[spectre] CALL FOR APPLICATIONS OF NET ART WORKS - BREAK_21/2002

[Jaka Zeleznikar]

Break 21
6th International Festival of Emerging Artists

May 19th - 24th, 2002
Ljubljana, Slovenia

http://www.break21.com
break21@k6-4.org
Tel.: + 386 (0)1 438 03 00

 =

Organiser
K6/4, Kersnikova 6, Ljubljana, Slovenia



THEME

=93Dead or Alive=94

=93Dead or Alive=94 implicates the urge, which tends to satisfy something=
 at
all costs, taking no regard whether it demands the life to be taken. It
is assumed, that it represents something, for which, imperatively, it is
greater than life or death. In the tendency to give up life as the
highest value, the sacrifice is implicated or some urgent denunciation
in the economy of one=92s own life, which we could call a particular
death, for the sole purpose - to accomplish something.

In the title, the initial question appears. It questions death and life;
it demands an answer to the question about definitions, what is actually
dead and what is alive. To what extent something is dead, though only
inert; to what extent something is alive, though tends to be prolonged
with the help of machines; how to understand organic material in the
cryobanks and how biotechnical mechanisms/organisms? Are the cyber space
and avatars with artificial intelligence, which are present in the
Hollywood apparatus of the imaginary or the top cyber laboratories, our
or the parallel world? Bionics and eugenics establish new paradigms of
life and death as much as nanomechanics and intelligent neuronic nets.
Artificial life is the oxymoron, which penetrates the core of our theme.

Questions, posed to us by high technology, are still utterly legitimate
in traditional sense, since we understand them through the perspective
of modern age. Intermingling of everyday violence, which we encounter in
the streets, car accidents, murders, suicides, diseases, wars and
catastrophes on higher scales are balancing with births, rebirths,
changes of identity and initiations, creations of new life situations
and cosmic phenomena. Religious repertoires and great ideologies are all
built upon dichotomy of life and death. They tend to be valid within the
scale of the universal, while moments of ecstasy during meditation or
sex, pain and dreams are utterly intimate and identical to themselves.
Mental deviations, such as insanity, psychosis, neurosis, obsessions,
paranoia and hysteric states were interpreted as a kind of intermediary
state between life and death in primitive cultures, while in modern
societies, the border between the healthy as an attribute of life and
the ill as an attribute of death is being obliterated.

Life and death are great themes of art and a lot has been said about
them, however, some things can=92t be talked about too many times. Our
intention is for artists to deal with them innovatively, through the
perspective of new art and research artistic practice, which owns a
tactical value that points more at the poetics of life than poetics,
which is already known from traditional aesthetic paradigms. Forms of
expression may not be products and aesthetic artefacts but rather
processes, states, situations ... that comprise the dimension of time -
transition.

CUSTODIANS
Suncica Ostoic, Chief Custodian, sunce@picigin.net
Olga Majcen, Chief Custodian, olga.majcen@inet.hr

SELECTOR/ADVISOR for net art: Jaka Zeleznikar, jaka@jaka.org




the URL works should be reported at the web site
http://www.jaka.org/break/

Deadline: March 1st 2002
Notification of acceptance: March 15th 2002



Additional information (TRAVEL EXPENSES AND ACCOMMODATION and call for
other FIELDS - Theory, visual arts, performative arts, intermedia arts,
mobile pictures, music and sound, architecture, applied arts, culinary
arts) can be found at festival's homepage:
http://www.break21.com