Do you have some extra greeting cards kicking around this holiday season? Put them to good use by participating in this collaborative project by Shopdropping.net:

SHOPDROPPING.NET is now calling on artists, designers, media makers, and creative folks to purchase or "regift" greeting cards and alter them in any way they see fit in order to create a new and unique card. Any form of commercial card, from wedding to graduation to birthday to bereavement, is eligible. But clever and witty will be given preference over easy and distasteful.

Please submit JPEG reproductions of the altered greeting cards to submissions@shopdropping.net with GREETINGS as the subject line.

The 22nd Prix Ars Electronica - International Competition for CyberArts is open for entries.

Online Submission Deadline: March 7, 2008. Entries are organized by category:

INTERACTIVE ART - dedicated to interactive works in all forms and formats, from installations to performances. At the top of the agenda is artistic quality in the development and design of the interaction as well as a harmonious dialog between the content level and the interaction level. Of particular interest is the sociopolitical relevance of the interaction as manifested by its innate potential to expand the scope of human action.

ANIMATION / FILM / VX - recognizes excellence in independent work in the arts and sciences as well as in high-end commercial productions in the film, advertising and entertainment industries. In this category, artistic originality counts just as much as masterful technical achievement.

DIGITAL SOUND & MUSIC - Contemporary digital sound productions from the broad spectrum of "electronica" come in for consideration in the "Digital Musics" category, as do works combining sound and media, computer compositions ranging from electro-acoustic to experimental music, as well as sound installations.

HYBRID ART - The new “Hybrid Art” category is dedicated specifically to today’s hybrid and transdisciplinary projects and approaches to media art. Primary emphasis is on the process of fusing different media and genres into new forms of artistic expression as well as the act of transcending the boundaries between art and research, art and social/political activism, art and pop culture.

tank.tv is looking for lists! Top 100s, 50s, 1000s! Lists of people, animals, minerals, vegetables! Good lists, bad lists and mediocre lists.Lists of anything and everything.

tank.tv is inviting submissions to its forthcoming show, The Whole World, curated by Ian White.

The Whole World is a list of lists: a programme of artists' film and video and an interactive online exhibition.

Both a formal device and a political strategy, film and video that deploys a list as part of its structure often does so with political intent: to subvert hierarchies, to undermine rationalism or to reveal contradiction. In contemporary culture the pop chart's Top 10 has been replaced by an ever-expanding craze for "Top 100s" of everything from Hollywood genres to celebrity gaffes. The Whole World attempts to wrestle back the initiative…

The Whole World is situated somewhere between the absurd and obsessive enterprises of Flaubert's eponymous characters Bouvard and Pecuchet (they hopelessly collect and explore until, exhausted, they revert to their
original jobs as copy clerks) and the Japanese animated game Katamari in which players roll all matter – objects, buildings, landscapes, the world itself - into snowballing globes of stuff. The Whole World is ridiculous and irreverent, ambitious and viral.

All are invited to contribute to the programme selected by Ian White by uploading their own video list, be that an extract from an existing work or something made specially for the purpose, to compile a unique, exponential collection: an extraordinary list of lists, of the world as we know it – the whole world. Submissions will be considered for both tank.tv and the CASZartscreen in Amsterdam.

Submit work via the website or mail mini DV tapes and/or Quicktime files to:

tank.tv
5th Floor
49 - 50 Great Marlborough St
London
W1F 7JR
UK

SUBMISSIONS WILL BE ACCEPTED UNTIL 1st MARCH 2008
Please complete a submission form and email or mail with your submitted
work: www.tank.tv/submissions.htm

Queries and questions to: Alice O'Reilly / alice@tank.tv

Calling all graduate student artists and academics... Pivot Journal is calling out for your work!

A centre point. A counter point. Pivot provides the space from which to respond to the shared and divided scholarly territories of visual culture. Concordia's new peer-reviewed graduate academic interdisciplinary journal brings together the Departments of Art History, Studio Arts and Communication Studies in a forum for graduate scholarship working towards the exploration of relationships among diverse forms of art practice and production, as well as among art historical scholarship, visual studies, theory, and criticism.

Currently Pivot is an online journal with a small print run. Pivot accepts submissions from graduate students across many disciplines within Canada and internationally. As a journal of visual culture recognizing art production as a site for scholarly exploration, Pivot accepts content in the form of academic papers, artist project descriptions, short texts by artists and image based proposals.

Arsenal Press has recently submitted Matthew Hay's new book, The View from Here: Conversations with Gay and Lesbian Filmmakers, for an Art Threat review. For our readers out there who can't wait for me to get to it in the stack, I thought I'd post about the title and let you know you can go out and grab a copy now. From Arsenal Press:

The history of gay and lesbian cinema is a storied one, and one that became much larger with the recent success of Brokeback Mountain, Capote, and Transamerica. But the history of gay and lesbian filmmakers is its own story.

In The View from Here, queer directors and screenwriters—some mainstream, others who work defiantly from the margins—speak passionately about the medium, in particular their personal experiences navigating through the often-cynical and cruel film industry. All of them offer fascinating anecdotes and opinions about cinema, and speak candidly about their attempts to combat studio apathy and demands of "the market" and still create films that are entertaining, engaging, and truthful.

Containing numerous black-and-white screen stills and production photos, The View from Here provides fascinating insight into the filmmaking process—a book for serious film fans and gay culture aficionados alike.

Filmmakers profiled include: John Waters (Pink Flamingos; Hairspray), Pedro Almodovar (Volver; Bad Education), Gus Van Sant (My Own Private Idaho; Good Will Hunting), John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig & the Angry Inch; Shortbus), Don Roos (The Opposite of Sex; Happy Endings), Randal Kleiser (Grease), Don Mancini (the Chucky films), Kenneth Anger, Gregg Araki, Lea Pool, Wakefield Poole, Monika Treut, Rosa von Praunheim, and Canadian filmmakers such as John Greyson, Bruce LaBruce, Robert Lepage, Patricia Rozema, David Secter, Lynne Fernie, and Aerlyn Weissman.

Get your copy at fine bookstores, or visit the Arsenal Press page here.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Design and Culture is a new interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal published by Berg. Edited by Elizabeth Guffey (State University of New York, Purchase, United States) and associate editors Guy Julier (Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds, England), Pekka Korvenmaa, (University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland), and Matt Soar (Concordia University, Montreal, Canada), it is the official journal of the Design Studies Forum. Design and Culture will publish three issues annually beginning in the spring of 2009.

Design and Culture explores the dynamic, contingent relationships between design and its many cultural contexts. Encompassing the numerous professional, quasi-professional, and amateur fields of design, the journal identifies and explores cultures of design and designs of culture, investigating the tensions often encountered between critical, analytical, and intellectual activity and traditional studio-based endeavors. The journal aims to broaden the discourse of design by examining its relation to other academic disciplines, including anthropology, cultural studies, economics, geography, marketing, management, material culture, politics, and visual culture. It also seeks congruence between traditional divisions within design practice, such as graphic, product, industrial, and environmental design. In so doing, the journal's editorial board proposes to strengthen, clarify, and promote the study of design cultures, including history, criticism, and design practice, in the contemporary academy.

Design and Culture invites interpretive critiques, review essays, interviews, book reviews, case studies, and field reports that address designed objects, systems, and practices and their contexts, texts, and reception.

SUBMISSIONS

Guidelines for contributors and instructions for submitting manuscripts are available at Design and Culture’s website, Books for review and suggestions for books to review may be sent to:

Prof. Carma Gorman
Lead Book Review Editor
Design and Culture
School of Art and Design
Allyn Building 113, mail code 4301
1100 S. Normal Ave.
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Carbondale, IL 62901-4301
USA
Email: cgorman@siu.edu

The Daniel Langlois Foundation is offering research grants for projects that work with the Foundation’s remarkable collection of documents and archival materials and which explore new ways of disseminating and interacting with documentary content.

Research projects accepted must propose a highly original concept for information architecture and/or electronic publishing. The Foundation is interested in research into content organization systems, navigation and user interface systems, semantics research systems, and metadata development. It is also interested in projects on data and system emulation or migration and research into database access modes and interoperability.

Grant holders will be invited to publish the results of their research and post digitized documents on the Web site after providing background information and interpreting the documents. For example, the Foundation helped create a complete digitized collection of Radical Software, the new media publication that helped birth the video movement and documented the beginnings of the video, cybernetics, social activism and counterculture art movements in North America. The Foundation also has the complete archives of 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering, the groundbreaking festival in 1966 that brought together 10 artists and 30 engineers to collaborate on a spectacular nine days and nights of technology and performance art. Check out the website for many more examples of what is possible.

The Program for Researchers in Residence is open to historians, curators, critics, independent researchers, artists, designers and computer specialists. Candidates must have extensive research experience and pertinent academic and professional knowledge of art, science and technology, supported by published articles and conference communications.

Artists From Emerging Countries

There are also residencies offered to professional artists from emerging countries. These residencies are offered in collaboration with OBORO, an artist-run centre in Montreal. These grants aim to help the successful applicants in their research, experiments and project development, while allowing them to work in a different environment than their region or country of origin – see the website for the list of eligible countries.

Research grants are for $5,000. For researchers who do not live in or near Montreal, living and research expenses of up to CAN$10,000 will be covered by the Foundation with additional funding available from other sources. The maximum value of each grant is CAN$25,000.

Deadine September 30, 2007.

For more info, check out the Daniel Langois Foundation website. Look for “Grants for Resarchers” beside one of the floating boxes…

The Banff Centre is offering full scholarships (including flight, meals, tuition and accommodation) for up to 10 projects (2 members from each team) for its 4 day Media Lab workshop October 22-24, 2007.

The workshop is aimed at furthering Canadian digital media content and technology creators' skills for the interactive media market and focuses on delivery platforms, audience development, customized business plan support, cross platform design and distribution, effective documentation and presentation of materials/skills.

Deadline September 7.

For more information visit the Interactive Project Lab website.

PROPAGANDA III is calling for submissions for their 2008 world tour. They want political posters of any kind – right, left, liberal, anarchist, rhinoceros, ecofeminist, animal liberationist, vegan, Marxist, Neoliberal, Dadaist, anti-civ, Etc. The curators state that there will be no censorship of any kind.

PROPAGANDA III will open July 4, 2007 at Start Soma Gallery in San Francisco.

Submission deadline July 1, 2007. To view submission guidelines or for information about hosting the show once it goes on the road, go here.

Artists and non-artists alike are invited to grab a suitcase, fill it with tools that can “incite, create, collect, and record political/emotional scenes” then hit the streets and incite, create, collect and record political/emotional scenes. Then, return them to Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois to be inspected, collated, discussed, distributed, and diverted to new uses.

It is a way to express your love for other people’s baggage, while putting together your own.

The show is called Pathogeography and is modeled on the Situationists’ psychogeography but substitutes pathos (feeling) for psyche (the soul), emphasizing the emotional investments, temperatures, traumas, pleasures, and ephemeral experiences circulating throughout the political and cultural landscape.

From the artists: “We envision the project as a surrealist but not unsympathetic irritant to current cartographic trends in art making. With our collaborators, we want not only to reveal hidden political histories as we map the affective expressions of various body politics, but also to create magical linkages and intensities that might extend our political horizons.”

The suitcase project is one of many fascinating interventions in Gallery 400’s visiting artist series:

There’s Gretchen Vitamvas’s suits for men and women inspired by military camouflage but modeled on the interiors of El cars. The suits will be worn by volunteers who travel around the city by public transit and exercise in (in)conspicuousness. (May 24)

And there's also the daring “Unmarked Package: A Case for Feeling Insecure” intervention. The Institute for Infinitely Small Things will leave small unmarked packages at locations in Chicago characterized by excessive security – a test for insecurity in Chicago's public places. (May 18)

Alas, it’s too late to catch "Loomed" by artist Anya Liftig where she turned her body into a loom to weave environments together using movement. The performances wove artist and viewer into the fabric of the moment. And it’s too late to attend the University of Hip-Hop, two workshops (with artist Lavie Raven) which introduced newbies to the basic skills involved in graffiti writing for community murals (May 5).