HUB Open Call #7: Post Organic Infrastructures and Alien Ecologies
HUB Open Call #7 Post Organic Infrastructures and Alien Ecologies
Issue #7 / Autumn 2026
Theme: Post Organic Infrastructures and Alien Ecologies
Guest Editor: Brigitta Zics
HUB Editors: Filipa Cruz, Manuela Bronze and Orlando Vieira Francisco.
Submission deadline: April 30, 2026.
The HUB's new issue explores post-organic ecologies: the emerging entanglements of biological, technological, and planetary systems. Machine learning infrastructures, microbial-material hybrids, and planetary feedback loops now operate as distributed agencies that challenge inherited ideas of nature, technology, and the human.
We invite contributions that examine infrastructures as more-than-human ecologies, perceptual systems, and speculative laboratories.
Artistic research offers a crucial way to think and feel through this shift. Artists, designers, scientists, and theorists are increasingly working across disciplinary boundaries, using practice-based and interdisciplinary methods to engage infrastructures not only as objects of critique but as speculative laboratories. Through making, prototyping, staging, modelling, and experimental systems, new forms of vitality, perception, structure, and politics can be sensed, tested, and articulated.
This issue explicitly invites submissions from artistic practitioners and practice-based researchers across art, design, media, and digital practices, including interdisciplinary art–science work and philosophically engaged artistic practice. Practice-based contributions are central to the scope of this issue, with making recognised as a primary mode of knowledge production.
Themes
Agentic Realities - Intertwined materialities and distributed agencies that dissolve boundaries and generate hybrid environments.
Alien Vitalities - Infrastructures enabling speculative or non-human potentials, making unfamiliar ecologies thinkable and inhabitable through new worldbuilding practices.
Algorithmic Ecologies - AI systems, data pipelines, and dashboards functioning as ecological environments that shape emergence, opacity, governance, and control.
Critical Infrastructures - Systems exposed as fragile or unjust; diegetic prototypes and methods that reveal infrastructural harms, ethics, resilience, and maintenance as an aesthetic and political act.
Post-Organic Enmeshment - Decentralised sensing and agency across synthetic growth, microbial life, machinic reproduction, and drone perception, revealing emerging non-human intelligences embedded in infrastructures.
Cross-Cutting Pillars
- New knowledge practices: situated methods, counter mapping, protocol design, forensic approaches, and fiction as method.
• Novel hybrid existence: practices rehearsing cohabitation among human, machinic, microbial, and mineral actors, including care and governance.
• Artwork as infrastructures: works that function infrastructurally, disclose structural behaviours, or incorporate agentic networks.
• Infrastructures as artworks: grids, data centres, dashboards, datasets, logistics chains, and repair pipelines treated as aesthetic and political forms.
HUB accepts the following types of articles:
- Full paper submissions
- Short paper submissions
- Project-based articles (exhibitions and/or reviews)
Attention to artwork as infrastructure or infrastructure as artwork.
HUB encourages proposals using visual, graphic, sound or any other media, including original artwork that embodies artistic research in its multiple forms.
Expositions submitted in a single PDF format will not be accepted.
About the Submissions, read the HUB Submission Guidelines
Submit your proposal via Research Catalogue by April 30, 2026.
HUB – Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
HUB is a peer-reviewed and open-access research journal for reporting on arts, design, and performing arts. The journal is published twice a year by i2ADS – Research Institute in Art, Design and Society (University of Porto, Portugal) and hosted on the Research Catalogue platform.
Read our past issues.
For more information read the Submission Guidelines and our Peer Review Philosophy, or contact us via hub@fba.up.pt
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