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

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

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 Sciences. With a special focus 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 aestheticisation of politics and everyday life, from archival issues and materialities to virtualisation and operational media. Caleidoscopio welcomes contributions addressing the implications of contemporary media aesthetics for the theorisation of communication itself.

The journal aims to be a global, multilingual platform (English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French) of excellence and open access, fostering critical and speculative thinking across all its covered 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 through the abandonment of logic, but through its hyper-rational and hyper-realistic excess, materialised 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 unconscious, these productions create ambiguous meanings, “bad” images and artefacts without clear authorship, challenging traditional models of creativity and cultural production.

This special issue explores these media 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 AI era.

Submission

We invite proposal submissions that articulate approaches within Media Theory, Visual Studies, Philosophy of Technology, Cybernetics, or Contemporary Artistic Practices and may cover thematic hypotheses such as:

• Hauntological machines and operational genealogies: from characteristica universalis to contemporary language models (LLMs) and multimodal architectures;
• Generativity and its shadows;
• The author’s mask & 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;
• Tokenisation as media infrastructure: technical codifications, linguistic bias, and computational constraints;
• From discourse networks to connectionist paradigms: media-archaeological excavations of "machinic" epistemic ruptures;
• Performative mediation and media negativity in automated writing systems and generative media arts;
• Machine ecologies and hypophenomenal temporalities versus human slowness and deliberation;
• Dialogue versus AI soliloquy: the absence of intercorporeal presence in generative systems;
• Media-archaeological approaches to cybernetic poetry: from early computational art to contemporary neural models;
• Arte(f)acts and operational images in multimodal AI: media theory perspectives on making versus showing;
• Media arts interventions in the exposition of machinic epistemologies in contemporary generative experiments.

Submissions Register Access

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

• Call for papers: until 15 March
• Notification of decisions to authors: end of April
• Second round of revision and editing: May
• Publication: July 2026
• Issue editors: José Gomes Pinto | Lusófona University and Alexander Gerner | Lusófona University.