Call for Papers: Mainframe Experimentalism (book)

CFP: Submissions for book on experimental arts and mainframe computing in 1960s and 70s

Mainframe Experimentalism: early digital computing and the experimental arts, edited by Douglas Kahn and Hannah Higgins.

We invite proposals for an interdisciplinary collection on the encounter of artists, musicians, poets and writers, media and filmmakers working within avant-garde, experimental and artistically innovative traditions with mainframe computers and institutionally-bound digital technologies during the 1960 and 1970s.

We are interested in three classes of materials: (1) substantive accounts of artistic engagements, critical motivations and contexts, institutional and collaborative settings within the social, political and cultural transformations of the period; (2 discussions of representations of computing during the period by individuals who would be of direct interest to artists, and (3) original documents, including unrealized plans.

Topics might include the digital work of John Whitney, Jackson MacLow, Stan Vanderbeek, John Cage and Jerry Hiller’s HPSCHD, OULIPO-related computer literature, among many others.

The editors have already assembled papers by Benjamin Buchloh (Columbia University) on Alison Knowles’ House of Dust poem, Hannah Higgins (University of Illinois-Chicago) on the intermedia aspects of the House of Dust, Douglas Kahn (University of California-Davis) on James Tenney at Bell Labs, Christoph Cox (Hampshire University) on Alvin Lucier’s North American Time Capsule, Owen Smith (University of Maine) on Dick Higgins’ Computers for the Arts, and Edward Shanken (Savannah College of Art and Design).

Please send 600 word proposals for essays of approximately 50,000 characters (including spaces) and/or publication of documents by July 1, 2005, to Hannah Higgins Department of Art History, University of Illinois at Chicago, or Douglas Kahn , Program in Technocultural Studies, university of California, Davis.