OPEN CALL: NET ART <> Les (Im)mattériaux?

Gallery XY Olomouc announces an open call for net art and digital art works for thematic exhibition taking place in February 2021.

The thematic starting point for the exhibition with working title Les (Im)mattériaux? is virus as a multifaceted phenomenon.

We perceive the virus as a complex and very current topic - be it biological virus endangering human health, or an artificially created virus in the framework of computer security/technology. Both categories of viruses - and not only today - significantly affect society and human lives. What do they have in common above all is the degree of danger caused by their (apparent) “invisibility” and invasiveness at the same time, and thus their ability to spread unobserved and infect large numbers of individuals at the global scale.


These points make virus not only security, health and/or social issue, but also philosophical and artistic problem, and raise a number of questions:
artificially created technological virus vs. biological virus, and their mutual permeability
virus as a manifestation of posthumanist tendencies
virus as art and art as virus
virus as algorithm
virus as a product of artificial (or biological) intelligence
virtual and physical virus as a manifestation of globalization
virus as metaphor
virus as investigative crime story
virus as technical problem
the performativity of a virus
….
keywords: #invisibility, #danger, #carelessness, #reaction, #invasiveness, #inability to understand what is going on, #abstinence, #adaptability, #caution, #anosognosia, #eisegesis

Therefore the subject of the exhibition lies not in approaching the virus literally (in the sense of biological analysis or visualisation of its anatomy), but rather in presenting the broader themes evoken by the existence of virus as an posthumanist autonomous entity within contemporary society.

The goal is to point out that the viruses have, and always will be part of our lives. And also to show in a sense that even a virus can be an art.


We accept existing or newly created digital and net artworks by both professional and emerging artists (the quality of the work is decisive).


We understand net art as defined by Rhizome: “as an expansive, hybrid set of artistic practices that overlap with many media and disciplines”, as "art that acts on the network, or is acted on by it." Therefore we seek not only works critically approaching the internet as an artistic medium but also those using informal practices such as selfies or Twitter poems, and the open call is open for works of digital and physical nature (web-based, facebook-based, twitter-based, tumblr-based etc. net art, wi-fi installations, networked art and performance, post-internet videos, photographs, paintings, gifs, objects, graphics, moving image, interactive installations, artistic texts etc.).



Submit your artwork proposal (incl. visualisation or documentation) prior to Aug 30 2020 to [email protected]. Subject “OPEN CALL NET ART”.



Selected authors will be contacted during September 2020.

Gallery site: http://www.xyolomouc.com/home/akce/open-call-net-art