In the coming issue we wish to focus on political geographies, as well as artistic interventions in, and reimaginations of, such geographies. The distinction between “place” and “space” is of particular interest, as it is fundamental not only to much art, but also to our global situation within neoliberal political geography. If time has come for us to reimagine this geography, as well as the interrelationships between, and definitions of “space” and “place”, is it thinkable that art could be an ideal site for such reimagination?

The construction and exploitation of a particularism of the local also seems indigenous to the logic of neoliberalism, in the sense that it relies on the opposition between place and space to be able to expand in the first place. Among other things, the space-place dichotomy facilitates the reduction of developmental issues, political unrest or violence to irrational expressions of local misguidance, backward culture or belief systems. When the evolution of neoliberal space is merged with democratic and civilizing pretentions, the otherness and fixed specificity of places appears to be a legitimate pretext to expand into always new (potentially profitable) areas in and beyond the periphery.

The self-fulfilling prophesy of neoliberal geography also constitutes an effective impasse in alternative visions of political geography –- on the one hand, by making the critical reconstruction of place and its interconnectedness with a larger picture, beyond the dichotomies of space/place and local/global, superfluous -– on the other, by dissimulating any locally based meaning of universality that cannot be reduced to the civilizing prospects and ideals of neoliberal universalist geography. In this sense, the self-upholding myth of the local which neoliberal geography feeds on seems to express another form of orientalism, convincingly presenting itself and its worldview as the necessary cure to global and local problems, and reversely; presenting political issues in localities beyond its borders as a temporary void in its over-arching, inescapable logic.

Contributors from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds are invited to submit articles, exhibition reviews or interviews that address the theme “Reimagining the political geography of place and space”, through a high variety of possible angles.

Topics may include, but are not restricted to:

• Artistic approaches to political geography, artistic intervention in geopolitical discourses and decolonization strategies.
• The concepts of space and place in art, and their renegotiation through art.
• The role of art and artists in the rewriting of history and political geography in post-colonial situations.
• The relationship between neoliberal political geography and orientalism.
• The art biennial as a global phenomenon, and its role in the (re)negotiation of political geography.
• The relationship between the global art scene and neoliberal political geography.
• The relationship between art and geography.

For guidelines and payment rates, please contact Seismopolite Journal of Art and Politics at info [at] seismopolite.com

We accept submissions continuously, but to make sure you are considered for the upcoming issue, please send your proposal, CV and samples of earlier work to us within February 10, 2012.

Completed work will be due March 5, 2012. Commissioned works will be translated into Norwegian and published in a bilingual version.

Seismopolite Journal of Art and Politics is a bilingual English and Norwegian quarterly, which investigates the possibilities of artists and art scenes worldwide to reflect and influence their local political situation.

People in audiences act: they talk, clap, heckle, sigh, inhale, exhale, rustle, twitch, tweet, dance, flirt, laugh, whisper, shuffle, cough… in doing so, they interact. There is a structure and dynamic to these responses which is central to the experience of being in a live audience. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and professionals with interests in performance, interaction and technology who are working on understanding, instrumenting or experimenting with these dynamics, and the shifting ends of audience that they reveal.

We invite proposals for oral presentations, live demonstrations, installations and performance experiments that explore the nature of interaction in audiences. We especially welcome interventions, participatory formats and creative approaches to convening workshop sessions. Topics include but are not restricted to:

- the dynamics of collective and individual experiences of performance,
- the communicative organisation of audience-audience interaction,
- non-verbal interaction and emotional contagion,
- remote and co-present audience interactions,
- the phenomenology of audience interaction,
- changing historical and cultural understanding of the audience,
- technologies and methods for sensing audience dynamics,
- technologies and methods for enhancing and manipulating audience engagement.

The workshop will take place in the new Arts 2 building at Queen Mary University of London. Spaces include black box theatre, lecture theatre, foyer and breakout rooms. Specifications are available on
request.

Submission Format: A two page summary including: a 300 word abstract, methods and rationale for your work, a specification of format and any technical requirements. Document in PDF format submitted via email to: audience [at] qmedia.qmul.ac.uk

The program Urban Research, curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr for Directors Lounge 2012, reaches beyond the genre “city films”. Contemporary artists are engaged in local politics, they are concerned with specific urban problems and developments, and they are directly interacting with the public with performances and public interventions. Due to rapid changes of urban environment, place is no more a reliable urban structure connected with consistency and collective memory. Place must be reinvented and newly defined over and over, and this does not only apply for spaces of temporary use. Public space in the sense of social interchange and interaction — as well as just a space free to use — is not a given opportunity any more, which can be taken for granted. International artists address these themes and issues with a variety of forms, experimental, documentary, abstract, and narrative; they intervene directly or they show there visions of public space, and a new urban landscape. For the festival presentation all screening media (besides 35mm projection) and art-related projects are welcome.

Urban Research 2012 will be first presented at Directors Lounge 9–19 February 2012. The program has also been presented internationally in screenings in London, Mannheim, Hannover, Poznan, Freiburg, Essen, Dordrecht, Senigallia, St. Petersburg and Berlin.

We want your work! Please use the online submission form (required!)

And please send your work including 2 video stills to Klaus W. Eisenlohr, Urban Research, Osnabrücker Str. 25, D-10589 Berlin, Germany; klaus [at] richfilm.de

Urban Research 2012 will first be presented at the media art festival Directors Lounge in February 2012.

As part of its project entitled Promiscuous Infrastructures, the Artivistic collective invites submissions for the second phase of the project.

Artivistic is currently in the research-creation phase of a publication tentatively entitled Promiscuous Infrastructures: experiments in art + information + activism. Rooted in the work of Artivistic’s friends, allies, and past participants, the publication sets its sights on “autonomous infrastructures” by looking at radical education & the production of knowledge, intergenerational support systems, as well as sustainable financing.

For Phase 2, we will set up a temporary printing workshop at Skol. This intervention is meant to collectively visualize our concern, obsession perhaps, with what lies behind art, activism and knowledge production: (1) the ways in which we relate to each other, (2) organise to work together, and (3) the conditions in which things are being done. In other words, we are asking:

• How do we build value in affective relationships?
• How do we organise for that (models, processes, strategies)?
• How do we in turn outstretch these in the long-term?

In order to get a grip on autonomous infrastructures, Artivistic will turn its ideas, words and images into printable material that can be shared in such a way that others can contribute and engage their own approach.

By engaging in this convivial method of making printed stuff to be passed on, commented on, and remixed, we hope to bring ideas to life and to punctuate collective thought processes that have to do with autonomy. In parallel to the set up of a printing area, an office space and a documentation centre, the public will be invited to further engage with the process through activities and events. Works featured will be composed of material produced by Artivistic, collaborators and that selected from the present call for submissions.

Submission requirements: 3xA cells

Artivistic will accept submissions that will address the above interrogations, in the form of printable material, and produced by “3xA cells” composed of 1 artist + 1 activist + 1 academic.

Of course, participants need not exactly see themselves in these ways, but there should be in every cell a trouble-maker, someone that is obsessed with form (or that can make things look pretty), and another who more often thinks things through a bit too much.

What for

Our stance is not so much “what is to be done?” but “something is already being done.” And we not so much want to show it (off) but to actually come to value it better, to become more confident collectively. We believe that the fundamental predicament of our times is fear. It makes us defensive, it insidiously brings about isolation. In 1969, it was right after the initiation of the first Black Panther’s Free Breakfast for School Children Program that J. Edgar Hoover (FBI director) stated that the Panthers posed “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” This exemplifies the power of alternative infrastructures and brings us back to today’s (global) criminalisation of dissent. As we know, valuing is not an individual act, it is a collective one. We see this project as a kind of “work interruption”: to interrupt the current flow of things, of business-as-usual (not for an anonymous “system” but for ourselves, as artists, activists,
academics); to perhaps go back to some of our footnotes (left behind because we were too busy going forward); to take the time to think and to nourish each other, to be present, in order to live differently. By making stuff together, we can get to know each other better, to value our ideas better, to build affinity.

Deadline: Saturday, February 4, 2012

Examples of formats: zines, booklets, posters, maps, inserts, and anything else that can be printed on paper.

Please send your submission (including names and contact info) to: printme (at) artivistic (dot) org

Send any questions to: info (at) artivistic (dot) org

Artivistic is currently in transition, experimenting ways of being perpetually creative within a hostile political and economic context. From 2004 to 2009, the Artivistic collective organized thematic events including four large-scale, international and transdisciplinary gatherings on the interPlay between art, information and activism, bringing together diverse artists-organisers and other thinkers & makers. Artivistic emerges out of the proposition that not only artists can talk about art, activists about activism, and academics about theory. Artivistic aims to inspire, proliferate, activate.

Nothing Beside Remains is a suite of commissioned public projects, presented by LAND, opening in September 2011 and continuing into 2012. This LAND 1.0 exhibition is sited in Marfa, Texas — rural town of 1,800 residents and a site of seminal art historical import — and features new commissions ranging from large-scale installations to discreet interventions.

Integrated into the boundless West Texas landscape, and connected by the thematic evoked in the exhibition’s titular reference, P.B. Shelley’s Ozymandias, these projects address the beauty and poetry in decay, the inevitable decline of the monumental, and the fleeting presence of legacy in the face of the erosion of time.

This weekend will include performances and programming by exhibiting artists, selected screenings, and guided tours of the exhibition.

Participating artists include Andrea Bowers, Sarah Cain, Sue de Beer, Rob Fischer, Karl Haendel, Ry Rocklen, Mungo Thomson, and Garth Weiser.

For more information on the Nothing Beside Remains Weekend, including a continually updated schedule of activities and information about travel to Marfa and local lodging, please visit here.

About LAND:

LAND was founded in 2009 by Director/Curator Shamim M. Momin, former contemporary curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Christine Y. Kim, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art, as a non-profit public art organization committed to curating site- and situation-specific contemporary art projects. For more information on LAND, please visit www.nomadicdivision.org.

Mapping the Local presents an overview of the major phenomena, trends and issues of contemporary art based on various subjects in each semester; a special emphasis will be placed on the East European region, in the form of seminars, presentations held by invited lecturers, field trips to museums, institutions and artist studios. The course is primarily directed towards Erasmus students as well as local students of the Intermedia and Fine Art Theory and Curatorial Studies departments.

While offering an insight into the Hungarian contemporary art scene, one of the course’s main intentions is to develop personal contacts and cultural interactions between local and foreign students fostering an emerging intercultural dialogue. It combines both theoretical and practical methods and is led by Zoltán Kékesi and Szabolcs KissPál, a scholar and an artist.

Site Specific Interventions in Public Space is a survey of the evolution of the different art practices relating to site specific and other public art projects or interventions which take place outside of the traditional museum environment, including sculpture, installations, graffiti and performances specifically conceived of as forms of artistic discourse situated in public spaces and/or within the routines of everyday life.

The class is taught by artist and author Allan Siegel and includes a discussion of selected theoretical works well as an analysis of significant specific projects and art work. Additionally, drawing upon the discussions and readings, students will apply their ideas to situations and locations throughout the city.

Invited speakers for the classes include:

Andreas Fogarasi - Golden Lion Award 52nd Venice Biennial; solo shows among others at Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; Grazer Kunstverein; Georg Kargl - Fine Arts, Vienna; Lombard Freid Projects, New York; Ludwig Museum, Aachen; Ernst Museum, Budapest. Tamás Kaszás - Recipient of Smohay Prize 2010 and Studio of Young Artists Association; exhibitions at W139, Amsterdam; NBK, Berlin; Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; Istambul Biennial 2011. Eszter Lázár - art historian and curator of many international group exhibitions with a focus on Contemporary Central and Eastern European Art, lecturer on the Dept. for Art Theory and Curatorial Studies, former curator of kArton Contemporary Art Gallery. Little Warsaw - Collective name for artists András Gálik and Bálint Havas. The duo exhibited at the Venice Biennial; the Berlin Biennial; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; GfZK, Leipzig; ApexArt Gallery, New York; and the 7th Manifesta. Their work is featured in Art After Conceptual Art published by MIT Press. Ilona Németh - Munkácsy-prize beholder, exhibitions at Modern Art Oxford; Kunsthalle Budapest; 49th Venice Biennial; Expo Hannover 2000; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; etc. Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Intermedia Dpt. Bratislava. János Sugár - Exhibitions among others at Annely Juda Fine Arts, London; Kunstverein, Stuttgart; Exit Art, New York; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Anthology Film Archive, New York; Documenta IX, Kassel; etc. professor at the Intermedia Dept. of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts. János Szoboszlai - art historian and curator, adjunct lecturer and head of the Dept. for Art Theory and Curatorial Studies, chief curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Dunaújváros (ICA-D), former director of acb Contemporary Art Gallery. Tibor Szemző - graduate of the Hungarian Music Academy, musician, composer and filmmaker, founder of the acclaimed Hungarian ensemble Group 180 and The Gordian Knot Company.

The Hungarian University of Fine Arts joined the Erasmus Program in 1998. Over the past thirteen years the number of our partner institutions has grown to 48. Each year 40 students are selected to travel abroad on scholarship and nearly as many international Erasmus students arrive to study at the HUFA. Students studying at the HUFA, besides course work in areas such as sculpture, painting, Intermedia or photography, participate in, and organize, projects and exhibitions on an off campus.

Contact information for the International Office of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts: Zsófia Rudnay / International Coordinator / Hungarian University of Fine Arts / email: foreign [at] mke.hu / tel: +36 1 478 0980 / web: www.mke.hu

Returning Fire: Interventions in Video Game Culture (Media Education Foundation, 2011, 45 min.), written and directed by Roger Stahl, examines the culture of war-themed video games through work of three pioneering artists and activists: Joseph Delappe, Anne-Marie Schleiner, and Wafaa Bilal.

Returning Fire documents how the three artists moved dissent from the streets to our screens, infiltrating war games in an attempt to break the hypnotic spell of “militainment,” and thereby forcing us to think critically about what it means when the clinical tools of real-world killing become forms of consumer play.

Film director Roger Stahl is associate professor in the Communication Studies Department at the University of Georgia. In 2010, he published a book Militainment, Inc and produced a documentary of the same title in 2007.

Joseph Delappe is a professor of art at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Game designer, writer and artist Anne-Marie Schleiner teaches game design in the Communication and New Media Program at the National University of Singapore.

Wafaa Bilal is assistant arts professor in the Department of Photography and Imaging at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Co-sponsored by The Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, in collaboration with the Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film, TV and New Media and the NYU Game Center along with the Department of Art and Public Policy and NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge.

The Department of Photography & Imaging is an intensive four-year BFA program centered on the making and understanding of images. It is a diverse department embracing multiple perspectives. The students work in virtually all modes of analog, digital, and multimedia photo-based image making, exploring photo-based imagery as personal and cultural expression.

Events are always passing; to experience an event is to experience the passing. But how do we perceive an experience that encompasses the just-was and the is-about-to-be as much as what is actually present? In Semblance and Event, Brian Massumi, drawing on the work of William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and others, develops the concept of “semblance” as a way to approach this question.

It is, he argues, a question of abstraction, not as the opposite of the concrete but as a dimension of it: “lived abstraction.” A semblance is a lived abstraction. Massumi uses the category of the semblance to investigate practices of art that are relational and event-oriented — variously known as interactive art, ephemeral art, performance art, art intervention — which he refers to collectively as the “occurrent arts.” Massumi argues that traditional art practices, including perspective painting, conventionally considered to be object-oriented freeze frames, also organize events of perception, and must be considered occurrent arts in their own way. Each art practice invents its own kinds of relational events of lived abstraction, to produce a signature species of semblance.

The artwork’s relational engagement, Massumi continues, gives it a political valence just as necessary and immediate as the aesthetic dimension. Massumi investigates occurrent art practices in order to examine, on the broadest level, how the aesthetic and the political are always intertwined in any creative activity.

About the Author

Brian Massumi is Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences at the University of Montréal. He is the author of Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation and A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (MIT Press, 1992).

In 2009 the City of Gdansk introduced the idea of a night time festival of contemporary art and design in public space. The idea to invite national and international artists and designers to read and comment on the city’s fabric has become an event in which the city, its traditions, its sites, its uses and its communities play the central role.

NARRACJE is engaged in the collective imagination of the city. It comprises the idea to reflect the current developments, to skip routines and to be part of a new culture of public space.

NARRACJE: Open Space for Art

The third edition of NARRACJE will present again an ensemble of national and international artists and designers who are dedicated to work in public space. For four days the night sights of Gdańsk’s “Dolne Miasto” will become the backdrop of a variety of installations and the canvas of a multitude of interventions. Starting at the Green Gate the series of installations and interventions will stretch throughout Gdańsk’s lower city, where the historical urban configuration is still present. This year’s parcours will link the city’s center with the nearby lower city.

NARRACJE Location: Dolne Miasto

“Dolne Miasto” has not undergone any urban developments since the end of the World War II. Architectural traces document the Dutch, French, German, Polish, Russian and Swedish influences. The contemporary appearance is dominated by the neighborhood’s development during the 18th and 19th centuries when manufacturing plants and workers housing were built. In the coming years “Dolne Miasto” will be in the focus of a revitalization program. The next month offer the ephemeral opportunity to witness the transformation of an urban quarter with unique qualities. Looking back, its characteristics are minted by the landscape it has been built on and now, in the process of revitalization, the need of infrastructure and the design of the urban landscape are of equal importance. The festival NARRACJE takes the opportunity to focus on the interdependencies of natural and urban landscapes and reflects on the nature of the city (”Natura Miasta”) as part of global phenomena in urban development.

NARRACJE Subject: Natura Miasta

While the number of people living in cities is growing architecture, design, engineering and urban planning are facing major challenges. Part of it is the need to reflect on the role of nature and ecology in order to develop the tandem of nature qualities and built form for a city being a living organism. The curator Bettina Pelz invited artists and designers to share how the cross-linked relationship of natural, architectural, socio-cultural and digital environments influence their artistic work.

Atsara - Roland Devocelle and Audrey Rocher, Jakub Budzynski and Monika Waraxa, Jennifer Braun, Dominik Busch, Sean Capone, Rob Carter, Alexandra Chomicz and Antonio Xavier, Kamila Chomicz, Elektro Moon Vision - Elwira Wojtunik and Popesz Csaba Láng, Ahmet Doǧan, Marcin Grezęda and Paweł Sasin, Andrea Thembie Hannig, Kobas Laksa, Gionata Gesi Ozmo, Ursula Scherrer, RaumZeitPiraten, Rosmarie Weinlich, Ania Witkowska, Tomasz Grzegorz Wlazlak, Marek Zygmunt will change the city’s landscape by night through projections, installations and performances and broach the issue of the changing qualities of public space in the 24-h-social-city as well as issue of the role of the natural in the experience of landscape.

Curator: Bettina Pelz
Organizers: Gdansk 2016/i kultura, The City of Gdansk, Gdansk City Gallery
Partners: Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdansk Gallery of Photography

For more info please contact Julia Cyrzan, PR coordinator: pr [at] narracje.gdansk2016.eu

Open Galleries

In addition the Gdańsk City Gallery will present an exhibition of Magdalena Jetelová and Łaznia Center for Contemporary Art hosts an exhibition of Gilbert and George. They are part of several art institutions which will be open for visitors at night time during NARRACJE.

Additional Program

The producers, Gdańsk 2016 in cooperation with the Gdańsk City Gallery, the City of Gdańsk and Łaznia Center for Contemporary Art, will provide a festive and educational program, including guided tours. For further information check the website.

Participants: Agnes Meyer-Brandis (Germany), DJ Spooky (USA), Ary Ehrenberg (Mexico), Masaki Fujihata (Japan), Javier Álvarez (Mexico), Jim Campbell (USA), Guto Nóbrega (Brasil), Barry Truax (Canada), George Lewis (USA), Ariel Bustamante (Chile), Llorenç Barber (Spain), Jacob Kirkegaard (Denmark), Joe Paradiso (USA), among others.