Inactual Magazine is launching its inaugural paper production, an experimental collective volume that aims to engage established writers, artists, researchers, and academics on both national and international levels. Additionally, the project welcomes submissions from emerging authors and artists through this open call.

 

THE VOLUME:

MEDIAL DISORDERS. Interpretive and non-statistical compendium of technological disorders is a volume that intends to reflect on the concept of media disorder—a neologism encapsulating the idea of technology as a neutral organism susceptible to developing pathologies influenced by human factors. It marks the first publication in a series by Inactual Magazine as an independent publishing house, characterized by a strong curatorial and experimental approach. The project adopts an intersectional publishing model, intertwining concepts, structure, content, and aesthetics, treating each publication as a genuine artistic practice, curation, and conceptual device.

 

THE CONCEPT:

Medial Disorders. Interpretive and non-statistical compendium of technological disorders presents a critical inversion of the well-known DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). The DSM, characterized as an atheoretical manual, relies on descriptive symptomatology, overlooking subjective complexity, historical context, socio-economic factors, and other dimensions. Essentially, the DSM contributes to a logic that prioritizes coercive adaptation of the individual over the healing of a troubled society. This ideology operates by organizing discourses that blame the individual while absolving the systems of power governing the society in which the individual is compelled to live. The DSM’s structure, comprising indices, categories, subcategories, neologisms, descriptions, and statistics based on often generic symptoms, facilitates and legitimizes this discourse.

By adopting the DSM as a symbol of power mechanisms in general—operating through supporting discourses and structures—this volume aims to détournement these discourses (theoretical and artistic research) and the structures that uphold them (editorial). This détournement is applied to the technological ecosystem in which we exist.

MEDIAL DISORDERS is therefore a volume that intends to reflect on the concept of media disorder, a neologism that is summarized in a vision of technology as a neutral organism capable of developing a series of pathologies due to human influence. We therefore do not pathologize the technology itself, but the way in which it is applied. It is therefore a conceptual passage that on the one hand brings the ultimate responsibility for every use of technology back to the human being himself, to those who program it, to those who manage it, to those who organize it as a form of power through discourses and structures. Every possible pathology therefore represents a dystopian, harmful or negative use for humans, non-humans and ecosystems. Each of these pathological uses of technology will therefore follow an inverse logic compared to the symptomatic and descriptive one of the DSM: (although it will be structured through categories, subcategories and terms) they will instead be interpreted in a critical and interdisciplinary manner. For this reason, Medial Disorders does not present itself as a statistical manual but as an interpretative compendium, to the extent that it will act as an interpretative guide on the state of the art, today and in the future, of all those applications and manifestations and pathological uses of technology that constitute, regulate and influence life as a whole.

 

EXAMPLES AND GUIDE:

*Examples of some categories of medial disorders: Technopolitics disorders; Medial and Audiovisual Disorders; Disorders of the mediated self; Digital Labor Disorders.

*Examples of medial disorders: urban Gamification, social credit, militarization of AI, image-conflict, NPC stream, contemporary ADV.

*The author* can choose an already existing medial disorder, treated by other authors* and summarize it, or he can investigate something specific and identify the analysis with a neologism.

*The call is aimed at writers, independent researchers, academics and artists. No thematic constraints arise, other than those pertaining to the theoretical intersection of technology (of media disorder) with the following macro areas: Visual, Media, Film, Game, Sound Studies / Philosophy / Politics / Anthropology / Sexuality and gender studies / Ecology / Contemporary Art / Subcultures / Neuroscience / Psychiatry / Biology / Sociology.

 

HOW TO APPLY:

Send an email to inactual.magazine@gmail.com by January 21st with the subject “MEDIAL DISORDER”, attaching 2 separate PDFs:

1– title (name of the medial disorder) + Author’s name Surname* + definitive text (min 2000 max 4000 characters) + any images (with courtesy) + any bibliography (to be cited in a note in the text).

2 – Short biography (max 300 characters) + contacts: website / social networks / other links

***Medial Disorders will collect the contributions selected through this open call together with others selected by us from theorists, researchers, writers and artists already established at a national/international level. The volume will be published by June 2024 and will make use of direct distribution in independent bookstores, participation in fairs and events, presentations and other forms of a hybrid nature***

 

© INACTUAL