Call For Submissions
INCITE! Journal of Experimental Media & Radical Aesthetics
Issue #3: NEW AGES
Submission Deadline: December 15, 2010

The notion of “New Ages” will be the focus of INCITE’s next issue.

This is a new age (for experimental media). The emergence of digital technology has had an enormous impact on contemporary screen practices. This impact extends from how media art is conceived of and made; to how it’s taught, circulated, exhibited, and disseminated; to how communities form to support and sustain it. The nature of the discourse around this work has likewise morphed. Just as desktop editing and pocket HD cameras have democratized the means of production, the Web has transformed distribution while engendering and empowering more interactive forums for discussion, commentary, promotion, and exchange. These new forums connect makers, viewers, and analysts in more direct ways, leading to a different kind of critical atmosphere. Utilizing the 2010 International Experimental Media Congress as an opportunity for reflection, this issue aims at addressing the generational shifts and divides in today’s experimental film, video, and new media sphere. In the two decades that have passed since the previous, much more politicized Congress, how have things changed? What continuities, good and/or bad, persist? INCITE invites response to these questions, and to the 2010 Congress specifically. We will be compiling a dossier of brief personal reflections on the Congress.

This is a new age (for New Age-ism). Although it may be in vogue now, New Age subculture was once the subject of widespread ridicule and scorn. Combining quasi-religious mysticism with self-help philosophy and environmental concern, the New Age movement gained mainstream awareness during the height of self-absorbed Reaganomics and the rise of corporate power (i.e. "Greed is good."). This duality -- of alternative spirituality based in holistic health, environmentalism, meditation, and simple living, and its pop commercialization (i.e. whale music CDs sold in strip malls) -- produced a values-based sociopolitical phenomenon that was hard to take seriously. So how do we account for the current fascination with New Age concepts and aesthetics among many of today’s emergent media practitioners? As ironic appropriation? As a desire to reconnect with non-Western medicine, environmental causes, organic farming, etc? As '80s-era nostalgia? The Web 2.0, via services such as YouTube, has made it possible to instantly re-experience the media memories of our recent past or stoke a younger generation's enchantment with a past not their own. In an era marked by both religious and political fervor and cynicism, it's hard not to see the positive in reclaiming an inclusive, optimistic, if naive, spiritual movement.

Texts, proposals, projects, and queries can be emailed to Brett Kashmere at [email protected]. We also welcome submissions (manifestos, essays, interviews, artist papers, reviews, etc) not connected to the organizing theme or the 2010 Congress.

For further information on our editorial policy and submission guidelines, please consult the Information section of our website (incite-online.net). Please forward this call to anyone that you think would be interested in contributing.