var.unseenmattering

CALL FOR PAPERS: Visual Art Research Journal

Anticipated Publication: Winter 2027
Guest Editor: Dr. David Herman Jr., Associate Professor, Temple University
Special Issue
Unseen Mattering: Indeterminate Perception, Relational Beings, and Practices of Making
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 and authenticity, mastery, and human-centered agency are increasingly unsettled through material agency and technological mediation. Within art education and related fields, including material and visual culture studies, these shifts call for renewed attention toward ideas of perception, embodiment, and enactments as ethical concerns. The matter of mattering is not simply a value judgment about what counts. It is the felt experiences of how things take form, how they register, and how they gesture within processes of making.
This special issue invites work that rethinks making as craft, or more precisely, as crafting, and seeks to illuminate how the imaginary comes into play as mattering emerges. Crafting is approached here as an ongoing negotiation with conditions that are not fully authored by any singular participant. In this posthuman framing, agency is variously distributed as materials, environments, tools, technologies, systems, histories, and bodies participate together. With this in mind, what kind of authority do we actually have over what we aim to make, over what becomes, over what matters, when our making is always already entangled with agentic tools and techniques, inherited histories, institutional logics, environmental forces, and computational infrastructures?
And 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 Sabolius’s (2017) reading of 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 and ephemerality, in which a lift or rupture of the given situation is suspended for a time, and something unseen enters. Drift 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 everyday terms, drifting can feel like a dodge, a temporal reorientation, where something other-than becomes present, and the situation becomes otherwise.
This is visible in material practice. Consider a potter at the wheel. You begin with intention (shape, texture, glaze), but 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 instead, it is 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; 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 Manning’s (2019) terms, “a collective field of making thinking that doesn’t 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, and theory, and to ask what craft becomes when imagination, matter, and technology drift together.

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 Patron, E. S. Casey, & J. M. Wirth (Eds.), Adventures in phenomenology: Gaston Bachelard (pp. 63–80). State University of New York Press.
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 practice, 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, generative tools) participate as co-contributors, redirecting attention, reorganizing process, 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 up 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 imagination and material life co-compose what becomes.
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 & Publication Timeline
● Call for Papers (proposal) sent: March 7, 2026
● Proposal submissions due: May 1, 2026
● Editorial responds to proposals: June 1, 2026
● Deadline for manuscript or project submissions: September 1, 2026 (or earlier)
● Review 1: September 1, 2026 to October 15, 2026
● Author Revision 1: October 15, 2026 to December 1, 2026
● Review 2: December 1, 2026 to January 15, 2027
● Author Revision 2: January 15, 2027 to March 1, 2027
● Final edits, assembly of issue, writing editorial: March 1, 2027 to April 1, 2027
● Guest Editor sends complete issue to VAR Editors: April 1, 2027 (or earlier)
● Due to the University of Illinois Press: April 21, 2027
For questions email: David Herman Jr.: var.unseenmattering@gmail.com
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