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Open call un Magazine 20.1 Stones & Circuits ed. VNS Matrix
un Magazine invites proposals for Issue 20.1: Stones and Circuits — Art, AI, and the More-Than-Human Commons, guest edited by Julianne Pierce and V Barratt of VNS Matrix. This issue asks how artists can engage with technology amid ecological crisis, displacement, and rising authoritarianism, proposing the commons as an anti-racist, de-colonial, and trans-feminist strategy for reimagining technology. It envisions computation as relational and material—rooted in earth, body, and community—and intelligence as shared among human and more-than-human entities. Contributors are encouraged to explore commons-based art and AI, ethical and land-based computation, de-platforming extractive systems, analogue and collective practices, intergenerational exchange, and collaboration with the more-than-human. Stones and Circuits seeks speculative, critical, and creative works that imagine computational futures grounded in care, accountability, and collective survival.
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V Barratt and Julianne Pierce are Adelaide/Tarntanya-based artists and founding members of the influential cyberfeminist collective VNS Matrix, alongside Francesca da Rimini and Josephine Starrs, formed in 1991.
Julianne Pierce is an artist, writer, curator, and creative producer who has contributed to publications such as Artist Profile, Artlink, and The Adelaide Review, and wrote the foreword for Mindy Seu’s Cyberfeminism Index (2023). She has held leadership roles in digital and screen culture, including as Director of the Australian Network for Art & Technology and Chair of both ISEA and the Australia Council’s Emerging and Experimental Arts Committee.
V Barratt identifies as a non-binary trans-(disciplinary/feminist) artist, and is a white settler living on Indigenous land—Kaurna Yerta. V has been working in the digital realm, bootstrapping the future, for over 30 years, values co-creation above all other production modalities and as a neurodivergent cryptoqueer elder, soil fancier, honours all who are enmeshed in creative pursuits with them—trans-generationally, trans-materially, trans-temporally.
Due: midnight 1 December 2025 AEDT.