Call for Entry: Black Box Seattle

  • Location: Seattle, Online
  • Deadline: May 1 2016 at 5:05PM
Eligibility: International
Location: Seattle, Online
Application Deadline: May 31, 2016 at 5PM PST

Festival Dates: September 21 - October 2, 2016

Hashtag: #BlackBoxing
Shareable URL: bit.ly/blackboxing

Artists from around the world working in any medium are invited to submit work to Black Box 3.0. A multi-platform program of significant scope, Black Box is an annual international arts and technology festival produced by Aktionsart in Seattle. The festival explores how technology is transforming the arts, culture, and public life.

Black Box is a platform for the most talented and innovative artists, filmmakers, designers, curators, technologists, hackers, and makers in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. The festival features new work by international contemporary artists who are collected by major museums and routinely featured on the international art circuit. It is also an essential voice for emerging talent. Black Box is open to all arts disciplines and mediums, including visual art, performance, design, fashion, music, folk and traditional arts, literature, media, film, research, theater, and more.

Core programming is nomadic and experiential, presenting projects in unexpected spaces throughout the city. The tightly curated festival includes exhibitions, screenings, discussions, workshops, installations, performances, and hybrid formats. An online channel - which received over 25,000 visits in 2015 - premieres and distributes festival content to audiences in Seattle and beyond.

Black Box collaborates closely with a selective partner network of Seattle’s most adventurous institutions. Past partners include Seattle Art Museum, Seattle International Film Festival, University of Washington, Seattle Center, and Cornish College of the Arts. In 2015, Black Box exhibited over eighty artists including new work from Pierre Huyghe, Ed Atkins, Sue de Beer, Phil Collins, Josh Kline, Gillian Wearing, Roman Signer, Zach Blas, Petra Cortright, Lisa Tan, Stan Douglas, Knut Asdam, Kalup Linzy, Robin Rhode, Ellie Ga, and Julien Prévieux.

There is no overarching festival theme beyond the umbrella of “arts and technology”, which is intentionally open. Attention will be closely paid to intellectually rigorous and socially urgent ideas, emerging technologies, and experimental projects that present new modes of creating and thinking. We are interested in works that respond to the following themes, tools or mediums: augmented and virtual reality, gaming, expanded and immersive cinema, social media, architectural mapping, generative software, systems, mobility and mobile apps, wearables, digital labor, interactivity, data visualization, experimental and interactive documentary, surveillance, biotech, holography, space exploration, 3D printing, robotics, production and distribution tools/platforms, artificial intelligence, machine learning, hypercompliance, deep web, blockchain, digital culture, sustainability, innovation, disnovation, transmedia, utopia.

Technology disrupts the arts, but how do the arts disrupt technology? What is the role of artist and creator in an increasingly mechanized world? How can artists leverage new tools to produce, distribute, create access, and build audiences for their work? How does technological innovation and disnovation shape public life?

APPLY: www.aktionsart.org/submissions