Caleidoscopio Vol. 1 No. 2: The Dream of Digital Reason?

Caleidoscopio - Journal of Communication and Culture is the journal of the Department of Communication Studies and the School of Communication, Architecture, Arts and Information Technologies (ECATI) at Universidade Lusófona.

Founded in 2002, Caleidoscopio returns in 2026 for its second series, aiming to consolidate its position as an open-access platform dedicated to critical research in Communication Studies. It focuses particularly on the intersection of communication, media, and the arts in contemporary societies: from the proliferation of visual culture and developments in cultural industries to the aestheticization of politics and everyday life, from archival questions and materialities to virtualization and operational media. Caleidoscopio welcomes contributions addressing the implications of contemporary media aesthetics in the theorization of communication itself.

We invite submissions in Media Theory, Visual Studies, Philosophy of Technology, Cybernetics, and Contemporary Artistic Practices. There are no processing or publication fees for authors.

The journal aims to be a global, multilingual platform (English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French) of excellence and open access, for critical and speculative thinking across all its areas.

When Francisco Goya engraved El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (1799), he reminded us that the dream of reason is never fully ordered. Today, that dream reappears in algorithmic rationalities and the promises of creative machines.

Large language models emerge as new monsters: not by abandoning logic, but through their hyper-rational and hyper-realistic excess, materialized in automated writing. Trained on vast cultural archives and digital traces—images, sounds, voices, gestures, art, literature, and cinema—these entities do not understand, but generate fictions with high statistical certainty.

Situated between consciousness and the non-conscious, these productions create ambiguous meanings, "bad" images, and artifacts without clear authorship, challenging traditional models of creativity and cultural production.

This special issue explores these medial shadows and the rational monsters of automated writing, investigating their genealogies, infrastructures, and impacts on literary and media culture, media arts (generative), and philosophy. We invite critical, theoretical, or empirical contributions on authorship, creativity, and artistic production in the age of AI.

We invite submissions that address approaches within Media Theory, Visual Studies, Philosophy of Technology, Cybernetics, or Contemporary Artistic Practices and may consider thematic possibilities such as:

• Hauntological machines and operational genealogies: from the characteristica universalis to contemporary language models (LLMs) and multimodal architectures;
• Generativity and its shadows;
• The mask of the author & AI ghostwriters;
• Cybernetic infrastructures of hyper-rational monsters: statistical dispositifs beyond the sleep of reason in media theory;
• Transmedia archives and spectral traces in AI training corpora: images, voices, gestures as computational substrates;
• Stakes, substrates, and platforms: material conditions of algorithmic reasoning in media arts and automated writing;
• Tokenization as media infrastructure: technical encodings, linguistic bias, and computational constraints;
• From discourse networks to connectionist paradigms: archaeological-media excavations of “machine” epistemic ruptures;
• Performative mediation and medial negativity in automated writing systems and generative media arts;
• Machine ecologies and hypo-phenomenal temporalities versus human slowness and reflection;
• Dialogue versus AI soliloquy: the absence of intercorporeal presence in generative systems;
• Archaeological-media approaches to cybernetic poetry: from early computational art to contemporary neural models;
• Artefacts and operational images in multimodal AI: media theory perspectives on making versus showing;
• Media arts interventions in exposing machine epistemologies in contemporary generative experiments.

Submissions may address these topics via theoretical, historiographical, critical, or practical approaches, including case studies, methodological reflections, or visual essays.

• Call for papers: until March 15
• Notification to authors: late April
• Second round of review and editing: May
• Publication: July 2026
• Issue Editors: José Gomes Pinto | Universidade Lusófona and Alexander Gerner | Universidade Lusófona.