Call for proposal

Call for Proposals/ "Hilchot Shchenim chapter C"

Globalization, a process that reflects modern society, has, in fact, existed for hundreds of years. Globalization as we recognize it today, gained impetus from the beginning of the 1990’s with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its signs are a cross frontier flow of capital, information, human resources and simulation.

Globalization could be defined as a combination of economic, cultural and political phenomena. These features point out its extent and make it possible to compare it with earlier phenomena that have changed cultures: Gutenberg’s invention of printing press and the Industrial Revolution. In comparison to other periods, globalization’s uniqueness is imbedded in the fact that it empowers the phenomena that have influenced humanity since the invention of the telescope, through which the world seems proximate and accessible.

Simultaneously to the globalization processes, a protest movement has developed claiming that globalization enables giant corporations to act without controls and neglect social and/or ecological issues. Perhaps this would be a good point at which to alter definitions: The protest is not against globalization, it is directed against the influences of global capitalism - the economic system, that from being one of the economic theses becomes the essence of the period that molds the world.

In 1962, the Canadian futurist, Marshall McLuhan, determined that the exploitation of electronics has converted humanity into a single global village. The development of the Internet, television and satellite communications have accelerated the process and the residents of the global village are, now more than ever, exposed to globalization’s economic, political and social influences. International commercial corporations can use these networks to produce products at various locations in the world in order to achieve the highest profits while optimally exploiting raw materials, salaries, research centers and geographic convenience. The middle classes - the largest throughout the world - are exposed to the same communications channels, music and fashions.

Globalization has an increasing influence on more and more people throughout the world. It alters our perceptions, the conception of place and converts local into universal. Geographical locations and regions no longer exist in the older accepted meaning of the word. In their stead, we witness geographic locations in which global phenomena occur. These phenomena could be economic, result in the migration of workers and work places; political and military resulting in emigration, refugees and terror.

One of the principal objections to globalization is that it weakens local cultures and creates a uniform, shallow culture that consolidates under dominant American-Western influences. Without a doubt there is much in common between the modern young British and Japanese cultures, a phenomenon that would have been impossible a hundred years ago. However, the fact that so many people are exposed to universal cultures, does not necessarily spell out the doom of local cultures, but rather to change and adapt. Thus cultural products and multi-cultural, national and corporate mutations, which gain expression principally in the urban space of the new geography, are born.

The second chapter of the Hilchot Shechenim Triology focused on the relationship between art and activism and the methods in which tactics and strategies move from economic and political to art and back again. The works at the exhibition naturally exhibited the negative aspect of global capitalism as the central trait of the globalization phenomenon.

In the third chapter of Hilchot Shechenim, we will attempt investigating the cultural variation that stems from the inter-cultural diffusion, or the manner in which diffusion influences artistic creation. We request artists, groups of artists, architects and media personalities to relate to the points of friction that global systems generate as a principal trait of our times. We propose the Internet as a positive model of globalization; a model in which states, nationality, giant companies and political and social organizations have equal value. This is a model that presents a decentralized network that has no control and enforcement center, a network that is incapable of controlling the flow of information or the number of its citizens. This is a network that simulates a supra political structure with weak controlling abilities, exposed to disturbances, misbehavior and rebellion, but does not collapse as a result. We invite artists to paint a possible scenario of life within the world of possibilities of a global culture. We will attempt to examine artists’ vision of this world and what the influences of a world such as this on the artistic field are consolidated.

Deadline 15/11/2004.

The Israeli Center for Digital Art
Digital ArtLab
16 Yirmiyahu st,
Holon 58373, Israel.
www.digitalartlab.org.il
T. + 972 3 5568792
F. + 972 3 5580003

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