Despite the ongoing interest in the history, epistemology, sociology, and cultures of computing and its defining practices (see Benjamin 2019, Mackenzie 2001, Roberge & Castelle 2020), the study of computational media remains largely dispersed across a wide range of discipline specific venues. Inspired by the more systemic examinations of computing advanced by fields like critical AI studies, indigenous STS, and media anthropology, however, this open call aims to bring together scholars who share a similar interest in understanding the transdisciplinary complexities, alternative histories, and political a prioris behind computational media.

With that intention in mind, we propose to consider computation as a paradigmatic ‘media technology’ whose entanglement with questions of both mediation and technoscience promises to renew the study of technical cultures at large. Computational media, we contend, provides a rich, boundary (defying) object around which the disciplinary perspective of media studies, history of technology, and science studies can be made to converge. Not only does computational media relate contemporary technoscience to the cybernetic and cyborgial origins of computing (see Haraway 1985, Hayles 1999, Medina 2011), it also forces us to consider mediation as a structuring principle of technoscientific cultures, practices and epistemologies (see Kittler 1986, Chun 2011). In that context, this open call invites scholars across fields to submit projects which both revisit dominant discourses surrounding the study of computational media as well as challenge the disciplinary frameworks in which they have been historically concentrated. All papers engaging historically, culturally, politically, sociologically, and/or materially with computational media are welcome.