[spectre] CFP: Edited Volume: Radical Media Art and Techno-Community

[Andreas Broeckmann LEU]

From: Erin Gordon
Date: Jan 18, 2026
Subject: CFP: Edited Volume: Radical Media Art and Techno-Community

Deadline: Apr 30, 2026

Reconstructing the Electronic Superhighway:
Radical Media Art and Techno-Community at the Margins of the Global Village.

Edited Volume, Abstracts Due April 30, 2026, Editors: Kelly Donahey and 
Erin Gordon, Submissions Portal: 
https://submit.kellydonahey.com/index.php/cfp/index.

In 1974, Nam June Paik proposed a new “Electronic Super Highway” to the 
Rockefeller Foundation, envisioning the construction of a 
technologically advanced, non-commercial television infrastructure to 
serve as both a public commons and a “springboard of unexpected new 
human activities.” Writing nearly a quarter century before the turn of 
the 21st century, he emphasized the need for artists to build hardware, 
physically intervene in network architectures, and challenge commercial 
interests—insisting on a dialectic of information and material 
infrastructure as a means to activate the utopian potentials of a 
technologically mediated community. Now, nearly a quarter into the 21st 
century, amid intensifying ecological crises, persistent digital 
divides, expanding systems of misinformation and surveillance, and a 
growing reliance on conflict minerals, Paik’s call resonates with 
renewed urgency. It reminds us of the enduring significance of artistic 
interventions in technology as a practice capable of reconstructing 
communities beyond the imaginary.

This edited volume seeks proposals for original, unpublished scholarly 
essays and artists’ texts exploring how artists have used 
telecommunications, broadcast and computing technologies, as well as 
other electronic media to build community—whether local or global—and 
challenge patterns of marginalization and exclusion from the mid-20th 
century onward. Echoing Ramesh Srinivasan’s vital question, “Whose 
global village?,” Reconstructing the Electronic Superhighway examines 
media art practices emerging from contexts in which “universal access” 
to technological media is bounded, uneven, or constrained, and considers 
the forms of community generated from these margins. The volume aims to 
recover artistic interventions in both emergent and legacy media, 
rethink the logics of critical infrastructures, and expand frameworks 
for studying artistic production and community formation.

How might artists construct or reconstruct the electronic superhighway 
for the digital age through tactical engagements with social media 
platforms, large language models, and cellular technologies—subverting 
and repurposing commercial mechanisms while refiguring community forms? 
How might art spaces and artists’ collectives support the creation and 
maintenance of decentralized mesh networks, LANs, or ISPs? How might new 
scholarly perspectives help us better understand and appreciate the 
technological, aesthetic, and social impact of artists whose work is 
marginalized, whether by present theoretical or geographical frameworks, 
failures of translation, the oversight of recent history, or narratives 
overdetermined by militarism and the global tech market?

Contributions may be speculative, theoretical, or historical and written 
from artistic, scholarly, or critical perspectives. We especially 
welcome interdisciplinary work informed by visual studies, science and 
technology studies, critical and aesthetic theory, or infrastructure 
studies, and transnational, national, or regionally grounded approaches 
that broaden the scope of media art studies.

Possible Themes:

- Globalization and the “global village,” including reassessments of 
Marshall McLuhan from the peripheries of the capitalist world system, 
for example within the contexts of imperialism, uneven development, 
transnational practices, and diasporic networks
- Artists’ work emerging from infrastructural inequities, including the 
use of alternative and appropriated technologies and networks, and 
strategies confronting resource extraction, energy consumption, and e-waste
- Histories of telematic, satellite-based, hybrid, televisual, and 
internet art practices in relation to the development of global media 
ecologies, community media networks, and technologically mediated 
communities
- Interventions in and alternatives to surveillance capitalism, 
platformization, and digital nationalism
- Social movements as techno-communities, including feminist, queer, 
Black, indigenous, and working-class approaches to media infrastructure, 
and the co-option, inversion, obfuscation, or refusal of institutional 
systems
- Latency, rupture, glitch, and other technological strategies for 
engaging with mediated presence

We are seeking proposals for scholarly essays (5,000–8,000 words) and 
artist statements (1,500-8,000 words) presenting new ideas, developments 
in media art, or contributions to art history and theory. We also 
welcome short-form interviews, oral histories, or conversations (1-3 
pages). Proposals should include a 350-500 word abstract, a brief 
biography (150 words), and any relevant institutional affiliations.

Please contact Kelly Donahey (kdonahey at uci.edu) or Erin Gordon 
(erin.gordon at utexas.edu) if you have further questions.


Reference / Quellennachweis:
CFP: Edited Volume: Radical Media Art and Techno-Community. In: 
ArtHist.net, Jan 18, 2026. <https://arthist.net/archive/51511>.