Prototypes: Artist Information Strategies

From Tucumán Arde, in 1968 that sought to address the governmental hypocrisy and negligence that plagued the region of Tucumán, Argentina, to Group Material, a group of conceptual artists active between 1979 and 1996 in NYC who created nearly fifty projects designed to encourage community oriented public discussions– artists and artists collectives have engaged in ‘excess information circuits’ to counter censorship and oppressive regimes. In existing discourse, such attempts to disseminate counter information have been primarily discussed in terms of their interdisciplinary resistance strategies, protest art, or socially engaged practice. 

This panel proposes a start to re-contextualizing these initiatives as prototypes for new systems of disseminating information – and in the process their forging of new organizational strategies and new innovative visual mediums. Through a reconsideration of these activities as promoting new organizational systems, this panel seeks to surface a potential alternate narrative to conceptual and performance art practices from the 1960s to the 1990s that prioritize deconstructing institutional hierarchies and systems of distribution. We are specifically requesting papers that investigate artists who have proposed prototypes aimed at navigating the negotiation of identity and the production of culture through alternative forms of systemic organization and the dissemination of information. Through this lens we will examine the following contradictions: centre vs. decentring, destruction vs. reclamation, nation versus community, and the individual versus the collective. We are especially interested in 20-minute papers that address mass media, information sharing, systems, bureaucratic structures, guerilla journalism, archives, performance, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Katherine Jackson, Utah Valley University, kjackson@uvu.edu

Wylie Schwartz, State University of New York at Cortland, wylie.schwartz@cortland.edu