Los editores de Popular Inquiry – The Journal of the Aesthetics of Kitsch, Camp and Mass Culture invitan a participar en el próximo número especial de la revista, dedicado a los automóviles. Se aceptan contribuciones provenientes de la práctica creativa y la investigación artística, la filosofía, la sociología, los estudios culturales, la geografía humana, o los estudios de ciencia y tecnología. Envío hasta el 15 de julio de 2010.

Wolf Vostell ‘Fiebre del automóvil 1973’, Museo Vostell Malpartida, Malpartida (Cáceres).

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Editors of Popular Inquiry – The Journal of the Aesthetics of Kitsch, Camp and Mass Culture invite contributions for the next special issue of the journal on cars. The many possible fields of investigation may include creative practice and artistic research, philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, human geography, science and technology studies.

Deadline for submissions: 15 July, 2020.

CARS

A part of many people’s everyday routines, traveling in cars offers an immersive aesthetic experience as well as a transformative one. Yet discussion of its impact on and role in our lives is relegated to television advertisements or programs, films and magazines for tuning or modifying cars that tend not to critically analyze the meaning and significance of this aesthetic relationship.

The experience of being in a car could be considered as at once an extension of the body and a separation between self and outside world. The transformation of our sense of physical body is extended into the structure of the car, while our manners of relating to other individuals and surrounding environment is changed as a result of this bodily extension. Speed itself is transformative as an experience, in the ways it changes perceptions as well as our relations to the landscape. New ways of seeing and relating to landscape develop out of such aesthetic experience. The separation and anonymity that this moving enclosure affords us also transforms our relations to other drivers on the road, leading to cases of road rage, or counteracted through the specialization and customization of the appearance of the car to express an individual’s personality.

The aesthetic experience of cars is one that has developed along multiple parallel lines. Manufacturing, industrial materials, changing landscapes and ways of living, and the social relations that have come about as a result of and in response to our use of cars, offer a complex ecology of ideas. This edition will explore the transformative affordances of the automobile. Topics of speed, mobility, vision and perception, the body, and social relations may be addressed.

We welcome articles from many fields, including but not exclusive to: creative practice and artistic research, philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, human geography, science and technology studies.

List of possible topics

–          Embodied and/or extended cognition and technological extensions of the body

–          Tuning/hotrod/motorhead culture and its aesthetic considerations

–          Disembodiment and separation from surroundings

–          The aesthetics of the everyday

–          Individuation, expression and symbolic objects

For questions regarding this issue, please contact scottandrewelliott@gmail.com

Please, find further details on the topic on the website of the journal.