Reconstructing the Electronic Superhighway:
Radical Media Art and Techno-Community at the Margins of the Global Village.

Edited Volume,
Abstracts Due April 30, 2026,
Editors: Kelly Donahey and Erin Gordon,
Submissions Portal: https://submit.kellydonahey.com/index.php/cfp/index.

In 1974, Nam June Paik proposed a new “Electronic Super Highway” to the Rockefeller Foundation, envisioning the construction of a technologically advanced, non-commercial television infrastructure to serve as both a public commons and a “springboard of unexpected new human activities.” Writing nearly a quarter century before the turn of the 21st century, he emphasized the need for artists to build hardware, physically intervene in network architectures, and challenge commercial interests—insisting on a dialectic of information and material infrastructure as a means to activate the utopian potentials of a technologically mediated community. Now, nearly a quarter into the 21st century, amid intensifying ecological crises, persistent digital divides, expanding systems of misinformation and surveillance, and a growing reliance on conflict minerals, Paik’s call resonates with renewed urgency. It reminds us of the enduring significance of artistic interventions in technology as a practice capable of reconstructing communities beyond the imaginary.

This edited volume seeks proposals for original, unpublished scholarly essays and artists’ texts exploring how artists have used telecommunications, broadcast and computing technologies, as well as other electronic media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 Kelly Donahey (kdonaheyuci.edu) or Erin Gordon (erin.gordonutexas.edu) if you have further questions.