With a focus on socially engaged art practices in the twenty-first century, this book explores how artists use their creative practices to raise consciousness, form communities, create change, and bring forth social impact through new technologies and digital practices.
Suzanne Lacy’s Foreword and section introduction authors Anne Balsamo, Harrell Fletcher, Natalie Loveless, Karen Moss, and Stephanie Rothenberg present twenty-five in-depth case studies by established and emerging contemporary artists including Kim Abeles, Christopher Blay, Joseph DeLappe, Mary Beth Heffernan, Chris Johnson, Rebekah Modrak, Praba Pilar, Tabita Rezaire, Sylvain Souklaye, and collaborators Victoria Vesna and Siddharth Ramakrishnan. Artists offer firsthand insight into how they activate methods used in socially engaged art projects from the twentieth century and incorporated new technologies to create twenty-first century, socially engaged, digital art practices. Works highlighted in this book span collaborative image-making, immersive experiences, telematic art, time machines, artificial intelligence, and physical computing. These reflective case studies reveal how the artists collaborate with participants and communities, and have found ways to expand, transform, reimagine, and create new platforms for meaningful exchange in both physical and virtual spaces.
About xtine burrough
xtine engages participatory audiences at the intersection of media art, remix, and digital poetry. Her creative practice rests on the communicative power of art-making as a vehicle for exploring the boundaries between humans and the technologies they create, embody, and employ. Her practice is iterative; it is conceptual and poetic. She collaborates within and outside the university with diverse populations from students to virtual factory workers in projects that yield multiple layers for various forms of participation in the creation of poetic moments of collaborative meaning-making. Strategically, she archives her work and process, and articulates the relationships between what she makes and does with how she thinks about technology and culture in articles, chapters, and books. burrough uses remix and appropriation as strategies for activism and speaking back to structures of power; and she has edited volumes and portfolio sections for other artists to write, reflect on, expose, and archive their practices.
xtine received a commission as part of "Data/Set/Match" at the Photographers’ Gallery, London (2020); a microgrant from the Nasher Sculpture Center (2019); and grant funding from the Puffin Foundation (2018), Humanities Texas (2017), and California Humanities (2015). She received a Terminal Net Art Award (2011), a UK Big Lottery commission developed by Cornerhouse for the Abandon Normal Devices and Looping the Loop Festivals (2010); and she is a 13th Annual (2009) Webby Award Honoree in the Weird category. Her 2005 project, Delocator.net was positively reviewed in a wide range of media outlets including newspapers, radio, television, and film.
As an author, x has written, edited, and co-edited several books including Art as Social Practice: Technologies for Change (burrough and Walgren, 2022), The Routledge Handbook to Digital Humanities and Remix Studies (Navas, Gallagher, burrough, 2020), Keywords in Remix Studies (Navas, Gallagher, burrough, 2018), The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies (Navas, Gallagher, burrough, 2014), Foundations of Digital Art and Design with Adobe Creative Cloud (burrough, 2013 and second edition in 2019) and Net Works: Case Studies in Web Art and Design (burrough, 2011). She was the editor of the Visual Communication Quarterly (January 2015- January 2019).
A Professor and Area Head in the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication at UT Dallas, burrough directs LabSynthE, a laboratory for the creation of synthetic and electronic poetry.
Margaretha Haughwout collaborates with humans, and the more-than-human, across technologies and ecologies, gesturing to possible worlds — worlds that generate abundance, presence and relationship, and antagonize regimes of private property. Her work manifests as speculative fabulation, intervention, participatory event, walking tour, experimental pedagogy, installation, and as biological process. Margaretha’s active collaborations include the Coven Intelligence Program, with efrén cruz cortés: a coven that uncovers revolutionary ecologies between witches, plants and machines; the Guerrilla Grafters, with Ian Pollock and Tara Hui: who graft fruit bearing branches onto non-fruit bearing, ornamental street trees in the urban environment; Ruderal Witchcraft with Oliver Kellhammer: considering of set of practices specific to planetary, weedy natures that work their way at edges and interstices of public and private property, and which are entangled with a range of other human and non-human outcasts of capitalist modernity; and the annual Grafters X Change, where bioregional eco-artists and fruit tree enthusiasts continue the work toward abundant Food Forest Futures.
