Submissions are due by October 25, 2020, and require high-quality photos or videos of the 3D work. Work will be displayed at Das Schaufenster Gallery in the artistically hip burgh of Ballard, Seattle, WA.
The theme of the work should be, "An authentically lived experience from the year 2020, a time that is 'No Longer and Not Yet' ". The project was developed as a collaboration between Goethe Pop Up Seattle and Ken Winnick at Visual Cognetics, with additional support from 4Culture of King County, WA.
This Art Call is based on the thinking of Hannah Arendt and Vilém Flusser (although, knowledge of either of these two thinkers is not a requirement for artists to submit). Learn more about Arendt, Flusser, and their ties to this art project below.
For more details and application please visit their website.
Please note that the digital call for 3D works is a worldwide call. The 3D artwork will be displayed as still photographs and video, on a high-resolution display in a sidewalk viewable gallery space. Selected works will also be on a Vimeo display, hosted on the Goethe Institut site.
Take a look attheUnsettling the Apparatus Archive, where five speakers discuss questions about seeing, thinking, politics, and art in our common world through the work of Arendt and Flusser. If you attended the WCGS Grimm 2020 lecture, you will recognize one speaker, Dr. Samantha Rose Hill, as she talks about images and where they exist in our thoughts.
About the Art Call from Ken Winnick:
Philosophical Background: Overall, the project was (and is) an experiment in, firstly, exploring how ideas might motivate and educate artists … especially ideas that are grounded in real and empirical truth, and secondly, how art and an art show might then be used to push back against the societal patterns warned about by Arendt and Flusser. You could say that it is activist art, but mostly I think the entire project is an artistic experiment in and of itself. The theme of “archives” permeates the project, and it’s worth noting that the outcome of this project, the art show itself, will be “an archive of true and lived experiences, represented in physical form, from the year 2020”.
Motivation:As we went through the distillation process… from “ideas” to “art”… two concepts remained in the final call. One was the Arendtian concept of the importance of building a common world, based on actual experience, and the durability of this world thanks to art and culture. The second was from Flusser, and what I perceived as a warning to “not be deceived” by the technical image. That is, to understand that the images we see in the telematic are not the real world, but only a distorted (or even manipulated) version of the real world. And on top of that, “we the people” innately have “a desire to be deceived” (it’s easier than thinking).
And so, in attempting to incorporate these two themes, the show asks artists to reflect on their “real, true and lived experiences”, as apart from online mediated experiences, and to attempt a representation of that in their art. The common world that we’ll create is through sharing and discussing of these objects, at the art opening on Zoom… or on the street as these are viewed by groups of people, and online.