[Reader-list] [X-Post] CFP: Theme: Art and Networks

[A. Mani]

_____________________________________
Subject: Media-N Journal Call for Papers | Spring and Fall 2014 editions

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
………………………………………….

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.

……………………………………….

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: Meredith.Hoy at UMB.edu AND Paulsen.20 at OSU.edu 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.)

……………………………………..

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: kham at illinois.edu AND tweissma at illinois.edu 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.)

……………………………………………………………………

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
Medianjournal.badani at gmail.com

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/

_____________________________________________________________





Best

A. Mani



A. Mani
CU, ASL, AMS, CLC, CMS
http://www.logicamani.in