digital residency | only 11 days left to apply!

/ p r o j e c t _ c o n c e p t : /

Is it not now useful to rename the Internet? Is the Web 2.0 not more of a cloud for falling than a net for catching? Here in the cloud, we are certainly floating in free fall: our bodies embedded and encoded in incalculable complicit connections, but none so stable as to provide a discernible horizon or sustainable ground for living. Hito Steyerl pronounces the death of the Internet— but not because it outdated, undervalued, or forgotten. Rather, the network of external interconnections that we once knew as the Internet has been consumed— cannibalized— brought into our bodies, our brains, our factories, and our fictions. The Internet's wiring of connectivity has shifted towards a cloudy and existential wirelessness, generating more connections than ever but also more abstraction and opacity regarding our own innumerable connective limbs. The Internet is dead, but its affective protocols of remote intimacies, generative aesthetics, embarrassing timelines, and immaterial labor persist into the zero gravity of the cloud. And, unlike in the Internet, there is no clear decision about being 'on it' or 'off it'; one need not be in the cloud to feel its spontaneous condensation. To quote Steyerl: "Huge cloud storage drives rain down as skylines in desert locations" and "an upload comes down as shitstorm."

The primary objectives of the embarrassment_party residencies are to explore the above terms, experiences, and affects of the cloud and to discover new ways to ethically aestheticize its ‘wirelessness’. How does the cloud become a medium for artistic practice? How is the cloud a factory for the performed labor of the net artist and the 'creative consumer'? What conversations can we generate regarding a future poetics of the cloud?


/ a b o u t _ t h e _ r e s i d e n c y : /

The embarrassment_party project is offering a set of digital residencies to take place between February 7th and 28th of 2014. The residencies will culminate in an array of connective hypertexts, with possible content spanning everything embeddable in HTML. Participants are encouraged to collaboratively generate of a continuous stream of media, swelling among creative prose, video art, performances, workshops, .GIFs, and theoretical writing.


/ h o n o r a r i a + s u p p o r t : /

The 8 artists chosen to participate will each receive a small honorarium (via check or PayPal), press through the project sponsors (including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation via the Five College Digital Humanities Project), hosting space for the commissioned works on the www.embarrassmentparty.biz platform, and the opportunity to archive works with the Five College Digital Environment Development and Coordinating Committee (DEDCC).

In addition to the support listed above, the maestros of the embarrassment_party project will continue to search for venues in which to instantiate the work after its online deployment, with the intention of sharing the show as widely and enthusiastically as possible.