This edition of Media-N takes shape around the theme of appropriation to examine some of the diverse strategies that contemporary electronic artists deploy while placing “found, sampled and stolen” media and information in a new or different context.

Guest Editor Joshua Rosenstock has gathered essays by an international roster of practitioners, theorists and curators in order to uncover new analytic positions. Mark Amerika, Sarah Cook, Marialaura Ghidini, Steve Gibson, Margot Herster, Alexia Mellor, Eduardo Navas, Cornelia Sollfrank, and Grant Taylor put forward multifaceted perspectives on the history and practice of appropriation in New Media; their collected works contribute to the larger discourses of art history and history of technology in the 21st Century.  Editorial Board member Kevin Hamilton’s input has been instrumental in his role of supporting Associate Editor for this edition.

Media-N further enhances this edition with a collection of timely REVIEWS-REPORTS & PAPERS. In this section of the journal, Pat Badani and Andrea Polli engage in a QA interview to offer an overview about “ISEA2012:Machine Wilderness – Re-envisioning Art, Technology and Nature,” held in September, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This is followed by Andres Burbano’s summation of presentations and events at “The Latin American Forum” – a Focus Area at ISEA2012. In Chicago, by way of a QA interview, Patrick Lichty and Julieta Aguilera Rodríguez consider “Moon Lust,” an Augmented Reality Art Exhibition at the Adler Planetarium, an astronomy museum. Further, we publish three essays. Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico survey how portable technological devices radically enable opportunities for the personalization of urban space and the understanding of place in their essay “Ubiquitous Infoscapes: new forms of awareness in contemporary cities.”Andrea Varela, in her article “MAGnetismo – gendered unspoken imprint in a second life,” discusses a project that she directs in Argentina, bringing the community into relationship with textiles and technology. Finally,Jennifer Way, presents “Women Art Technology,” a paper analyzing her project by the same name – an ongoing ethnography of oral history interviews aspiring to enlarge the scope of art and technology research with first-person statements from women who discuss their definitions –and interpretations– of technology.

Pat Badani