The 5th International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology, Renew, will be hosted by RIXC and held in Riga, Latvia, October 8 – 11, 2013, coinciding with the international festival for new media culture Art+Communication. It will host three days of keynotes, panels and poster sessions on the histories of networked digital, electronic and technological media arts.

Besides general topics of the call, the theme of Renew, Media Art History 2013 addresses current tendencies in sustainability quests from various perspectives. As media art is based on increasingly out-dating technology and it is dependent on energy (electricity) the conference will discuss sustainable approaches towards the issues of producing, preserving and representing media  artworks – how to ’renew’ them through both – tools and histories. By focusing on networked media arts, the Renew conference will cover a broad range of topics to include early communication art (mail, fax, radio, satellite, etc.), net.art and net.radio, open source and network culture, locative media and wireless communities, hybrid networks and electromagnetic art, and last but not least – artistic investigations in sustainability, and future visions of art within the convergence of information and energy technologies.

Proposed topics:

* Histories of networked art and media technologies

* Archiving, preserving and representing new media art

* Media archaeology

* Paradigm shift – from new media to post-media conditions in art

* Writing histories of media art across Eastern Europe and the Baltics

* Revising the geospatial aspects – for writing comparative media art histories

* Resilient networks and emerging ‘techno-ecological’ art practices

* Multifarious potential of expression in media art – ‘new imagery’
of our times