Avantika Bawa:

Drain mag- Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture (www.drainmag.com) invites submission for its upcoming issue on Desire

Many collaborative art and design practices take the sociality of cultural practices as their starting point. As such these forms of contemporary culture challenge us to experience desire beyond the framework of pleasure, lack, natural drive, or even subjectivity. Inevitably, what begins to happen here is that we start to think and experience "desire" as a zone of intensity or affectivity that defies rigid organization. Similiarly, theorists such as Deleuze, Guattari, Hardt, Negri, Grosz, Reich, and Agamben have also in their own way embraced the materiality of desire inviting us to consider desire as social.

In effect there is an important shift in focus that is being proposed here: it is not ideology that produces the masses but the masses that produce ideology. This issue of Drain intends to lean upon the concept of "desire" as material process to explore cultural activities that operate according to a spirit of cooperation, all the while clearly situating the specificity of such practices within a contemporary political context.

The editorial board of Drain is interested in papers and artworks that address cultural practices that prompt us to face the perennial problem of desire in a capitalist world. In this respect this issue aims to further our understanding of the different investments desire can take (repressive or open) from the vantage point of culture. Essays(and art works) that examine the politics and/or ethics implicit within practices operating along the interstices of art and technology, art and design, architecture and urbanism, or theory and practice are especially welcome.

ABOUT DRAIN
Drain seeks to promote lively and well-informed debate around theory and praxis. Each issue of Drain has a specific concept that it explores. For more information, contact Avantika Bawa at avantika@drainmag.com or vist us at www.drainmag.com