CFP - Media-N -- Art & Networks

  • Location: Media-N, Journal of the College Art Association New Media Caucus,
  • Deadline: Nov 15 2013 at 12:00AM
  • outbound link ↱
Media-N CFP for Spring Edition 2014
Media-N, Journal of the New Media Caucus, is pleased to announce a Call for Papers for spring 2014 on the theme of “Art and Networks.”


“Art & Networks: Revealing, Critiquing and Composing Global Infrastructures” Edition One – Hardware
deadline for proposals: 11/15/13

Dr. Meredith Hoy & Dr. Kris Paulsen (Edition One – Hardware)
Media-N Editor-in-Chief – Pat Badani
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DESCRIPTION
“Art & Networks: Revealing, Critiquing and Composing Global Infrastructures” - Part 1, Hardware

Our telecommunications infrastructures are composed of multiple layers, and serve as grounds for conflict at multiple scales. To address networked infrastructure through art or scholarship is to make visible both the material, physical supports of everyday telecommunication, as well as its informational processes, its necessary protocols for organizing knowledge, sensation, and labor. As in all infrastructures and sociotechnical systems, these two layers – the physical and the informational, the hardware and the software – are interdependent, and result from simultaneous, sometimes even conflicting, interests at work in their construction. For 2014, across two consecutive editions, Media-N will explore how artists engage, visualize, study, and critique these processes of formation.
The Spring edition will focus on the physical structures of these channels, and the networks they construct; the Fall edition will address the knowledge protocols and epistemes necessary to networked information, and the archives that emerge. Both will explore the role of visualization in knowing our shared networks.
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Edition One / Hardware
Co-Guest Editors:
Dr. Meredith Hoy, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Dr. Kris Paulsen, The Ohio State University

Fiberoptic cables gird the globe; they span pylons, burrow underground, and snake across ocean floors to connect individual users in private homes. Satellites circle the earth, instantaneously bouncing signals through outer space. “Clouds” now wirelessly store and transmit data to dispersed users across a multiplicity of devices; they make information accessible to users in virtually any networked location. Data may be abstract, and “immaterial,” but physical hardware necessarily facilitates the flow of information. Given that the scale of these networks exceeds the scope of human vision by establishing connections across the globe and beyond, into extraterrestrial space and deep below the ocean and ground, the question emerges of how to make visible the kinds of connectivity provided by telecommunications hardware.
This edition of Media-N will explore how networks, as well as the data that travels through them, become visible and meaningful through artistic practices ranging from data visualization and sonification, to mapping, satellite video and photography, telerobots, and interactive cable systems. The technologies in question reconfigure distance and proximity, presence and absence, space and time. We seek to turn attention toward the physical hardware that subtends our mediated interactions, and to explore contemporary attempts to picture connectivity. The issue will bring together theorists, artists, and historians to analyze how particular forms of visuality and logics of connection result from different, technologically enabled approaches to global communications technologies. Proposed papers might take up the specifically “ecological turn” of contemporary media studies, which assesses the world in terms of systems, or conduct media archaeological investigations of the development of specific technologies and practices, or trace critical histories of networked art, among other possibilities.
TIMELINE for Submission for Edition One / Hardware:
November 15, 2013: Deadline for reception of abstracts/proposals.
December 15, 2013: Notification of acceptance.
February 15, 2014: Deadline for reception of final papers/artworks.

ABSTRACT GUIDELINES
Please send your submission proposal with the following information, by email to:
[email protected] AND [email protected]
with ‘Media-N Submission’ and your name(s) in the subject line.

Include your Email(s), Proposal Title, 300-500 word Proposal Description, up to 3 page Resume, and your Title/Affiliation (the institution/organization you work with ­ if applicable, or independent scholar/practitioner.)