Experiential Space Research Lab Open Call
The Experiential Space Research Lab is focused on exploring the potential of immersive art and design as critical thinking tools for addressing the pressing issues of our time. The six-month Incubator program provides two teams of artists with seed funding, mentorship, and a final exhibition at Gray Area.
We encourage media artists with an entrepreneurial spirit and systems orientation to apply. In the Incubator, we will work together to prototype, develop, produce and market an experiential space, which is modular and can tour to other locations. Successful artworks may be offered opportunities to install in various sites, beyond Gray Area.
We will be hosting two ‘Immersive Design Mixers’ to answer questions as well as provide a space for artists to meet potential collaborators.
Immersive Design Reality Mixer – Launch: May 30, 6-8pm
Immersive Design Reality Mixer – Showcase Closing: June 20, 5-7pm
Accepted applicants will join the Incubator from July 18, 2019 through January 17, 2020 to facilitate creating immersive installations showcased in a final exhibition. Artists will work in collaboration with partners possessing expertise in the following fields to engage the following topics:
- Background: thinking about living systems
- Curatorial Strategies: creating art centered around social and civic responsibility
- Economic Strategies: supporting artists within an immersive format
- Operations & Facilities: producing sustainable installations that scale
- Enactive Environments: prototyping and developing experiential spaces
Open Call Theme:
Reworlding: The Art of Living Systems
“Life creates the conditions conducive to life.”
– Janine Benyus
“On earth the environment has been made and monitored by life as much as life has been made and influenced by the environment.”
– Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan
The most unexpected discovery of the space age is that Earth is alive. Far from serving as a passive context for communities of organisms, it is both the substrate and dynamic extension of our collective existence. Over billions of years, evolving living systems have regulated and transformed the planetary environment. From plate tectonics to the global atmosphere, from mycelial webs to neural networks, life has shaped the world. And today, this is happening at an unprecedented pace under the influence of human technologies.
Reworlding: The Art of Living Systems is an invitation to explore new ways of perceiving these symbiotic relationships. While scientists excel at breaking down the details of our planetary systems, we are seeking artists interested in experientially cultivating an intuition of living wholes. How might immersive artworks become perspective-shifting spaces that dissolve critical distance and reveal intimate entanglements? By making the planetary personal as well as communal, how might we even accelerate Earth’s capacity to heal itself?
Reference Materials
Videos
Books
- The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems by Fritjof Capra
- Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna Haraway
Articles / Essays
- Gaian Systems essays
- Gaia 2.0 by Timothy Lenton and Bruno Latour
- How Life Shaped Earth by Michael Gross
- Wood wide web: Trees’ social networks are mapped
- Living Systems Essay by G.A. Swanson and James Grier Miller
Open Call Theme developed in partnership with Gaian.Systems.
Click here for more info.
