the wound of the possible. art, futurity & non-human agency
Noema (from Greek νόημα, “thought”, “concept”, “idea”) is an online magazine (ISSN 2283-3145) exploring the relationships between technology, science, culture, and society. Founded in 2000 — with roots going back to 1994, when a group from the University of Bologna launched NetMagazine/MagNet, the first online magazine in Italy — Noema has spent twenty-six years as a reference point for the analysis of cultural transformations at the intersection of art, science, media, and the environment. Its international network of authors, its Scientific Committee and Advisory Board, and its long-standing partnerships — including with the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (SciArt project) and the European Media Art Platform (EMAP) — reflect a commitment to rigorous, transdisciplinary inquiry. Noema welcomes contributions from researchers, artists, critics, curators, and practitioners across all disciplines.
Art is bound to the new, to the not-yet. It is an essential instrument for interpreting the world and for navigating the complex dynamics of human and non-human entanglement — a way of looking into the future in a time that makes such looking both urgent and difficult. Art is a kind of philosophy of contemporaneity: one that opens transdisciplinary horizons, remains attentive to the ethical dimension, and moves with the grain of social transformation. Not art that speaks only of itself, nor art that laments the present while facing the past — but art that generates visions of the world, that activates the future. Art that looks beyond humanism.
The Promethean conception of art insists on art as a form of knowledge — not only of the present but of what the future might be. Speculative narrative, climate art, bioart, AI-generated aesthetics, robotic art, post-human performance: these are not decorations applied to the surface of technological change. They are epistemological practices. They do not only ask “what is happening?” but also “what could happen, what should happen, what must be prevented from happening?” In this sense the contemporary artist inherits the double bind of Prometheus: endowed with the tools to illuminate futures that others cannot yet see, yet exposed to the risks that such illumination entails.
The publication (print and digital) and the series of related events that will emerge from this call for papers are intended as an open invitation to reflect on the relationship between art and futurity in all its complexity, including its post-anthropocentric dimensions. We are interested in art that anticipates, interprets, and imagines, but also in art that resists and keeps open the wound of the possible against the pressure of the inevitable. We are interested in the aesthetics of survival and the poetics of catastrophe, in the archive as a form of construction of the future and the algorithm as aesthetic agent. We are interested in voices from the margins of the dominant technocultural imaginary, and in the stubborn and necessary work of imagining otherwise.