Art as Social Practice: Technologies for Change

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.

An invaluable resource for students and scholars of art, technology, and new media, as well as artists interested in exploring these intersections.

xtine burrough is Professor and Area Head of Design and Creative Practice in the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication at The University of Texas at Dallas, where she directs LabSynthE. burrough is a hybrid artist who engages participatory audiences at the intersection of media art, remix, and digital poetry. She is the author of Foundations of Digital Art and Design with Adobe Creative Cloud, 2nd Edition, editor of Net Works: Case Studies in Web Art and Design, and co-editor of a series of books about remix studies.

Judy Walgren is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, and the Associate Director for the Michigan State School of Journalism, where she teaches classes in visual literacy, photography, and immersive media. Before pivoting to academia, Walgren worked with multiple media companies including the Dallas Morning News and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her research interrogates relationships between photography, media archives, and power structures. Her work explores socially engaged practices for visual storytellers.