27 Jan 2014

Open Call: paraflows .9 - Intimacy

The topic of the ninth annual festival for digital arts and cultures in the city of Vienna is INTIMACY.

What does human affinity look like in our time? How do we initiate and maintain friendships and relationships? What is the role of digital media, like social media platforms, in breaking down physical and spatial, as well as temporal barriers? To interact and communicate we increasingly rely on technology. By this, we develop an emotional connection with things, devices enabling us to participate in the network. Even actual relationships – emotional and sexual – are built with inanimate objects. What are the consequences of this substitution of human affinity by a love for the object? Technology gets personalized here and becomes an intimate extension for our actions. New possibilities to establish contacts emerge: from a huge online dating pool to special interest groups; like-minded people and people who are meant to be together find each other on the internet. How can technology support, store, evaluate, or even create emotional moments? It is easy to share sentiment, emotion, as well as pictures and videos with a large, almost unmanageable, number of people. Have we surrendered control over our content? What about the protection of our digital enclosures? Who has access and derives benefit from all the personal information? And what is the impact of digital and impersonalized communication on the individual?

paraflows .9 INTIMACY wants to assess the situation with regard to privacy, explore the changes which have been brought about by the latest developments and observe how society reacts to these changes.

Pls send your application as pdf file via e-mail to: office(at)paraflows.at

or ship to:

paraflows
Museumsplatz 1
A-1070 Vienna
AUSTRIA

Mandatory information for submissions:
1) name, institution (if existing), address, e-mail, phone number, website/s
2) submitted work: title, medium, author/artist, year of production
3) work description: 1 DIN A4-page maximum
4) technical explanation, room/space requirements (hardware, operating
system, additional software)
5) CD with 1-2 high resolution, printable images
6) biographies
7) documentation of earlier projects, e.g. a link to your website

Language: all submissions have to be in English or in German or need to have subtitles in one of the two languages. Works in any other language have to include a text list in either German or English. We especially encourage international submissions.