[rohrpost] Migrating Reality call for papers and other variable content

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Migrating is reality. Reality is migrating.

The "Migrating Reality Project" ** organized between 04-05 April 2008 at 
GdK, Gallerie der Kuenste in Berlin is a live platform to discuss the 
mixing and remixing of art forms and digital data flows within the 
context of the current worldwide reality of migration.

 From 01 March in cooperation with the online zine balsas.cc for media 
and technology (http://www.balsas.cc) we are initiating a focused look 
at the migration between reality, media, technologies, art, spaces, 
disciplines, politics, and networks. Migration interests us in cultural 
and technological aspects as well as in aspects of the movement of 
different objects and subjects. Balsas.cc has been publishing online in 
Lithuanian and English from Vilnius, Lithuania since 2005. Every fourth 
month it announces a new topic and as of now "Migrating Reality" is open 
for your interpretation.

We invite the submission of texts, sounds, and visuals (photo, video, 
etc) which will help us to delve deeper into the subject during the 
Berlin project. Balsas.cc is stimulating interest in the generation and 
publishing of ideas online -- the most interesting of which will be 
published in the printed catalog at the end of 2008. We are interested 
in not only pure texts but also in migrating formats, interdisciplinary 
discussions, interviews, and the meetings of artists and theoreticians. 
Please submit texts in English, German, and (or??) Lithuanian to 
balsas at vilma.cc.  The rolling submission and publication period is from 
01 March to 01 June.

Editorial Board: Vytautas Michelkevicius, Mindaugas Gapsevicius, 
Zilvinas Lilas and John Hopkins

** Migrating Reality, http://www.migrating-reality.com

The conference and exhibition “Migrating Reality” is organised by >top - 
Verein zur Förderung kultureller Praxis e.V. in Berlin and KHM - 
Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne. It is also generously supported 
by the Embassy of Lithuania in Germany within the framework of the 
German-Baltic Year 2008.

The event focuses on the Baltic nation of Lithuania. In the last fifteen 
years, more than ten percent of Lithuania's population has emigrated, 
among them numerous individuals engaged in the cultural sector. Others, 
while still living in Lithuania, are deeply engaged with the subject of 
migration. Selected individuals from both these groups will present 
their work at the conference and exhibition.

Migrating Reality deals specifically with the realities of migration and 
migrating realities that are independent of global structural changes 
and economic or cultural processes and are opening unique opportunities 
for creative exchange.

Electronic and digital cultures generate completely new forms of 
migration. In the creative arts, new phenomena related to migration and 
the synergies of disparate systems are emerging. Artistic products 
evolve from traditional forms to hybrid digital forms. Analogue products 
are being digitized; data spaces are trans-located from one data storage 
system to another; existing sounds, images, and texts are re-mixed and 
fused into new datasets.

The emergent processes of migration generate temporary autonomous zones 
where socio-political actions occur without the interference of formal 
control mechanisms. These zones and enclaves appear in physical space as 
well as in virtual space. By integrating these into available structures 
and temporarily interconnecting them, new trajectories and ideas are 
created.

Migration is reality and reality is migrating. This dialectic, appearing 
as a banal topic in everyday politico-economic debate, includes 
unarticulated issues which, by their fragmented nature have to be dealt 
with through creative multidisciplinary means. Only occasionally do 
components of the migrating global situation surface in the mass media, 
within individual mediums of expression, or in exhibitions as 
documentation and artwork. This is likely because dealing with the 
realities of migration in an explicitly European context means accepting 
the potential for conflict.

This trans-cultural German-Lithuanian event will take on the risk in 
highlighting certain fragments of the discourse. Participants will be 
invited to piece together aspects of this inexorable global mobility on 
the one hand and of retrograde power relations on the other.