CALL FOR PARTICIPATION ISEA2006THEME: TRANSVERGENCEhttp://isea2006.sjsu.edu/transvergence/index.htmlDeadline October 3, 2006
This is an invitation by the ISEA2006 Symposium and ZeroOne San Jose:A Global Festival of Art on the Edge to groups and individuals tosubmit proposals for exhibition of interactive art work and projectsreflecting on the thematic of the transvergence.
Creative interplay of disciplines to catalyze artistic, scientific,and social innovation is evidenced by decades of multi-/ pluri-,inter-, and trans-disciplinary discourse and practice. Emphasis on thedynamics subtending this interplay has led to the notion oftransvergence, a term coined by Marcos Novak which overridesdiscipline-bound issues and demands, and serves as the focus of thepresent call. Proposals are sought that address but are not limited tothemes outlined below, challenging the boundaries of disciplines andconventional (art) institutional discourse, and indicating creativestrategies for overriding them. Proposals may consist of art projects,residencies, workshops, standalone conference papers, or groupconference sessions. "While convergence and divergence are allied to epistemologies ofcontinuity, transvergence is epistemologically closer to logics ofincompleteness, to complexity, chaos, and catastrophe theories,dynamical systems, emergence, and artificial life. While convergenceand divergence contain the hidden assumption that the true, in eithera cultural or an objective sense, is a continuous land-mass,transvergence recognizes true statements to be islands in an alienarchipelago, sometimes only accessible by leaps, flights, and voyageson vessels of artifice.
"Central to transvergence is speciation. We want to draw proposalsthat constitute new species of effort and expression and that bothenact and reflect on our construction of new species of culturalreality – not by being merely novel mutations within known areas, butby boldly challenging known areas and yet being potentially viable tothe point of becoming autonomous entities – not dancing aboutarchitecture or architecture about dancing, for instance, but dancingarchitecture… or, better still, something else, as yet alien andunnamable, but alive and growing."–Marcos Novak ORGANIZATIONAL MODELS OFFERINGSETTINGS FOR TRANSVERGENCE
Transvergence is conditioned by exodus and invention. New idioms ofexpression do not happen in isolation. Although creativity is aresource that works best when shared, there is no clear form ofrevenue or infrastructure for the practices of collaboration thatcharacterize transvergence. Collaboration in this context does notarise from democratically disseminated, proportionally allocatedproperty, but from the permanent re-appropriation of shared resources,and resultant re-territorialization of production, creation andartefacts. The models of the think-tank, media lab and research centrehave shown their limits since the 80s and 90s, as have tactical mediaactivism tied to the logic of events, and NGOs facing the donorsystem's arduous accountability requirements; university research isoften encumbered by best-practice driven managerial culture, and"creative industries" clusters are subject to economies of scale anduneven divisions of labour. As a technics of expression immanent tomedia of communication, transvergence requires settings thatinstantiate structures of possibility. Such settings might derive frommodels offered by ecologies, fields and membranes, and from theemergent institutional forms of organized networks, whose constantconfiguring of relations between actors, information, practices,interests and socio-technical systems corresponds to the logic oftransvergence.
ISEA seeks new visions of organizational and participatory models asstructures of possibility for transvergent practice.
TRANSVERGENT ETHICS AND REDEFINTIONS OF ART
Institutions which purportedly back new art practices are not alwaysthe bravest when it comes to work which challenges basic assumptionsabout what art is, what the artist is, what the relationship betweenartwork and audience might be, and what the outcome of an artworkmight be. Counter intuitively, business corporations can be muchquicker to support radically new ways for artist, artwork and audienceto speak to each other: every time a viewer/player engages with aninteractive creation, a kind of commerce occurs - a series oftransactions, a litany of offers and purchases. Similarly,organizations devoted to healthcare, social well-being and politicalactivism may more readily recognize exchanges that privilege thecontingent yet compelling "we", and the urgency of the encounter. Artand cultural institutions remain reluctant to take on these new formsbecause they destabilize old views of the artist as a person making aproposition about the world and of the audience as consumer/interpreter of this proposition, whereas transvergent work instatesaudiences as key f/actors in communication processes. This implies ashift in