EDITORIAL STATEMENT

Pat Badani

Editor-in-Chief

With the thought of engaging art and scholarship around questions related to network infrastructures, Media-N is dedicating consecutive spring and fall 2014 editions to that theme. As a series, the two editions explore how artists and scholars engage, visualize, study, and critique telecommunication infrastructures and the processes of knowledge formation upon which they depend.

The current spring issue titled Art and Infrastructures: Hardware examines the physical components (cables, satellites, and other built structures) that make global telecommunication transmissions possible. Guest Editors Meredith Hoy and Kris Paulsen, map out the topic by way of eleven international contributors, including: Nicole Starosielski, John Harwood, Tung-Hui Hu, Brian Michael Murphy, Brooke Belisle, David Fodel and George Millward, Ashley Ferro-Murray, Ned Prutzer, Billy Friebele, Paul Taylor, and Joana Moll. These authors take on multiple theoretical positions to examine the materiality of network infrastructure and the various ways in which bodies move through networked space. Kevin Hamilton, Media-N’s supporting Associate Editor for this edition, has offered invaluable guidance throughout the editorial process.

Media-N further enhances this edition with a collection of timely Papers, Reports and Reviews. In this section of the journal, Marie-Pier Boucher’s essay Urban Procedures: Small Pragmatics of Collective Space speculates on how urban media actions can operate a spatial distribution capable of activating new forms of collectivities. Next, in the essay The Political Portrait in the Age of Protocol: Lincoln Schatz’s The Network, Michael Maizels examines Schatz’s work based on the theoretical framework laid out in Alexander Galloway’s Protocol and the argument that political power in the digital age is shaped as a center-less network. Geoffrey Alan Rhodes follows with his AR on AR: Future Museums Now – Augmented Reality Musings, an account on his series of ‘performance lectures’ in which Rhodes uses new Augmented Reality technology to mediate lectures in real time. Swiss artists and scholars Flavia Caviezel and Sabine Hagmann have engaged in a Skype conversation that they transcribe for Media-N with the aim of sharing thoughts on Modes of Collaboration in interdisciplinary research. Finally, Carrie Ida Edinger in her Discussion Resumed from the Art2Make Exhibit reviews an exhibition held during CAA (Chicago) that was part of curatorial and creative research projects by the collective v1b3.

Pat Badani, Editor-in-Chief