[spectre] CFP: Leonardo, Issue "Art + Electric Light"

[Andreas Broeckmann]

From: Maggie Bell
Date: Mar 15, 2025
Subject: CFP: Leonardo, Issue "Art + Electric Light"

Deadline: Jun 2, 2025

Since the mid-19th century electric light has become increasingly 
essential to daily life, from nation-spanning power grids to the glow of 
smartphones. This often-precarious reliance on artificial illumination 
has long attracted the attention of artists, scientists, and engineers, 
giving rise to collaborative works that explore the aesthetic, 
conceptual, and affective possibilities of electric light through 
technological innovation. Such experiments began soon after the advent 
of electricity as artists, designers, and illumination engineers 
contended with new light-emitting technologies that embody and express 
light’s multifaceted roles as a technological form, an artistic medium, 
and a rich symbol for ingenuity and, indeed, enlightenment. Electric 
light remains a provocative point of intersection for art, science, and 
technology, especially as artists and engineers grapple with 
accelerating climate change and inequitable access to energy. Taking a 
long view of the twentieth century, we seek contributions that bring 
forth new perspectives on artificial illumination as a historical and 
contemporary conduit of artistic, social, and scientific dialogue. 
Themes include but are not limited to:

- Electric light as an artistic medium: Building on expanded definitions 
of media and mediation (focused, for example, on air and water), how has 
artificial illumination served as both an artistic medium and means for 
creating new types of media environments? What can works of art that use 
illumination technologies contribute to key themes—such as 
communication, distribution, and transmission—that cross media studies 
and engineering discourse?
- Electric light and the environment: How have artists, at times in 
collaboration with scientists and engineers, used light to engage 
questions about climate change, the risks of mass energy consumption, 
and more sustainable energy futures?
- Electric light and infrastructural contingency: How does light’s 
absence—for example, in contexts shaped by limited, contingent, or 
failing electric infrastructure—shape artistic practice, and how do such 
practices challenge assumptions about the smooth functioning of 
infrastructure and privileged notions of access?
- Electric light and the body: How has electric light been used to 
understand, visualize, aestheticize, objectify, or torment the body? How 
have artists and scientists used artificial light to produce 
physiological and psychological effects, and to what ends? Does the 
artistic medium of electric light create opportunities (or challenges) 
for accessibility?
- Ethics and practices of conserving light-based art: What are best 
practices for conserving works of art that rely on illumination 
technologies that will inevitably fail? What are some of the 
technological and ethical challenges in doing this work? What might art 
conservation demonstrate about the broader challenges of infrastructural 
maintenance?

Submission word count: 2,500-5,000
Submission deadline: June 2, 2025
Submission guidelines: 
https://leonardo.info/preparing-your-materials-journals#man

Guest editors: Brian R. Jacobson, Maggie Bell; contact via 
editor at leonardo.info


Reference / Quellennachweis:
CFP: Leonardo, Issue "Art + Electric Light". In: ArtHist.net, Mar 15, 
2025. <https://arthist.net/archive/44809>.