last call - Dead or Alive

[jurij.krpan at kapelica.org]

Dear colleagues,
this is the last call for applications which should be sent by March 1st  2002.

Key words: Death, Life, Body, Poison, Oxymoron , Fatal Sex, Biotechnology, 
Artificial Life, ...


CALL FOR ENTRIES - BREAK 21/2002

Break 21
6th International Festival of Young Emerging Artists

May 19th – 24th, 2002
Ljubljana, Slovenia

Integral description of the festival: http://www.break21.com
 
Organiser
K6/4, Kersnikova 6, Ljubljana, Slovenia

THEME

“Dead or Alive”

“Dead or Alive” 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’s 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’t 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.

FIELDS 

- THEORY: we will organise a series of lectures and presentations and the texts
  will be published in the catalogue. We will also publish essays, theoretic 
  and critical texts of the selected theme. The emphasis will be put primarily 
  on the texts, which deal with the complex of life and death through the 
  perspective of contemporary and new art.
- VISUAL ARTS: computer-assisted art (from web art to robotics), comics, 
  graphic prints, digital prints, photographs, interactive works, visual 
  communication (subvertising), etc.
- PERFORMATIVE ARTS
- INTERMEDIA ARTS
- MOBILE PICTURES: films in all categories will be presented at the festival: 
  documentaries, fiction, video art, animated films, experimental films, short
  films ... 
- MUSIC and SOUND: concerts, sound installations and intermedia performances, 
  in which sound holds the priority.
- ARCHITECTURE: we are interested in the projects, which sublimate themes of 
  life and death in the most radical meanings. Architectural semiology should 
  be oriented towards conceptual projects and less towards utilitarian 
  realisations.
- APPLIED ARTS: although we recognise the fashion creativity through fashion 
  machinery of the consumer society, we decided to underline the part of a
  designing production, which holds highly personalised approach and thus point
  at semiology of dressing, which wrenches from the vice of mass economy. 
- CULINARY ARTS

DEADLINE
 
Call for applications should be sent by March 1st  2002 to the following address:

Študentski kulturni center
Break 21
Kersnikova 6 
SI - 1000 LJUBLJANA 

e-mail: break21 at k6-4.org
 

phone: ++ 386 (0)1 438 03 00
fax:   ++ 386 (0)1 438 02 02 


Thank you!

Andreja Kralj
Coordinator of the Festival