Transitus issue 2: Embodiment and affect in a transitional moment in illustration research

This editorial gathers together a transitional moment within the field of illustration research and pedagogy, as well as within larger daily contexts that presume our physical transaction with screen technologies as interfaces to practices of illustration. Curiosity comes through as a motivation for our movement as bodies through time and space. We find many examples in contemporary cultural production, including and especially in examples of illustration, of a turn towards the body and its senses as being a more aware, more divergent and more vibrant site of reception and potential. Underlining what I have noticed as the reckoning of embodiment that characterizes current directions in illustration practice, research and pedagogy, I introduce Affect Theory as a backdrop to graphic medicine, but it is a theory that also seems compatible with other examples of embodied illustration. As it relates to our theme of 'transitus', crossing over is, I propose, an embodied action, a 'shimmering passage' through which we journey towards an 'ethico-aesthetics', a 'bloom space' of the body's and illustration's potentials.