Studio 27: Utopia?
for the Big Muddy Film Festival 34
Deadline: January 16, 2012

Studio 27 is looking for short videos and films for our next program at the Big Muddy Film Festival 34 at Southern Illinois University. We are curating a special out-of-competition screening titled "Utopia?" For this program, we are seeking experimental films and videos (under 30 minutes) that critique or express a fundamental shift in the trajectory of contemporary utopian thought and practice. We are interested in work that explores how utopia, as a projection of what is possible in the future, can be an implicit critique of what is lacking in the present, an indication of how far we have to go to achieve an ideal society. As the notion of dystopia is integrally connected to utopia, we also welcome work that is dystopic in nature. How do the limitations and contradictions of the present drive us toward escape or change? Another timely concern is how utopia is not necessarily a physical or geographic space. Rather, it can be an internal space, a transformation of individual or social consciousness. How does the hope for radical social transformation haunt contemporary media art, and how does the utopian work of the historical avant-garde speak to present day aspirations?