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From the early stages of its development, New Media Art readily adopted a variety of means of artistic engagement and expression that aim at serving modes of utopian social being: from multi-modal collaboration to public participation and from open software applications to hacktivism, the germs of leftist political thought seem to abound in the art of the Digital Age. Prompted by the economic crisis, New Media Art appears to increasingly employ the tools provided by new technologies in order to penetrate all aspects of global social living and propagate such apparatuses as catalysts for socioeconomic change. New Media artworks and art projects have gradually formed a common practice whose objectives allude to utopian theories of social organization lying closer to certain visions of communism, direct democracy and anarchism, rather than to the realities of neoliberal capitalism within which new media are produced and predominantly operate.
The Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) is inviting proposals from academics, critical theorists and artists for an issue investigating the relevance of communist utopianism to New Media Art’s ideological dispositions. Relevant areas of interest addressed by the issue’s contributors could include, but are by no means limited to:
• Art, technology and social media
• The rise of New Economies and the rise New Media Art
• The working class and affective labour in data capitalism
• New media artworks as commodities: “use” and “exchange” values
• Digital Art and symbolic or cultural capital
• New Media Art’s reaction to the global economic crisis (2008-2012)
• Legal issues and new concepts of intellectual property in Digital Art
• The online democratization of art
• The art of protest: from anti-globalization to the “Facebook Revolutions” and the “Occupy” movement
• The role of New Media Art in ex-communist countries
• Hacktivism as art: a revolution for the Digital Age?
• Tactical Media and its progeny
• The institutionalization of radical New Media Art
• Histories of leftist aesthetics
Through the synthesis of such diverse points of view, the issue will attempt to demystify whether and to what extent the art of the Digital Age is, or could be, the result of the seemingly paradox combination of capitalism’s products and communism’s visions.
http://www.leoalmanac.org/red-art-lea-call-for-papers/
Senior Editors: Lanfranco Aceti (LEA Editor-in-Chief), Julian Stallabrass (Courtauld Institute of Art) and Susanne Jaschko (prozessagenten)
Editor: Bill Balaskas (Royal College of Art)
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