Issue 9 of Laocoonte. Revista de Estética y Teoría de las Artes aims to offer a space for reflecting on the relationship between images and action, as well as on their forms of power. New Deadline for submission: July 20, 2022.

The power of images and their relation to action is one of the main questions in the philosophy of images over the last decade. Images seduce, persuade, change the way we see the world and they can certainly mobilize us. Pictures take over public and everyday spaces, seeming to acquire a movement of their own. Accordingly, images not only reflect power and allow the expansion of its myths and delusions but, beyond simply transmitting people’s intentions, they also seem to impose a presence that affects us and moves us to action, provoking both fascination and rejection and fear. In addition, these forms of power, although present in complex iconic relationships that largely predate the age of technology, are today driven by recent digital technological transformations. Digitization creates images that are no longer neutral intermediaries between subjects and objects but mediators that reconfigure perception and agency.

In addition to pragmatic theories of images, inspired by the classical theory of speech acts, other lines of research have been developed in recent years, such as those of H. Bredekamp in the field of German Bildwissenschaft or WJT Mitchell in the Anglo-Saxon context. These, in line with a tradition that focuses on the life of images, on their energeia and on their own capacity for agency, explore what images themselves do, what they want and what therefore we can do with them. Furthermore, theories of material culture provide significant reflections on the modes of agency of things, from A. Gell to B. Latour or to some recent approaches from Anthropology, Archeology, new materialisms, etc. All this research raises questions about key issues for understanding iconic practices such as, among others, the definition of the notion of agency, the dialectics between presence and symbolic representation, the relations and limits between animism and rationality, the forms of intentionality involved in action or the techno-social mediations of images and image acts.

Issue 9 of Laocoonte. Revista de Estética y Teoría de las Artes aims to offer a space for reflecting on the relationship between images and action, as well as on their forms of power. Contributions related to the following thematic areas are welcome/

  • Forms of agency in the action of and with images.
  • Reviews, critical reception or genealogies of theories of images that address their relationship with action or power: Kjørup, Sonesson, Bredekamp, Mitchell, Freedberg, Warburg, Gell, Rancière, Didi-Huberman, Boehm, van Eck…
  • Articulation of representational (semiotic character) and presentational (power, presence, action) aspects in images.
  • Images, agency, and materiality: material determinations of action in images.
  • Social relations with images. Dynamics of interaction with images and behavior and power structures they enable.
  • Authorship, processes of creation and invention of images (ways of their production and social circulation, collective and disseminated forms, distributed agency, etc.).
  • Reception and its mixed forms (reception and intervention): ways of seeing and their transformations. Participation, appropriation, co-definition of images.
  • Performativity of digital images. Operational, algorithmic, informational images. Technical devices and programs of visual production, capture, reproduction, and manipulation.
  • Political images and politics of the image. Forms of iconic propaganda. Political and cultural power of iconic narratives. Emancipation and strategies of activism in images. Iconoclasm and iconodulism.
  • Action, activisms, performativity, ways of doing and artistic images.

Issue coordinators/ Ana García Varas (Unizar) and Sergio Martínez Luna (UNED)

Authors will need to upload the original articles onto the Lacoonte journal platform which can be found in the following link. Guidelines for submissions can also be found here:

https://ojs.uv.es/index.php/LAOCOONTE/about/submissions

Articles that do not meet the journal’s guidelines concerning submission, presentation and referencing will not be accepted.

Deadline for submission: July 20, 2022.

The estimated publication date for volume 9 is 14th December 2022.