“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. “Consider: co-creating non-imperialistic, multi-cultural or domestic agendas for community or global scale aesthetic endeavors,” write feminist artists Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz in their 1984 manifesto for their Electronic Cafe Network Project that linked marginalized Los Angeles’ neighborhoods by computer. That same year, pioneering artist Nam June Paik rethought the satellites used for surveillance as the medium of creative collaboration in Good Morning, Mr. Orwell.

Proposed by scholars of American art history, this panel seeks to de-center the discussion of media art away from NFTs, AI, and VR towards how marginalized artists within and outside the United States have used technologies to forge communities in a different image. Inversely, how might these communities inform new technologies that resist existing patterns of marginalization?

We invite proposals that take both speculative and historical approaches to these questions. We especially encourage proposals that look beyond the United States, and the use of telecommunications to other modes of techno-community formation.