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CFP Edited Volume: Reconstructing the Electronic Superhighway: Radical Media Art and Techno-Community

Type: Calls For Papers [View all]
Posted by: Self-Edited
Deadline: Thu, April 30th, 2026

Editors: Kelly Donahey, PhD and Erin Gordon
Consulting Editor: Helena Shaskevich, PhD
Submissions Portal: https://submit.kellydonahey.com/index.php/cfp/index
Abstract Deadline: April 30, 2026

This edited volume seeks proposals for original, unpublished scholarly essays and artists’ texts exploring how artists have used telecommunications, broadcast and computing technologies, as well as other electronic media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 us via email if you have any questions. 

Posted on Wed, March 18th, 2026
Expires on Thu, April 30th, 2026

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