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:[email protected] AND [email protected] 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.) 
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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:[email protected] AND [email protected] 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.)