16.270 call for Unfoldings

From: Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk)
Date: Thu Oct 17 2002 - 02:05:12 EDT

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                   Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 270.
           Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                       www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                         Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu

             Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2002 06:49:11 +0100
             From: carolyn guertin <cguertin@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca>
             Subject: Call for works: Unfoldings

    Unfoldings: An Exhibition of Information Art and Architectures
    The Arts District, the City of Edmonton, Canada
    February 2003

              Unfoldings are intrinsic dimensions that open indefinitely outward,
    potentially encompassing an infinite expansion of space. Like an inflating
    balloon, the computer interface is also a phenomenon whose infinite writing
    surface is situated in ever-present temporal and incremental space,
    perpetually dividing itself to reveal new moments of present-tense textual
    time, and whose spatial dimensions are performed via the instantaneity of
    mouse clicks and real time navigation. A temporal surface like the
    interface is a self-contained discourse network and an organic system; such
    a system is also familiar to us in the guise of the body, a system that is
    both frame and material for its own performative narratives. This
    expression of embodied presence is the world we navigate in an electronic
    text. Virtual architectures call for a reunion of the mind and body in
    space-time to heal the rift that has existed since Ren Descartes tore them
    asunder. The text like the body rejects Cartesian dualism because the
    text-as-body and the body-as-text write themselves and their archi-traces
    as fluid expressions of the experiential and aesthetic realms.

              This kind of virtual architecture is an embodied fiction in both
    cyberspace and the new media arts that inhabits a metaphysical dimension, a
    dimension that allows us to insert ourselves -- like we do into memories.
    Both Marcos Novak and Elisabeth Grosz call for an architecture of excess
    for virtual space, one not contained or confined by the physical laws of
    the real. Architecture of excess is a term that has traditionally been used
    to describe imaginary architectures like Giovanni Battista Piranesi's
    prisons, the Carceri d'Invenzione, or Hieronymous Bosch's visions of Hell.
    Alternatively, Paul Virilio believes that there can no longer be
    architectures of excess in a virtual age because we have moved into the
    realm of 'post-architecture.' Paul Lunenfeld uses the term 'hybrid
    architecture' to describe incursions of the virtual in real space, and
    Marcos Novak uses the terms 'liquid architecture' and 'TransArchitecture'
    to describe the new structures of and intrinsic to cyberspace. Once
    architecture ceases to be material, there is nowhere to go but into virtual
    constructs. Media theorists Mark Taylor and Esa Saarinen call the new
    virtuality 'electrotecture.' Electrotecture, they say, blurs the boundaries
    between building and builder, between programme and programmer, between
    time and space. This latter term is perhaps the most useful and descriptive
    terminology for constructs inhabiting the digital domain. Such an intense
    preoccupation with architectures demonstrate that structures have not been
    left behind as Virilio's term suggests, but instead have indeed been
    redefined as more fluid, flexible, multiple, hybrid and complex, in part
    through the interpolation of the dimension of time as a living system into
    their forms.

              In virtual space, unlike Piranesi's Carceri, electrotectures are
    infinite. The fold or the click is the systemic in the expanding
    materiality of the somatic rooms of the interface. Unfoldings are dynamic
    acts, the process of navigation in information space, and traces of
    archi-writing contained therein. Unfoldings are both cartographic form and
    behavioural dynamic, active motion and embodied context. They are
    ultimately both the space of our interaction with the surface of the
    interface and our interactive engagement with the mnemonic gestures they
    represent and contain. Always operating within the framework of the visual,
    unfoldings are an irreducible element -- gesture and membrane, link and
    rupture -- between sensible codes.
    __________________________

              You are invited to submit your own interactive new media unfoldings
    to a show in the Arts District of the city of Edmonton, Canada in February
    2003. Preference will be given to original electronic works created
    specifically for this exhibit, but previously exhibited works will be
    considered. Submissions may be web-based or on CD-ROM or other portable
    media for on-site display in a public venue.
              The deadline for electronic or snail mail submissions dated no
    later than 15 December 2002. Send the work and/or its link along with a
    300-word abstract, biographical details, c.v. and/or website URL to:

    Carolyn Guertin, Curator
    Department of English
    University of Alberta
    3-5 Humanities Centre
    Edmonton AB T6G 2E5

    cguertin@ualberta.ca

    Please do not send works as e-mail attachments.

    ___________________________________________________
    Carolyn Guertin, Dept of English, University of Alberta, Canada
    E-Mail: cguertin@ualberta.ca; Voice: 780-438-3125
    Website: http://www.ualberta.ca/~cguertin/

    Assemblage, The Online Women's New Media Gallery, at trAce:
    http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/traced/guertin/assemblage.htm



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