This book integrates the three fields critical theory, digital art making, and pedagogy, drawing from scholarship and practices of new media, social practice and community-based arts interventions, and arts education pedagogy. With a collection of essays from an international group of authors, we guide readers through steps artists and art educators use to explore digital media, using new media art making to enable voices and interrupt power structures. The three sections of formation, co-construction, and intervention through critical digital practice, provide a survey of current research in new media art pedagogy and social practice. The first section explores interaction techniques, sound technology, 3D printing, pedagogy as sociomaterial, and data visualization as forms of critical digital media. The second section demonstrates examples of social media as means to engage communities and digital art making to critically investigate citizenship, local and international issues, and bring together intergenerational conversation. The last section offers examples of new media art practices addressing the sociopolitical status quo to empower socially disadvantaged and relegated groups of people.


Our collection offers an important survey to university new media art and social practice courses to show the range of ways media arts technology can be used in art practice.