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When?
"SARUS Festival for Site-specific & Experimental Art" is scheduled for August 25-28, 2023 Where? Locations: Wilmington, NC: Cameron Art Museum, downtown, Hannah Block Community Arts Center, local beaches, Greenfield Lake, Jengo's Playhouse/WabiSabi, and others tba Topic "Disorientation - Dislocation - Digestion" We would like your proposals to address one or all of these terms. How is up to you. Why is up to you. For example: Disorientation could speak to a sense of loss. Disorientation speaks to experimental exploration and not-knowing. Dislocation could speak to spatiality and site-specificity, to loss of space or new forms of relating to space, or to becoming dislocated. Dislocation could cause disorientation. Disorientation could be good. Digestion could speak to processing, assimilating, distilling the useful and discarding that which is burdening, and it could speak to our biology, the biology of the you-me-all-and-everything-planet organism. How you interpret or work with these terms is up to you, and we are hoping to be surprised by your creativity around this challenge. Statement In his book "Post-Cinematic Affect" (2010) Steven Shaviro writes "...we are witnessing the emergence of a different media regime, and indeed of a different mode of production, than those which dominated the 20th century. Digital technologies, together with neoliberal economic relations, have given birth to radically new ways of manufacturing and articulating lived experience. I would like to ... look at developments that are so new and unfamiliar that we scarcely have the vocabulary to describe them, and yet that have become so common, and ubiquitous, that we tend not even to notice them any longer." (Shaviro,p.130) SARUS Festival 2023 shares Shaviro's goal to investigate "... what it feels like to live in the early 21st century." (Shaviro, p.130) Shaviro continues "Films and music videos, like other media works, are machines for generating affect, and for capitalizing upon, or extracting value from, this affect. As such, they are not ideological superstructures, as an older Marxist criticism would have it. Rather, they lie at the very heart of social production, circulation, and distribution. They generate subjectivity, and they play a crucial role in the valorization of capital. Just as the old Hollywood continuity editing system was an integral part of the Fordist mode of production, so the editing methods and formal devices of digital video and film belong directly to the computing-and-information-technology infrastructure of contemporary neoliberal finance. There's a kind of fractal patterning in the way that social technologies, or processes of production and accumulation, repeat or "iterate" themselves on different scales, and at different levels of abstraction." (Shaviro,131) SARUS Festival hopes to encourage artists and audiences to build encounters for critical engagement around their, all our, implications in the re-inscribing of old patterns as well as the search for new/different ways of knowing and becoming. SARUS Festival seeks to present works and people that do not entertain, but rather engage and challenge us to become aware of the smaller and larger social and political structures that move and guide us. This year's topic is influenced by the past two years' experiences that drove a good number of us toward digital communication, representation, and digital soothing. What is it like to live in this world? How do we engage with one another? What is important to us in life? What is life? |
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