Media-N, Journal of the New Media Caucus, is pleased to announce a Call for Papers for spring and fall 2014 editions.

  • Location: Media-N, Journal of the New Media Caucus - spring & fall 2014 editions,
  • Deadline: Nov 15 2013 at 12:00PM
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Media-N, Journal of the New Media Caucus, is pleased to announce a Call for Papers for spring and fall 2014 editions.

This is a single call for two consecutive editions on the theme of "Art and Networks," to be published spring and fall 2014 respectively. Below are details about each edition’s submission timeline and particular focus within the theme - READ ON!


TITLE OF THE EDITIONS
Art & Networks: Revealing, Critiquing and Composing Global Infrastructures” Edition One - Hardware —- Edition Two - Software

1) Edition One / Hardware
deadline for proposals: 11/15/13

2) Edition Two / Software
deadline for proposals: 06/15/14


GUEST EDITORS
Dr. Meredith Hoy & Dr. Kris Paulsen (Edition One - Hardware)
Kevin Hamilton & Terri Weissman (Edition Two - Software)

Media-N Editor-in-Chief
Pat Badani
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GENERAL DESCRIPTION Editions One & Two

“Art & Networks: Revealing, Critiquing and Composing Global Infrastructures” -
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.)
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Edition Two / Software
Co-Guest Editors:
Kevin Hamilton (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Terri Weissman (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

Whereas the first edition of this series on Art and Networks seeks papers that examine the physical components—cables, satellites, and other built structures—that make global telecommunication transmissions possible, the second edition seeks essays that focus on the seemingly invisible conventions, protocols, languages and knowledge structures that shape contemporary networked life. The storage and retrieval of digital files, multiple forms of instant communication, remote monitoring of international events, 6.5 trillion in daily foreign exchange transactions—all of these actions also depend on technologies that are intrinsically intangible: graphical user interfaces, norms of use,knowledge taxonomies, mathematical algorithms, and so on. While artists, scholars and critics of digital media have addressed these aspects of digital life as modes of representation, they have spent less time understanding how these intangible components function within larger flows of commerce and communication.

Part II of this series of Media-N thus seeks to address these issues by turning attention, for example, to the way the jpeg image compression format functions not only as a particular approach to visual phenomena, but also as a way of facilitating the flow of such phenomena between users. Or, how, for instance, have artists visualized the linguistic dynamics of online social space? What have we learned from artists about the influence of software development protocols and processes on everyday consumer experience? Visualization designers such as Wattenberg and Viegas showed us the knowledge structures and taxonomies at work over time in Wikipedia editing processes; who is doing the same for the filters at work in search algorithms? Artists such as Stephanie Rothenberg or Andrew Norman Wilson have brought to light the hands of labor in global digital trade—who else is making tangible the routinely intangible components of virtual exchange? We welcome submissions that address these or other related topics, histories, or critiques.


TIMELINE for Submission for Edition Two / Software
June 15, 2014: Deadline for submission of abstracts/proposals.
July 15, 2014: Notification of acceptance.
September 15, 2014: Deadline for submission of final papers.


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.)

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If you have questions about Media-N, please feel free to contact:
Pat Badani, Editor-in-Chief Media-N, Journal of the New Media Caucus
[email protected]

Media-N was established in 2005 to provide a forum for New Media Caucus members and non-members alike, featuring their scholarly research, artworks and projects. The New Media Caucus is a nonprofit, international membership organization that advances the conceptual and artistic use of digital media. Additionally, the NMC is a College Art Association Affiliate Society.
http://median.newmediacaucus.org/