do relational and posthuman ontologies make possible for art education, curriculum, and ethics, particularly around attentiveness, responsibility, and care in entangled worlds?

●       How might making offer alternatives to individualism, productivity, and ownership by foregrounding shared agency, contingency, and co-emergence?

●       What might it mean to treat mattering as an emergent condition that intensifies, recedes, ruptures, and reforms through relation?

Invitation to Contribute

This special issue welcomes theoretical essays, artist writings, visual or creative essays, and pedagogical inquiries that explore making and mattering as crafting practices. Submissions may engage philosophy, art education, studio practices, technology, environmental thought, critical theory, or transdisciplinary approaches that challenge anthropocentric and outcome-oriented models of making.

By centering the unseen alongside the made, this issue opens space for new ways of considering, teaching, and practicing making and mattering, grounded in relationality, shared agency, indeterminate perception, and the spatiotemporal drift through which being is co-composed by the imaginary and material life.

Accepted Formats

●       Scholarly manuscripts approximately 4,500 words plus references

●       Artist or practitioner writings

●       Visual or creative essays with accompanying statements

●       Pedagogical or curriculum-based contributions aligned with the theme

Submission Information

●      Proposal submissions due May 15, 2026

Submission Form: https://forms.gle/Yt7LsdChTN5a2vSm6

●      Editorial response to proposals June 15, 2026

●      Full manuscript submissions due September 1, 2026, or earlier

Review Process

All proposals and full manuscripts will undergo a double-blind peer review process. An Editorial Advisory Collective, composed of scholars in art education and related fields, will work in consultation with the guest editor to review submissions at key stages of the process.

Contact

Dr. David Herman Jr.
Temple University, Tyler School of Art and Architecture
var.unseenmattering@gmail.com

References

Manning, E. (2019). Experimenting immediation: Collaboration and the politics of fabulation. Inflexions: A Journal for Research Creation, 11, 1–39.

Sabolius, K. (2017). Rhythm and reverie: On the temporality of imagination in Bachelard. In E. Rizo Patrón, E. S. Casey, and J. M. Wirth (Eds.), Adventures in phenomenology: Gaston Bachelard (pp. 63–80). State University of New York Press.

Editors

Editors
Sarah Travis
University of Illinois Urbana Champaign

Jennifer Bergmark
University of Illinois Urbana Champaign

Merel Visse
Drew University

Visual Arts Research
143 Art and Design
University of Illinois Urbana Champaign
Champaign, IL 61820
visualartsresearch@illinois.edu

Editorial Board

• Sahar Aghasafari, University of South Carolina, Lancaster
  
• Ilayda Altuntas Nott, The University of Arizona
• Angela Baldus, Independent Scholar
• Jasmine Begeske, Purdue University
• Joy G. Bertling, University of Tennessee
• Shivani Bhalla, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
• Paulina Camacho Valencia, Independent Scholar
• Yichien Cooper, Washington State University
• Kendall Crabbe, Independent Scholar
• Kimberley D'Adamo, University of Nebraska
• Stephanie Danker, Miami University
• Richard Fletcher, The Ohio State University
• Kelly Gross, Northern Illinois University
• Min Gu, California State University, Long Beach
• Christina Hanawalt, University of Georgia
• Emiel Heijnen, Amsterdam University of the Arts
• Catalina Hernández-Cabal, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
• Ann Holt, The Pennsylvania State University
• Emily J. Hood, University of Arkansas at Little Rock
• Dana Carlisle Kletchka, The Ohio State University
• Ahran Koo, California State University, Fresno
  
• Hyunji Kwon, University of South Carolina
• Nicole S. Lee, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design
• Somi Lee, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
• Lillian L. Lewis, Virginia Commonwealth University
• Christine Liao, University of North Carolina at Wilmington
• Luke Meeken, Miami University
• David Modler, Shepherd University
• Kaleb Ostraff, Brigham Young University
• Hayon Park, George Mason University
• Samuel H. Peck, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
• Allison Rowe, University of Iowa
• Sara Scott Shields, Florida State University
• Borim Song, East Carolina University
• Lauren Stetz, Drexel University
• Jody Stokes-Casey, University of Kentucky
• Juuso Tervo, Aalto University
• Merel Visse, Drew University & University of Humanistic Studies
• Amber Ward, Florida State University
• gloria j. wilson, The Ohio State University
• Kate Wurtzel, Independent Scholar
• Li Xu, University of North Texas
• Ahu Yolaç, Lawrence Technological University
• Gigi Schroeder Yu, University of New Mexico

PDF Policy

Submissions

Please verify that all communications come from the editor directly (see “Editors” for contact information) or from Scholastica, our submission system. There is no cost to submit or publish in the journal unless you have requested open access for your accepted article.

Visual Arts Research

Manuscripts of approximately 4,500 words should be submitted electronically to the Visual Arts Research online manuscript submission system. This secure, personalized resource will allow you to track your manuscript through each step of the review and acceptance process. To begin, click on the link below to set up your personal account and upload your submission. Your transmitted material will be reviewed as soon as possible.

READ BEFORE SUBMITTING: Submissions should follow the recommendations of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th edition, 2021. Accompanying tables, figures, images, or illustrations should appear at the end of each manuscript, and must be submitted in accordance with APA guidelines (click here to download).

This journal utilizes a double-blinded review process in which all manuscripts are blind reviewed by members of the Visual Arts Research Editorial Board. Figures, images, or illustrations accompanying final accepted manuscripts must be submitted as separate electronic files, properly labeled, formatted as TIFF documents, 300 dpi, and sized in height and width dimensions approximate to how the writer wishes these materials to appear in the journal. Only high quality images or figures will be accepted. Images appearing in accepted manuscripts must comply with U.S. copyright laws. Writers will be asked to obtain permission for VAR to publish copyrighted photographs, illustrations, or images. Visual Arts Research will provide blank permission forms to authors, which must be returned prior to final acceptance.

View our Publications Ethics and Malpractice Statement

Featured Articles

Online Access

Online Access

Project Muse Access

Institutions- Current Content (SPC)

Institutions- Back Content (JSTOR)

OA Content