FIELDS – Call for Participation

Fields starts from the assumption that the changing role of art in society is one where it becomes a critical interloper in patterns of social, scientific, and technological transformations. The range of practices which were once subsumed under terms such as media art, digital art, art and technology, art, and science have experienced such growth and diversification that no single term can work as a signpost any more. Fields is about mapping those expanded fields of artistic practices which are contextual seedbeds for ideas and practices aiming at overcoming the crisis of the present, inventing new avenues for future developments by bringing together traditionally separated domains. Fields is about new ecological and transversal trends in art, outlining potential future trajectories for multifarious types of activities that merge politics, technology, ecology, gender, semiology.

Which Fields act as catalysts and underpin those artistic practices which offer the greatest potential for social change towards more imaginative and sustainable ways of living? Which pre-cursors in the last 30-40 years did exist and what can we learn from those often untold stories? Areas that we will be looking at include but are not restricted to
* real fields, fields as in agricultural fields, works relating to fields, food growing, water, seeds, plant ecologies and communications; eco-activism, agro-socio-political projects
* field as metaphor, semiotic field theories and meta-field theories; work as decoding and recoding of cultural patterns of social use of images;
* electromagnetic fields: and their experimental epistomologies (quantum field theory); notion of relational field (Burnham 1968); the epistemological implications of quantum theory in art
* gendered fields, field as a psychological relation, psychological and psycho-analytical field theories
* field theories of perception
* social field theories, theories of masses and of emotional ‘contagion’; relational field  theories, notion of culture as a relational field

If you have an art or artistic-research project that fits one of those categories or where you feel that it extends this concept, please send a short description to: fields@rixc.lv

This is a first round call, the deadline is 31st of May, 2013.

In 2013 we aim at organising a number of workshops and event, beginning with Transmediale 2013, where the initial matrix of Fields gets jointly developed. This work is a step to the launch of the final exhibition Fields from May 15 to August 03 as part of Riga Culture Capital 2014, at Arsenals Exhibition Hall of National Art Museum in Riga. Fields is co-curated by Armin Medosch, Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits, and will get produced by RIXC in collaboration with a growing number of networks and partners.