
With this Open Call "Exploring Contemporary Realities", we launched the annual major theme of interest for scopio Magazine AAI – Exploring Contemporary Realities, Volume 2, and initiated a new collaboration with the project Contrast: Multidisciplinary network of artistic initiatives in Art, Architecture, Design and Photography through SCOPIO & CONTRAST International Conference.
The call had as responsible Editors academics / artists coming from both scopio Magazine AAI and the Contrast project and this rich editorial team ensured the necessary peer review work through the U. Porto OJS platform.
scopio Magazine AAI is, in this way, the official publishing academic periodical for International Conference SCOPIO & CONTRAST and the submissions are both for the Conference and its 2nd volume in partnership with Contrast addressing the theme Exploring Contemporary Realities.
Scopio Magazine AAI is transitioning to continuous publication to better align with the dynamics of Open Access electronic publishing, moving away from the constraints of its previous model geared towards traditional print formats. This shift aims to expedite the dissemination of research to the community, offering immediate benefits to both readers and authors by ensuring quicker access to new findings. The adoption of a continuous publication strategy enhances the open review process by reducing the time from submission to publication and by boosting the visibility of individual contributions, thus fostering greater engagement and dissemination within the scholarly community.
This means that submissions that are accepted after peer review are released online for open review and once the issue is complete, the submissions receive traditional consecutive page numbering as part of the annual issue/volume that is then complete and released.
"Exploring Contemporary Realities" aimed to explore the use of photography and other means of visual representation as forms of artistic research, documentation, and analysis of different configurations on the transformation of the physical environment and how it is understood and shaped by a diverse field of study, practices and cultures. This means, besides other things, to better understand through photography and film the relationship between culture and space and explore how culture, beliefs, behaviours, and practices, interacts with and shape the physical environment of different territories and their architectures, cities and landscapes, as well as to acknowledge contemporary discourses and usages of landscape concepts[1].
Social transformations are linked to changes in the inhabited place, and recent history has revealed the speed with which space changes. These transformations have been so radical that regular documentation about the impermanence of the place has become urgent. In fact, places are uncertain spaces and to represent them visually is to preserve their understanding, recent life experiences such as the gentrification of large cities or the health crisis have imposed profound changes on contemporary life models and, consequently, allowed the creation of previously unthinkable photographs. This is where the “Exploring contemporary realities” is located, artistic projects and documentary projects that operate from the expanded field of architecture, art and design from its actual materialization to the experiences of the place; exploring different levels of privacy, scales and urban landscapes. Focusing also on the exploration of the discursive space that operates in broader systems: sociocultural, political, historical and even technical.
If we accept the image as a kind of visual language2 , disseminated and received in different geographic points, this call extends this dialogue, opening up to the integration of different looks of cultural identities from other regions, places and countries; the specificity of the place as a way to increase our understanding of society and the territory. The objective is to encourage the use of images for the construction of artistic projects that promote critical views on the transformation of the physical environment as a result of the way they are perceived and experienced in their multiple facets. In summary, the aim is to take advantage of the current role of the image as a way of expanding knowledge with a particular focus on photography, recognized as a privileged means of expression and research for the understanding of architecture and urban landscapes and for the construction of the imaginary; between document and fiction; reproduction and manipulation; analogue and digital visual representation as a means of crossing different disciplines, blurring artistic boundaries.
[1] See the discussion of key conceptions of landscape circulating as part of the recent discourse i.e. landscape as a fundamental building block, a communicative medium, and a realm of imaginative constructs." Vera Vicenzotti. "The Landscape of Landscape Urbanism." Landscape Journal 36, no. 1 (2018): 75-86. https://doi.org/10.3368/lj.36.1.75. https://lj.uwpress.org/content/wplj/36/1/75.full.pdf.
[2] Nathan Jurgenson - The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media, Verso, 2019, p. 13-14