Call for Papers #4
ReCIA #4 2026 pdf descargable
Edited by: José Vicente Martín Martínez and Damià Jordà (research group MAAP and MASSIVA)
History and Practice of Audiovisual Media. Approaches from Media Archaeology.
Under the denomination of media archaeology are gathered several interdisciplinary approaches and methodologies addressing the study of the history of communication media and information technologies and industries from a heterodox viewpoint, which attempts to transcend exclusively technological aspects to focus on the reception and use of various devices, on user experience.
This approach entails establishing relations between these historical uses and contemporary media practices, seeking affinities and cyclical recurrences between contemporary and obsolete technologies, avoiding a linear temporality or a teleological conception of media history. Thus, media archaeology has progressively been defined as a specific approach or methodology of media studies for approximately two decades, thanks to figures such as Friedrich Kittler, Siegfried Zielinski, Erkki Huhtamo, Jussi Parikka, Eric Kluitenberg, Thomas Elsaesser, and Wolfgang Ernst, among others.
Gradually, working groups, research networks, conferences, and publications, alongside artistic creations inscribed in this approach, have formed a relevant theoretical-practical corpus.
This issue 4 of the ReCIA journal aims to deepen the confluence of artistic practice and media archaeology understood as a connection between art and research, locating the specificity of artistic practice at the intersection of history, theory, and creation, formulating proposals for reflection, hypotheses, and critique on media devices and their history based on their design, construction, modification, and/or decontextualisation.
Including media devices amongst artistic techniques implies considering them as a device/object subject to the laws of antiquity value under a double prism: as a functional device/object extracted from history and as an artistic technique itself.
The anachronistic use of such functioning media devices in contemporary art responds to a rhetorical and critical dimension coinciding with a favourable cultural context: the valorization of obsolescence during late capitalism, associated with a certain nostalgia for the technological past and its material component. This implies breaking with temporal linearity and suggests a circularity in which old and modern devices are interwoven in an attempt to understand the cultural context alluded to: the mediating and transforming character of record and representation techniques typical of epigonal Modernity.
The research groups Media Archaeology and Artistic Practice (MAAP) and MASSIVA focus their activities on research and artistic production projects based on audiovisual languages and technologies, in the contexts of cinematographic arts, experimental audiovisual media, media archaeology, animation, and video games.
The MAAP research group proposes a theoretical and practical analysis of the use of methodologies, resources, and devices typical of mass media and information and representation technologies, employing a methodological approach closely related to media archaeology.
The MASSIVA Research Group studies the interrelationship of audiovisual practices and network media with mass culture phenomena. Among its main guidelines are promoting new studies and strategies for implementing audiovisual media in contemporary cultural fabric, as well as generating devices and resources related to the diversity of audiovisual disciplines existing in the market.
In this regard, we are interested in receiving proposals around the following five thematic lines:
- Media archaeology as artistic practice: typologies and case studies. This research line focuses on the various ways in which contemporary artistic creation—the ready-made and the objet trouvé, speculative design, allographic production, the idea of obsolescence, or the work as device—are developed as media archaeology, detecting and analyzing various thematic areas and theoretical-practical approaches, aiming to define a typology of artistic practices of media archaeology and case studies.
- Speculative and imaginary devices as a reflection/action on media history. Media archaeology as a discipline suggests an approach focused on the reception—cultural and phenomenological—of devices rather than merely on technical aspects. This approach explores the break with temporal linearity by searching for recurrences, dead ends of technical evolution, and strange and/or forgotten devices. In practice, this branch converges partially with speculative design and, on the other hand, with art as a project—not necessarily realized—leading to a series of works that combine historical/documentary analysis, hypothetical design, and/or experimental technical realization, which can be grouped under speculative or imaginary media.
- Aesthetics of obsolescence and material culture. This line focuses on theoretical reflections, practical approaches, or case studies centered on the revalorization of media devices displaced from the center of novelty and/or technical and commercial efficiency. Both in their historical consideration—especially linked to spectator reception—and in their rhetorical and expressive possibilities when reused for artistic ends. Practices that find value in obsolescence, enabling speculative reflection on media history and critical recovery of material technological culture.
- The videogame medium: historical and technological evolution. Video games have experienced rapid evolution in recent decades, manifesting in multiple aspects such as technological development, narrative versatility, connection with contemporary artistic practices, or sociocultural impact. This line proposes a view from game studies that transgresses its conception as an entertainment industry and approaches it as a cultural object and artistic creation, incorporating concepts related to media archaeology but also to other areas mentioned.
- Cinematography and artistic creation. A research line proposing the study of the cinematographic medium—photosensitive or digital—as a device that agglutinates artistic disciplines and methodologies, as well as the relationship between cinematographic narratives and contemporary art discourses. Historiographic or critical studies and research projects based on practice and artistic experimentation linking cinematographic technologies with art discourses.
Deadline for submission of proposals: January 31, 2026