Media Artivism: On the Archaeology and History of Digital Culture for Social Change
Deadline: 30 June 2023

Submissions to be published in Issue 33 (January 2024)

Call for Papers

The purpose of this special issue is to delve into the field of activism in media art from an archaeological approach and a digital-art-historical perspective, in order to understand the specific context in which media artivism emerged and how it has evolved until the present day. Despite the prosperity of international examples since the advent of digital technologies, scholarly studies have so far failed to grasp the relevance of this autogenous field for the development of media art and for the transdisciplinary understanding of how contemporary creators employ digital technology to tackle issues in a broader societal dimension.

From pioneering experiences to current practices, this call for papers is looking for contributions that explore the theories, trends, artworks and key figures in this field, especially those focused on their action/function in the public sphere. By establishing an epistemological framework along the lines of media archaeology and digital art history, fed by the study of a selection of case studies, we intend to highlight the role of media artivism in the framework of recent historical and societal developments, as well as its potentially leading role for behavioural and social change.

The field of media artivism is particularly relevant considering how artists are tackling societal issues through digital strategies and thus drawing attention to gender issues, environmental crime, greenwashing, racial discrimination, social injustices, political and economic corruption, abuse of power, invasive technologies, surveillance abuse, the digital divide, sustainable development, among many other topics. The issue will also explore the role of data visualization, immersive installations and interactive projects based on the use of new media and the internet as instruments for awareness-raising and social protest. Special attention will be paid to contemporary art practices based on hacktivist and intercreative procedures that aim to highlight or uncover realities in traditional media to expand the role of investigative journalism in the post-digital age.

The call for papers welcomes proposals by scholars with a background in digital and public humanities, internet culture, media studies, mediaart history and cybersociology, as well as those from other fields wishing to engage in the exploration of media artivism from a transdisciplinary perspective.

The editors of this special issue are two founding members of the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities (Ca’ Foscari University):

Carolina Fernández-Castrillo

Media archaeologist and transmedia digital literacy scholar at Carlos III University of Madrid (TECMERIN). European PhD from Sapienza University of Rome; Extraordinary PhD Award from Complutense University of Madrid; and Excellence Mention from Real Colegio Complutense at Harvard. Since 2009, she has been an associate researcher at ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. Over the last two decades, her contribution to media archaeology as the author of international lectures and several publications has gained remarkable recognition, for instance at New York University, the School of Creative Media (CityU of Hong Kong) and Yale University. She is also a member of the organizing committee of the MediaArtHistories conference series.

Diego Mantoan

Digital, public and contemporary art historian at the University of Palermo. He obtained his PhD magna cum laude at the Freie Universität in Berlin. His monograph The Road to Parnassus was longlisted for the 2016 Berger Prize and he received the European Commission’s Seal of Excellence in Research. He is a founding member of the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities and a member of The Ecological Imperative at Universität Bern. He was a visiting fellow at NYU Tandon, Warwick University and Sotheby’s Institute of Art, as well as assistant director at the Venice Biennale. He collaborated with the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and developed the digital archives of Douglas Gordon (Berlin), the Estate of Sigmar Polke (Cologne) and the Julia Stoschek Collection (Düsseldorf).



Topics

This special issue will focus on the study of a new phenomenon in internet cultures and, thus, on the need to assess recent changes in how media archaeology and digital art history can establish a useful canon to enrich the methodologies of digital and public humanities for social change. We are calling for proposals containing theoretical reflections, historical reconstructions, technological analyses, and specific case studies of media artivism, including:

Investigatory art: beyond investigative journalism; immersive installations and interactive documentaries.
Video art: audiovisual performances, video essays, video installations, expanded cinema and post-media experiments.
Social guerrilla campaigns: unconventional marketing strategies, exemplary political campaigns and subversive advertisement.
Creative appropriation as activism: remix practices and critical digital intertextuality.
Culture jamming: video clips, trailers and mash-ups.
Networked culture: social media, transmedia storytelling, memes, video games and user-generated content.
Hacktivism: data activism and expanded information.
Digital innovation and activism: artificial intelligence, machine learning, virtual reality and the metaverse.


Submission process

To submit an article, create an account on the Artnodes website and follow the submission instructions. You can review the author guidelines and submission checklist at https://artnodes.uoc.edu/about/submissions/.



Queries

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