ON / OFF SCREEN – Artistic research through the screen

In VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research issue 18, the focus is on the screen and its role in artistic research. Much of contemporary life reaches us through our screens: entertainment, art and advertising, as well as images of war, climate change and genocide. Everything appears in real time, yet through mediated images. The screen allows us to see, but not to touch; to witness, but not to intervene.

Artistic research is also increasingly presented and encountered through screens. Performances, paintings, installations, musical works, films, spatial practices and material processes are documented, archived and published through digital platforms and online journals such as VIS. What happens to an artistic practice when it is translated onto a screen? What is preserved, transformed or lost? Is the screen a container or a scene, a window or a barrier, an archive or a new site of artistic research?

The English word screen has many meanings:

• Screen as a surface of display
• Screen as a filter
• Screen as protection, shield or barrier
• Screening as a practice of selection, filtering and surveillance
• Screen as projection surface and cinematic apparatus
• Screen as window, interface and portal

For VIS #18, we invite contributions from all areas of artistic research, with expositions that relate to or challenge the surface of the screen and the practice of screening, through sound, image, composition, design, voice, noise, score, movement, reflection, rhythm, montage or animation.

ON / OFF SCREEN asks not only what a screen shows, but also what screening does. The issue considers the screen as an active condition of knowledge and invites expositions that attend critically to the relations between visibility and concealment, presence and mediation, access and refusal, and the image and its outside.

For this issue, we particularly value expositions in which image, sound, movement, composition, animation or other media play an active role in communicating and developing the research, rather than text-heavy expositions. Expositions containing text should not exceed 4,000 words.

Deadline for exposition proposals: 11 November 2026.

Read more about the theme and how to submit an exposition proposal on the VIS website.