SHIFTER is a free, topical, online magazine published as a .pdf. It can be viewed at www.shifter-magazine.com In Shifter, visual and textual material by emerging artists and writers is juxtaposed to generate meanings and questions that hope to open up a topic of discussion rather than close it down.


SHIFTER issue#7

Science Seance : Interior/Essence, Exterior/Extension

Call for entries - deadline January 15th
Submissions can be in any form as long as they are static (images, text etc. Not sounds/ videos, but potentially scores, stills etc.)

To put things simply:

Science, maybe, as a means or methodology or discipline using which one attempts to explain the essence of natural phenomena - Natural phenomena as those materials, occurrences and interactions that we experience through our senses. The Scientist, as one who is able to construct the most rationally plausible, elegant, experimentally verifiable, explanation of these phenomena.

Seance, meaning, a meeting, a session, a sitting. A meeting convened to receive messeges through a "medium" who senses phenomena that ordinary people cannot perceive. Who is able to translate these phenomena into material presence through extension.

Both pursuits having a preinscribed belief in a notion called "Truth" and through extension an obsession with "Falsity".

This issue of Shifter, then, will attempt to once again address the question of projecting form onto the formless. Artists as Alchemists, Scientists as Mediums. The tenuous boundaries that circumscribe the notions of Fact, Myth and Falsity.

These are urgent questions to address in a world where we are intensely aware of the maleability of information and thus meaning. Today Media becomes Medium, bringing us distant Truths; constructing places, peoples and events that would otherwise be imperceptable to us. Search Engines and Remotes become our Oija Boards as we sift through information, constructing our own narratives of reality that begin to form the basis of our knowledge.

Please email submissions to shiftermail@gmail.com

Best,

Sreshta (Rit) Premnath
Editor