Call For Papers
Issue 4: Cancelled
Guest editor: Maia Nichols
The Journal
Unlikely is a trans-disciplinary journal, which opens unexpected spaces for artistic exchange and scholarly conversations across mediums, disciplines and continents. Unlikely supports the research community of practitioners, makers, and scholars working in the creative arts.
This international, peer-reviewed publication presents the opportunity for artists working in practice-led research to engage in conversation with a range of arts scholars on contemporary concerns. As an experiment in form, Unlikely engages its audience and contributors in a two-stage process of live event, presenting creative practitioners’ works, followed by peer-reviewed electronic publication.
Issue 4: Cancelled
They say “[t]he time of heroes is over” [1], hoping to bury with it all forms of heroism. Certain key aspects of society are irretrievable, crossed out, eliminated. On the one hand, some purposefully act under the guise of nonchalance, taking up a void status as strategic positioning. These can be seen to act up “be unruly” or to act out “behave anti-socially” within the world. On the other hand, the impetus for Cancelled will be to consider agency and alternative models of questioning globalized capital, by rethinking the productive legacy of nihilist strategies and their temporal effects. This issue invites essays that consider how the fields of comsmunication, hacking, design, architecture, activism, scientific or artistic practices produce effects through cancellation, deflection, or discretion.
[1] Bernadette Corporation, Get rid of Yourself, 2003
Themes
Contributors are welcome to confront the tensions between strategies of objectification and tools of abstraction versus the glorification of selfhood, expressionism and the individual. What forms of spatial orientation does your position entail? What are the advantages and pitfalls of strategic desertion, drop-outs, purposeful self removal?
What is the effect of choices to evade selfhood, to bypass an emphasis on the self, or to leave the scene of art, science or neighboring fields? This issue examines the aesthetics, function and purpose of cancellation and urges rigorous and thoughtful critical perspectives.
Contributions may include:
- Critical engagement with subterranean networks
- Bio-politics and discretion
- Neuroscience, architecture, history of science
- Practices that abhor an audience or use only what is necessary and without records
- Detailed and thorough analysis of specific projects, artists, cancelled events or performances
- Scholarly articles and essayistic writing
- Case studies
- Fieldwork, field notes
- Models for the re-distribution of agency
- Biographies/documentation of hackers/ rogue figures
- Critical examination of collaborative strategies
Papers from researchers in art history, visual studies, sociology, curating, film studies, media studies, philosophy, geography, architecture, science, and other relevant fields are encouraged to apply. Scholarly submissions should be in English, in MLA format. Texts should be between 3000-6000 words including abstracts and works cited. All submissions should be accompanied by a biographical note on the author, no longer than 100 words.
Process
Email cancelledinfo(at)gmail.com with the subject “Cancelled Abstract” by March 19th, 2017, specifically outlining your contribution (250 words) in terms of both the thematic focus, and its proposed form. The editor will respond, inviting selected contributors to develop their proposal into a full submission to be peer reviewed.
Submissions are due by July 2nd 2017.
