From New Media to Old Utopias: ‘Red’ Art in Data Capitalism?, Leonardo Electronic Almanac

The Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) is inviting proposals from academics, critical theorists and artists for an issue investigating the relevance of communist utopianism to New Media Art’s ideological dispositions. Relevant areas of interest addressed by the issue’s contributors could include, but are by no means limited to:

• Art, technology and social media
• The rise of New Economies and the rise New Media Art
• The working class and affective labour in data capitalism
• New media artworks as commodities: “use” and “exchange” values
• Digital Art and symbolic or cultural capital
• New Media Art’s reaction to the global economic crisis (2008-2012)
• Legal issues and new concepts of intellectual property in Digital Art
• The online democratization of art
• The art of protest: from anti-globalization to the “Facebook Revolutions” and the “Occupy” movement
• The role of New Media Art in ex-communist countries
• Hacktivism as art: a revolution for the Digital Age?
• Tactical Media and its progeny
• The institutionalization of radical New Media Art
• Histories of leftist aesthetics

Through the synthesis of such diverse points of view, the issue will attempt to demystify whether and to what extent the art of the Digital Age is, or could be, the result of the seemingly paradox combination of capitalism’s products and communism’s visions.

Senior Editors: Lanfranco Aceti (LEA Editor-in-Chief), Julian Stallabrass (Courtauld Institute of Art) and Susanne Jaschko (prozessagenten)
Editor: Bill Balaskas (Royal College of Art)