Digital Media and Magic. Magical Practices, Spirituality, and Alternative Visions in Digital Culture

editors Giulia Conti and Ruggero Eugeni.

deadline: 30 May 2026

In the porous and fertile spaces of social media, magic is not dead. It has neither disappeared nor been relegated to the residual folklore of a hyper-rationalised society. On the contrary, as a form of living archaeology, magic dominates cinema and literature, thrives in feeds and algorithmic recommendations, surfaces in beauty filters and the aesthetics of astrological memes, and presides over communities with billions of views, such as #WitchTok (Miller, 2022; Houlbrook, 2025; Eugeni, 2023). In this advanced phase of digital culture, the magical does not simply persist; it is reconfigured, performed, and hybridized, returning in novel forms and expressive modalities. This is evident not only in the proliferation of magical, para- or pseudo-spiritual representations across serialized narratives, cinema, and video games, but more fundamentally in the ways media experiences are defined and lived, particularly through social media platforms, online environments, and generative artificial intelligence.
The new millennium has not diminished the need for meaning, mystery, or transcendence; it has rearticulated the dispositifs through which these are mediated. From this perspective, the contemporary resurgence of magic can be understood only if it is not reduced to “superstition,” but recognized as a cultural and medial form operating on at least two levels. On the one hand, magic functions as a resource for articulating and negotiating the deep tensions of contemporary subjectivity, in its relations with others as well as with techniques and the materiality of the world. On the other, it renders visible the magical roots of technology itself, inviting an understanding of media not merely as rational instruments of communication, but as infrastructures imbued with promises of revelation, action at a distance, the visualization of the invisible, and access to expanded forms of knowledge, what Umberto Eco described as “realizations of ancestral dreams.
Adopting the perspective of symbolic mediations as cultural devices that structure experience, meaning, and social identity (Ricœur, 1975; Geertz, 1973; Bourdieu, 1991), and in dialogue with scholarship on contemporary forms of the sacred (Houtman & Aupers, 2007), magic today appears as an active and mutable semiotic grammar shaped by the logics of digital media: iterability, aestheticisation, performativity, and immediacy. It also renders urgent a dialogue between semiotic tools and neo-materialist epistemology. The latter informs both a significant strand of scholarship on magic (as evidenced by the renewed engagement with authors such as Ernesto De Martino) and contemporary media studies (particularly in relation to the agency of technical objects, the archaeology of dispositifs, and the processes of co-constitution linking bodies, technologies, environments, and imaginaries). From this vantage point, the magical and the medial can be approached as overlapping fields, united by a shared attention to practices, to concrete mediations, and to the capacity of things to orient perception, social relations, and regimes of belief. Consider, in this respect, how enunciation with and through artificial intelligences increasingly assumes a collaborative, agentive, and predictive character, recalling traits historically attributed to magical actors.
This issue of Ocula aims to investigate the return of the magical in contemporary digital culture through a plurality of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives: media studies, anthropology, visual studies, and cultural analysis. The concept of magic will be understood not only in its pagan, esoteric, or ritual meanings, but as a symbolic technique, an imaginary technology capable of structuring experience of the world and of relationships within media culture.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
Magical origins of technology;
Magic between the sacred, the profane, and belief systems;
#WitchTok, digital covens, and the construction of magical identities on social media;
Neo-paganism and technopaganism;
New aesthetics of the esoteric: between glitch, digital interfaces, and occult femininity;
Filters, effects, and remixability;
Magic and artificial intelligence: algorithms as divinatory devices;
Cinema, television, and magic;
Feminism, women, and witches;
Religion, magic, and new materialism;
Networks and occult symbols: forms of participation and the collective construction of magical imaginaries;
Manifestation practices, self-determination, and other forms of self-help;
Tarot cards, crystals, spells, and other magical devices.


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Deadline
Abstract submission: May 31, 2026
Abstract acceptance: June 15, 2026
Article submission: August 31, 2026
Review feedback after double-blind peer review: September 30, 2026
Submission of revised articles: October 31, 2026
Publication: Winter 2026/2027

Abstracts must be sent jointly to the journal (redazione@ocula.it) and the two guest editors: Giulia Conti giulia.conti@unimore.it and Ruggero Eugeni ruggero.eugeni@unicatt.it

The abstract, excluding references, must not exceed 3,500 characters, including spaces, and must include: title, author name(s), email address(es), and institutional affiliation(s).

Accepted languages: Italian, English, French.


Information

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