Spontaneous Combustion! Performance and Social Networking in Digital Art :: New Media Caucus Sponsored Panel at College Art Association, Los Angeles, 2012 :: Call for Papers — Deadline: November 1, 2011.

This panel will explore the dynamics of social networking sites and open source software as it is being utilized in postmodern digital art practice. Currently, artists are collaborating, networking, performing and creating interventions in social, political and conceptual art utilizing frameworks created under a variety of contexts.

Recent trends in technology have created avenues for digital arts in the realm of locative geography and internet-based works to be generated and experienced outside the gallery proper, creating new venues and strategies for ephemeral and performance based work. We’ll address spontaneous and scripted artworks of a performative and process-based nature, utilizing web-based technology in a variety of contexts. Working individually or collectively, the rules of engagement with the audience vary, as do approaches in technique and documentation.

Some questions the panel will consider:

-What makes a performance piece successful or unsuccessful?
-Who decides?
-How are artists redefining the use of technology to subvert current or expected outcomes?
-In what ways is digital and net-based work performative and public?
-How is work in new and public digital formats being courted (or ignored) by galleries, collectors, press, critics?
-What mean for maintaining or archiving this type of work have been designed (and implemented)?
-What strategies are been used to identify media which can exist in perpetuity?

If you have any questions of queries please feel free to contact panel chair, Preston Poe , Assistant Professor of New Media, and Director of The Electronic Gallery at Salisbury University, Salisbury, Maryland.