Call for proposals: “Technology, Mediation, Performance”: Extended deadline to 1 July 2022

Download this CFP as a PDF: https://performancephilosophy.org/public/journals/1/CFP%20Technology,%20mediation,%20performance.pdf

Call for proposals: “Technology, Mediation, Performance”

Joint issue of ECHO / Performance Philosophy 7/3 (Dec 2022)

Editors: Anthony Gritten, Caroline Wilkins, Jonathan Impett, Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca

Deadline for first draft submissions (draft material suitable for peer review): July 1, 2022

We are delighted to share this call for proposals for a joint issue on ‘Technology, Mediation, Performance’ that will be published simultaneously on the platforms of Performance Philosophy journal and the Echo journal of the Orpheus Institute. 

How does technology inform, shape, mediate and constrain our conceptions and practices of performance? This issue begins with an expanded understanding of ‘technology’. Not only specific technologies (notation, the oboe, recording, the internet, VR), but also wider technological discourses of practical, environment, and conceptual thought-space (heliocentrism, the steam engine, computation and our common extended reality). Not only “new technologies” in the present and imagined or hypothesised future, but across knowledge horizons to the past and in considering our relations with inherited culture.

The bounding distinctions of our performances are dissolved and renegotiated, and with them their constituent concepts. If new technologically informed work denies distinctions between ‘performer’ and ‘composer’, ‘work’ and ‘practice’, ‘instrument’ and ‘environment’, even ‘performer’ and ‘listener’, then where are our objects and foci in performance? How do such transformations affect the subjects of and approaches to performance? Do our identities shift, and with them entire cultural bodies of education and criticism?

Our notions of instruments as ‘tools’ collapse as sound production and control is assimilated into cognitive prosthesis. Confronting questions raised by AR suggests that the physicality of performance is always mediatised. The intentionalities of performance are brought into question in our interactive and environmental work. We might view the proposal of a ‘metaverse’ - a multi-world of dynamic, interacting augmented realities – with scepticism. But in some respects, it is also our increasingly common reality, one that we are naturally drawn to explore and examine, whatever our apparent material. How does our current and coming technological reality shed new light on performance and practices from other times and places, however near or distant?

Can we locate the musical phenomenon itself sufficiently to be able to talk about its performance? Viewed from a current technologically informed perspective, we might suggest that (Western art) music is indivisibly both a virtual entity and a fundamentally material phenomenon. As such, it constitutes a long cultural experience of some of the challenges with which AI and VR technologies now confront us – practically, culturally, and philosophically.

If, in a fully interactive virtual world, distinctions between ‘artist’ and ‘receiver’ collapse, along with the autonomy of the phenomenon itself, where might our performances re-emerge sustainably? What are their constituent concepts and techniques? If all engagement becomes performative, then what might that imply for our relationships with inherited musical cultures?

We welcome proposals for presentations that choose multiple materials and forms, whether digital or non-narrative, that correspond with their particular aesthetic style, thus avoiding a possible compromise with regard to content. We encourage practices of doing, rather than theorizing. We seek practitioners working at the intersections of performance, technology, and (musical) sound, and invite the invention of new approaches and new optimal expressive means for their communication. The inter-disciplinary nature of this call means that the readership of both journals will be wide. In terms of content, form and style, we therefore ask contributors to consider how material will be received and understood by a non-specialist ‘audience’ unfamiliar with specialist terms, whether technical, musical or philosophical.

We also particularly invite submissions that:

• Re-centre the work of BIPOC and global majority heritage artists and scholars, and other groups most impacted by systemic oppression
• Foreground performance and philosophy from the global South

Possible topics: Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Artificial Intelligence (AI), intermedial performance, new music theatre, online performance, performance prosthetics, performativity of technology, mediation and subjectivity, trans/interdisciplinary performativity, ontologies of virtual musicking, the mediating role of technologies in historical and contemporary performance.

 

Formats

We invite proposals for submissions to be published on one or both journal platforms simultaneously. Both ECHO and Performance Philosophy are committed to publishing artistic research and to the performative expression of thinking through different formats and styles.

For Performance Philosophy, we welcome academic articles, but also contributions in a wide range of other formats that take advantage of our platform and collaborative pieces between two or more authors. Performance Philosophy is able to embed video and other media (where appropriate permissions have been obtained) in our online edition. See examples such as: A mixed media article, A collectively authored annotated score, An audio article. Performance Philosophy only considers submissions that have not been previously published, and are not under consideration for publication with another journal. For complete author guidelines, see here.

For ECHO, submissions may be articles of several thousand words or shorter artist statements. Authors are encouraged to structure digitally-native storytelling around their creative work, using media-rich materials, nonlinear navigation and tools of data representation and interactive code. Accepted authors will be invited to experiment and build their article on the ECHO platform. See examples: echo.orpheusinstituut.be

Queries about suitability of topic and / or form to any of the issue editors: Anthony Gritten [email protected] , Caroline Wilkins [email protected]  , Jonathan Impett [email protected] , Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca [email protected]

Submission

Contributors should upload by July 1, 2022 the following four items to both platforms (ECHO here and Performance Philosophy here):

• Material sufficient for peer review (text files, images, media, code in standard formats),
• Brief description of how you envisage using either or both of the online platform/s
• Names of two possible peer reviewers
• Biography 200-word max

This issue is scheduled for publication in December 2022.

Peer review

Editors reserve the right to return submissions that are not suitable for the journal at the submission stage.

If your submission is accepted for consideration, then your material will be sent out for peer-review. We aim for this to be a supportive process and are careful to select reviewers with expertise in the form of the submission.  We do not charge fees for accessing articles, nor for publishing or processing submissions. For full details regarding Performance Philosophy’s open access, peer-review, and other policies, see here.