August 10, 2006
Free Press
Call for Participation
This summer and fall you are invited to contribute to the creation of an open-access publishing house, a Free Press, to be launched at Röda Sten contemporary art center in Göteborg, Sweden. A project of artist Sal Randolph, Free Press will accept all kinds of writing from the public; contributions in any language can be as short as a single word or as long as an encyclopedia and can include manifestos, statements, documentations, studies, stories, recipes, poems and whatever you can imagine.
"Even in the age of the internet, book publishing is a walled garden where editors and commercial interests filter out most of what is written," says Randolph. "To publish is to 'make public,' and the published materials of the world create their own kind of public space, a city of books where readers and writers are citizens. Free Press aims to open up access to that public space. Like any city, Free Press is bound to include both ugliness and beauty, though the definitions of each will certainly differ."
All participating manuscripts will be published as printed books in the Free Press series, available in the project's library and reading room at Röda Sten, where events and discussions will also take place. Additional copies will be placed on shelves in local bookstores and libraries. Readers will be able to download copies from the website and order them at cost from an internet book printer.
Free Press builds on several earlier projects by the artist -- in particular, Free Words, where 3000 copies of a free book were infiltrated onto the shelves of bookstores and libraries by a worldwide network of volunteers, Opsound, a gift economy of music, and Free Biennial / Free Manifesta, in which the form of an art biennale was appropriated and re-imagined to create large open-participation exhibitions of free art in the public spaces of New York and Frankfurt am Main, Germany. In her work, Randolph explores the effects of gifts and gift-economies in the creation of social architectures.
The Free Press exhibition will take place from September 17 - October 20, 2006 at Röda Sten.
Free Press: Call for Participation :: Free Press is looking for writing of all kinds - any language, any style, genre or subject matter, experimental or traditional, unpublished or previously published.
Manifestos, artists statements and conceptual/experimental texts are especially welcomed, as well as writing about gifts and gift economies, open systems, freedom of expression, censorship, surveillance, intellectual property, the commons & the public domain, anarchy, cooperation, political philosophy, alternative economies, public space, urbanism, situationism & psychogeography, conceptual, performance, and participatory art, graffiti and street art, distributed creativity, social software, virtual worlds, open source, happenings, the 1960s, the future, utopian and postutopian visions.
All material included in the Free Press project will be released under Creative Commons licenses which will allow the texts to be printed and freely shared.
Deadlines: Texts will be accepted through the Free Press website starting August 1, 2006 continuing through the end of the exhibition on October 20. However, if you wish your text to appear in the gallery, please allow for publication time (2-4 weeks) and send it as soon as possible, certainly before the end of September. If you want your book to be there at the opening (September 17), send your text now!
For guidelines and more information please visit: http://freewords.org/freepress/you/info/help
About Röda Sten
Röda Sten is a cultural center in Göteborg, Sweden. Röda Sten is also a cultural landmark which lies on the sea entrance to the city and is a popular port of call for many who take a stroll on the banks of the harbour. Once housing the huge industrial boiler, Röda Sten today is an exeptional centre of the arts. It entices and fascinates with i's enormous dynamic space and opportunity to work large scale. The outside of the building is a zone for the graffiti artists of the city while within the building remnants of past graffiti is preserved. This unconventional exhibition space sets the scene for daring, ground breaking explorations.
Posted by jo at August 10, 2006 03:42 PM
