Helga Müllneritsch (National Taiwan University)

Over the past two decades, the concept of materiality has undergone a profound transformation across the humanities. Approaches such as New Materialism, Posthumanism, and Object-Oriented Ontology have challenged anthropocentric models of thought by emphasizing the vitality, agency, and relationality of both living and non-living matter. Rather than treating objects as passive entities defined solely by human perception and use, these perspectives foreground the active role of material forms in shaping human experience, cultural practices, and historical processes.

Yet questions surrounding materiality are far from new. Throughout history, philosophers, artists, writers, and cultural thinkers have explored the relationship between human beings and the material world. In the late eighteenth century, for instance, the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder argued that “sight reveals merely shapes, but touch alone reveals bodies” (Herder, Sculpture, 2002, p. 35), emphasizing tactility and embodiment as fundamental conditions of human experience. His reflections acquire renewed significance in the present moment, when increasing aspects of social interaction, creativity, labour, and intimacy are mediated through digital technologies.

The emergence of artificial intelligence, virtual environments, and digitally mediated relationships raises new questions about the status of the material in contemporary life. While digital technologies may appear to distance human experience from physical presence, they remain deeply embedded in material infrastructures, embodied practices, and affective relations. The rise of AI companions, virtual therapists, and synthetic forms of intimacy challenges established distinctions between human and non-human, physical and virtual, object and subject.

This special issue seeks to explore how materiality has been imagined, experienced, represented, and transformed across different historical periods and cultural contexts. Rather than understanding the digital age as a departure from material existence, we invite contributions that examine how new technologies, philosophical developments, artistic practices, and social transformations reshape our understanding of matter itself. How have concepts of materiality evolved across time? How do objects acquire meaning through their movement, preservation, and transformation? How might digital and technological developments alter, rather than diminish, our relationship with embodied existence?

We welcome interdisciplinary contributions from literary studies, history, philosophy, cultural studies, media studies, anthropology, art history, and related fields. Submissions may address any historical period or theoretical approach within literary and cultural contexts.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Literary, Historical, and Philosophical Foundations

• Philosophical approaches to being, matter, embodiment, and the material world
• Historical transformations of concepts of materiality across cultures
• The global circulation and intercultural adaptation of material concepts and practices
• Handwriting as a form of embodied expression and the material trace of the self
• Drawing, sketching, and visual practices as material expressions of thought
• Material objects and their meanings across time and space
• Objects as carriers of memory, emotion, and historical experience
• Matter as palimpsest: accumulated layers of personal and collective histories

 Material Practices, Technology, and Intimacy

• The movement of material practices across cultures and historical periods
• Traditional Chinese Medicine in Europe and the transnational circulation of healing practices
• Material and spiritual connections in practices such as ancestor worship
• Bodies, prosthetics, and technological extensions
• Understanding of materiality as a property of discrete objects or emerging through dynamic networks of human, non-human, and technological relations
• Ethical questions surrounding AI-human interaction
• Artificial intelligence, emotional attachment, and new forms of intimacy
• Reshaping of our understanding of embodiment, relationality, and presence through digital objects, virtual environments, and algorithmic systems

 Cultural Representations and Imaginaries

• Literary representations of artificial consciousness and synthetic emotions
• Cinematic portrayals of human-machine relationships
• Science fiction and speculative explorations of synthetic life
• Representations of human and non-human agency
• The role of objects and technologies in shaping identity and memory
• Artistic engagements with virtuality, embodiment, and material presence

INTERFACE also invites papers not related to the Special Topic which will be published in a dedicated General Topic Section.