Reconstructing the Electronic Superhighway: Radical Media Art and Techno-Community at the Margins of the Global Village
“Whose global village?” asks Ramesh Srinivasan of the inequalities characteristic of “ubiquitous” computing in his eponymous 2017 book. The scholar reconstitutes Marshall McLuhan’s famed notion of a global village forged by telecommunications media in the shadow of the digital divide. Srinivasan’s question of how peoples othered by an infrastructure built for wealthy Western consumers might otherwise forge techno-community is only more urgent in the wake of a global pandemic; communications blackouts; and heavy reliance on conflict minerals. Yet, it is a question that artists have sought to answer since at least the mid-20th century.