Callout: Vancouver's "New Forms" Festival

Call for Proposals: New Forms Festival 2007
The New Forms Festival is an annual cross-disciplinary festival
exploring installation, performance, music, film, and electronic arts.

The theme for NFF07 is Re·Use
To use something again, often for a different purpose and usually as
an alternative to throwing it out.
NFF 07 looks at the ideas of reuse in the media arts. These forms
have been able to come from different areas all around us. Whether
involving the recycling of equipment, the change in its use,
reprogramming material, the sample and mash-up of sound/images and
reconstruction of ideas; the concept of reuse has become one of the
major entities behind invigorating, changing, and growing media and
electronic arts.

Over history art has always seen recontextualization at its very
core. Warhol once asked if there was ever really an original idea.
Shakespearean tales become modern films, ancient sounds become
electronic music anthems. Pop culture drives home sounds and imagery
that have changed, grown, and evolved over time. Within this we have
seen our cultures mix, grow, and shape shift as ideas get
recontextualized and reapproapriated from generation to generation,
and culture to culture.

For Re:Use NFF is looking for pieces that challenge these models and
trends, recognizing shifts that have taken place as well as new and
innovative works that re:use works on formats and in ways not yet
seen. As the amount of information we receive on a daily basis
increases at a pace far faster that at any other time in history, NFF
07 will become a platform for this mixed media world, and a indicator
of what might lie ahead in the years to come.

NFF EXHIBITION 07
Re-Use: Everything Knows Itself
The world is round.- Gertrude Stein

Clocks are thinking, Earth is spinning, people are ticking...

Furthering the New Forms Festival's 2007 direction of exploring
things unseen the exhibition will centre on the theme of
re-constructing, re-shaping and re-mixing the already extant. The aim
of this reincarnation is to reflect the sameness and the difference of
things revealed by repetition, iteration, rhythm and phase.

Sameness requires difference; the very regularity of a beat, of
drumming, can be enhanced and overwritten. The second repetition is
invariantly different then the first by being second. Difference
resolves into more complex kinds of sameness.

We are interested in form as much as content. We shall invite works
that are spare, astringent, and display a simplicity of means coupled
with transparency of technique. Works purged of metaphor and stripped
down to their most fundamental features. "Less is more, more is less.
The eye is a menace to clear sight." [Ad Reinhardt]. We would like to
show self-contained works that shed light on the underlying systematic
action of their construction, exhibiting regularity of behavior in the
elements they use. We welcome audio/visual installation, kinetic
sculpture, networked and telematic art submissions. The key words,
again, are: repetition, iteration, rhythm and phase.

UNCONFERENCE: ArtCamp07: Re:use

ArtCamp07: Re:use follows up on ArtCamp06, the World's First
Un-Conference on Art, a groundbreaking day-long event co-produced by
New Forms Festival and Upgrade! Vancouver, which was attended by over
a hundred artists, designers, programmers, critics, theorists,
curators and practitioners from all fields who presented over 30
workshops, talks and hybrid events throughout a single
inspiration-filled day. The theme of Re:use will be brought into the
framework of ArtCamp in order to offer an opportunity for participants
from all fields working creatively with technological or material
frameworks to come together in an open window of time and space to
meet, show work, talk about ideas, try things out, and learn new
hands-on practices.
Bring your turntables, laptops, or sewing machines, your old mp3s,
National Geographics, bridesmaid's dresses, or liquor tickets. Come
with something, and leave with something else. We invite all manner of
on-the-spot engagements including but not limited to: DIY projects
that transform discarded materials in something beautiful, cool or
useful; showing people how to cut and paste code to make quick and
dirty websites or applications; strategies for revisioning experiences
or environments; workshops for recycling photographs, cassettes, CDs
or other technological or manufacturing detritus; conceptual
detournement; discussion or demonstration of interventionist practices
relating to performance, psychogeography or street art; collaborative
drawing events; experimentation with found materials; realtime mixing
of cameraphone pictures, text messages, video, photostreams or
something else; swaps, exchanges or tricked-out marketplace mods for
circulating, disseminating or evolving objects, subjects or
frameworks; presentation of cultural objects or artifacts that relate
to reuse or recycling; discussion tracing the circulation and "reuse"
of strategies or ideas; or grand schemes for social or environmental
engagements. You get the idea: it's up to you. Bring something --
object, material, idea, technology, or just bring yourself – and put
it in the mix.
ArtCamp is a self-organizing event that gear up in the form of a
collaborative wiki in the months and weeks leading up to the festival.
To look at last year's wiki, visit http://artcamp.pbwiki.com


FILM
Deconstruction
Deconstruction looks to films made entirely out of sample based
material. Whether coming from a found art, archival, scratch video or
other mode of presentation, deconstruction looks to those works that
alter the reality of the original clips, creating new context through
the finished result. Works are encouraged from a wide range of
sources including poltical, pop-cultural, surreal, home-video, and the
internet.

MUSIC AND VISUALS SERIES
Scratch Video
Aiming to present a comprehensive look at the world of scratch-video,
one of the most prominent sub-genres of live video production and
interfacing, this night takes live video mixing/scratching under the
context of hip-hop/beat music production as its focus. Assembling
National and International artists, software developers, and
scenemakers, NFF07 affords a mash-up of sub-genres, styles, and
methods, picturing where this Form has been and where it is going.
Live movement within the image, movement, and sound is crucial to this
evening.

Cross-Pollination
Articulating the crossovers and variances between traditional
band/instrument structures and electronically-mediated production and
performance, this event allows audiences to see committed efforts on
both sides in order to facilitate cooperation and communication
between Forms. Cross-Pollination features 30-minute sets from bands,
which are sampled live and then restructured and remixed by a
laptop/live p.a. artist immediately thereafter, which effectively is a
live remix. This format encourages both artists and audience to
stretch their understanding and appreciation to the limit, as it lays
bare both the capabilities, but also inadequacies, of the Forms, while
pushing both all involved to further their skills and the scope of
their art.

Electronic Heritage
Electronic music as a musical art form has been in existence for
nearly a century. From early modulating and noise creating machines
like the intonarumori to modern day audio computer software like ACID
and Pro Tools electronic musicians have been at the forefront of
musical innovation since its existence. 2007 will mark the 100th
anniversary of the first electronic instrument the teleharmonium. In
celebration of the birth of this now antique musical art form the New
Forms Festival would like to pay tribute to yesteryears electronic
pioneers by inviting contemporary electronic innovators to interpret
their sound. Electronic Heritage will invite artists to incorporate
electronic theories, instruments and samples from their electronic
forefathers into live performances that will both address the old and
bridge the new. This night will show where we've come from and where
electronic music is yet to go.

Manglification
Building off the success of the "Where We Are" and "Timestretch"
nights from the Low/Music & Visual Series of NFF05 & 06 respectively,
Mangling plans to showcase those at the forefront of modern dance
culture and its subsequent music production. These artists provide
necessary alternatives, reconsiderations, and subversions of the vast
machine that has occured as the music industry has overtaken branches
of the electronic music scene and its pop tangents. The event will
complete the spectrum of the modern club environment, pairing the
music sets with visual installations and live video performance.

RESIDENCY PROGRAM
New Forms has begun to work with Artist Run Centres in the city to
produce works specifically around the festival. The goals are to
create a maximum audience for these local artists works that might not
be available otherwise, and also to give these artists a forum to
display works in an international context. The first of these
partnerships will be with OFMAS (Open Forum Media Arts Society) for
2007. We will be contacting further Artist Run Centres in Vancouver
concerning this in the months ahead. The Residency Program is only
applicable to local artists and community projects are encouraged.
Please contact curatorial@newformsfestival.com
for further information on
the program.


All submissions should be done through the online form at
www.newformsfestival.com
, with accompanying
material sent to:
New Forms Festival 06 / Transformations #200-252 East 1st Avenue,
Vancouver, B.C. V5T-1A6. Submission Deadline: April 1st, 2007.

(No Submissions arriving after April 1st will be accepted)

For any further information please email submissions@newformsfestival.com.


-------------------
Malcolm Levy
New Forms Festival : Revised Films
#200-252 East 1st Avenue. Vancouver, B.C. V5T-1A6
malcolm@newformsfestival.com
604.648.2752