January 23, 2007
New Forms Festival 2007: Re·Use
Call for Proposals
Call for Proposals: New Forms Festival 2007 :: The New Forms Festival is an annual cross-disciplinary festival exploring installation, performance, music, film, and electronic arts.
The theme for NFF07 is Re·Use. To use something again, often for a different purpose and usually as an alternative to throwing it out. NFF 07 looks at the ideas of reuse in the media arts. These forms have been able to come from different areas all around us. Whether involving the recycling of equipment, the change in its use, reprogramming material, the sample and mash-up of sound/images and reconstruction of ideas; the concept of reuse has become one of the major entities behind invigorating, changing, and growing media and electronic arts.
Over history art has always seen recontextualization at its very core. Warhol once asked if there was ever really an original idea. Shakespearean tales become modern films, ancient sounds become electronic music anthems. Pop culture drives home sounds and imagery that have changed, grown, and evolved over time. Within this we have seen our cultures mix, grow, and shape shift as ideas get recontextualized and reapproapriated from generation to generation, and culture to culture.
For Re:Use NFF is looking for pieces that challenge these models and trends, recognizing shifts that have taken place as well as new and innovative works that re:use works on formats and in ways not yet seen. As the amount of information we receive on a daily basis increases at a pace far faster that at any other time in history, NFF 07 will become a platform for this mixed media world, and a indicator of what might lie ahead in the years to come.
NFF EXHIBITION 07: Re-Use: Everything Knows Itself
The world is round.- Gertrude Stein
Clocks are thinking, Earth is spinning, people are ticking...
Furthering the New Forms Festival’s 2007 direction of exploring things unseen the exhibition will centre on the theme of re-constructing, re-shaping and re-mixing the already extant. The aim of this reincarnation is to reflect the sameness and the difference of things revealed by repetition, iteration, rhythm and phase.
Sameness requires difference; the very regularity of a beat, of drumming, can be enhanced and overwritten. The second repetition is invariantly different then the first by being second. Difference resolves into more complex kinds of sameness.
We are interested in form as much as content. We shall invite works that are spare, astringent, and display a simplicity of means coupled with transparency of technique. Works purged of metaphor and stripped down to their most fundamental features. "Less is more, more is less. The eye is a menace to clear sight." [Ad Reinhardt]. We would like to show self-contained works that shed light on the underlying systematic action of their construction, exhibiting regularity of behavior in the elements they use. We welcome audio/visual installation, kinetic sculpture, networked and telematic art submissions. The key words, again, are: repetition, iteration, rhythm and phase.
UNCONFERENCE: ArtCamp07: Re:use
ArtCamp07: Re:use follows up on ArtCamp06, the World’s First Un-Conference on Art, a groundbreaking day-long event co-produced by New Forms Festival and Upgrade! Vancouver, which was attended by over a hundred artists, designers, programmers, critics, theorists, curators and practitioners from all fields who presented over 30 workshops, talks and hybrid events throughout a single inspiration-filled day. The theme of Re:use will be brought into the framework of ArtCamp in order to offer an opportunity for participants from all fields working creatively with technological or material frameworks to come together in an open window of time and space to meet, show work, talk about ideas, try things out, and learn new hands-on practices.
Bring your turntables, laptops, or sewing machines, your old mp3s, National Geographics, bridesmaid’s dresses, or liquor tickets. Come with something, and leave with something else. We invite all manner of on-the-spot engagements including but not limited to: DIY projects that transform discarded materials in something beautiful, cool or useful; showing people how to cut and paste code to make quick and dirty websites or applications; strategies for revisioning experiences or environments; workshops for recycling photographs, cassettes, CDs or other technological or manufacturing detritus; conceptual detournement; discussion or demonstration of interventionist practices relating to performance, psychogeography or street art; collaborative drawing events; experimentation with found materials; realtime mixing of cameraphone pictures, text messages, video, photostreams or something else; swaps, exchanges or tricked-out marketplace mods for circulating, disseminating or evolving objects, subjects or frameworks; presentation of cultural objects or artifacts that relate to reuse or recycling; discussion tracing the circulation and “reuse” of strategies or ideas; or grand schemes for social or environmental engagements. You get the idea: it’s up to you. Bring something -- object, material, idea, technology, or just bring yourself – and put it in the mix.
ArtCamp is a self-organizing event that gear up in the form of a collaborative wiki in the months and weeks leading up to the festival. Last year’s wiki.
FILM
Deconstruction
Deconstruction looks to films made entirely out of sample based material. Whether coming from a found art, archival, scratch video or other mode of presentation, deconstruction looks to those works that alter the reality of the original clips, creating new context through the finished result. Works are encouraged from a wide range of sources including poltical, pop-cultural, surreal, home-video, and the internet.
MUSIC AND VISUALS SERIES
Scratch Video
Aiming to present a comprehensive look at the world of scratch-video, one of the most prominent sub-genres of live video production and interfacing, this night takes live video mixing/scratching under the context of hip-hop/beat music production as its focus. Assembling National and International artists, software developers, and scenemakers, NFF07 affords a mash-up of sub-genres, styles, and methods, picturing where this Form has been and where it is going. Live movement within the image, movement, and sound is crucial to this evening.
Cross-Pollination
Articulating the crossovers and variances between traditional band/instrument structures and electronically-mediated production and performance, this event allows audiences to see committed efforts on both sides in order to facilitate cooperation and communication between Forms. Cross-Pollination features 30-minute sets from bands, which are sampled live and then restructured and remixed by a laptop/live p.a. artist immediately thereafter, which effectively is a live remix. This format encourages both artists and audience to stretch their understanding and appreciation to the limit, as it lays bare both the capabilities, but also inadequacies, of the Forms, while pushing both all involved to further their skills and the scope of their art.
Electronic Heritage
Electronic music as a musical art form has been in existence for nearly a century. From early modulating and noise creating machines like the intonarumori to modern day audio computer software like ACID and Pro Tools electronic musicians have been at the forefront of musical innovation since its existence. 2007 will mark the 100th anniversary of the first electronic instrument the teleharmonium. In celebration of the birth of this now antique musical art form the New Forms Festival would like to pay tribute to yesteryears electronic pioneers by inviting contemporary electronic innovators to interpret their sound. Electronic Heritage will invite artists to incorporate electronic theories, instruments and samples from their electronic forefathers into live performances that will both address the old and bridge the new. This night will show where we’ve come from and where electronic music is yet to go.
Manglification
Building off the success of the "Where We Are" and "Timestretch" nights from the Low/Music & Visual Series of NFF05 & 06 respectively, Mangling plans to showcase those at the forefront of modern dance culture and its subsequent music production. These artists provide necessary alternatives, reconsiderations, and subversions of the vast machine that has occured as the music industry has overtaken branches of the electronic music scene and its pop tangents. The event will complete the spectrum of the modern club environment, pairing the music sets with visual installations and live video performance.
RESIDENCY PROGRAM
New Forms has begun to work with Artist Run Centres in the city to produce works specifically around the festival. The goals are to create a maximum audience for these local artists works that might not be available otherwise, and also to give these artists a forum to display works in an international context. The first of these partnerships will be with OFMAS (Open Forum Media Arts Society) for 2007. We will be contacting further Artist Run Centres in Vancouver concerning this in the months ahead. The Residency Program is only applicable to local artists and community projects are encouraged. Please contact curatorial[at]newformsfestival.com for further information on the program.
All submissions should be done through the online form with accompanying material sent to: New Forms Festival 06 / Transformations #200-252 East 1st Avenue, Vancouver, B.C. V5T-1A6. Submission Deadline: April 1st, 2007.
(No Submissions arriving after April 1st will be accepted)
For any further information please email submissions[at]newformsfestival.com.
Malcolm Levy
New Forms Festival : Revised Films
#200-252 East 1st Avenue. Vancouver, B.C. V5T-1A6
malcolm[at]newformsfestival.com
604.648.2752
Posted by jo at January 23, 2007 05:29 PM
