As part of the Rewire 2018 discourse programme, we are looking for artists, writers and thinkers to explore two of the festival themes and submit a short proposal for a longer text that will be commissioned and published with our editorial team. Deadline for submissions is 1 March 2018.
For the eighth edition of our festival for adventurous music, Rewire will invite artists, speakers and theorists to engage and reflect on selected themes that we consider crucial to current debates in the wider contemporary cultural scene. During the festival, these themes will take shape as a series of talks and presentations that will be free for all to attend, as well as a series of published texts.
In the run up to the festival,we are opening our platform to artists, writers and thinkers to explore two of the festival themes – Sense of Self and Network Music (detailed below) – and submit a short proposal for a longer text that will be commissioned and published with our editorial team. Submissions can comprise traditional text formats as well as fiction, theory, poetry or anything else. We are happy for you to stick to one theme, merge them, contradict them, make them entirely your own, interpret them through our music programme… it’s open.
Sense of Self seeks to explore music and performance as a means of knowledge production and exchange. It invites us to reconsider age-old questions such as, “Who am I?” and “What is the self?” within a contemporary, often digital, context. To explore music as a platform for mobilising and exchanging emerging ideas, negotiating new perspectives, and challenging mainstream assumptions. How are today’s artists using their work to raise consciousness, to reflect and depart from given contexts. This can be theme can be taken anywhere – alternative personas and avatars as second selves, relations between the body and technology, and subsequent changes to our understanding of gender, normality, nature and ontology, the political potential for art as a means for constituting and subjectivating ourselves as well as the possibilities, and limits, of artistic practice for consciousness-raising.
Network Music will critically reflect on the mediation between url/afk spaces, how these relations materialise and the consequences and potentials that emerge from the cracks between their infrastructure. It considers how online spaces are increasingly offering alternative ways of community making. The term network nods to the unmappable and nonlinear form of organisation. It acknowledges how artistic practice has evolved with newly possible co-constituent processes, unfamiliar materials, formats and disorientating contexts, often hosted by ephemeral platforms that conflict our tendency away from temporality and inhabitability.
→ Please email submissions by 1 March 2018 to jo@rewirefestival.nl
→ Proposals should be no longer than 300 words;
→ Commissioned texts should be completed by 16 March and be around 500 to 1500 words
→ Include your name, contact details and location
→ Commissioned texts will be paid and you will be invited as a guest to Rewire 2018