Imagine yourself on a dance floor - scratch that - a rave. You see faces, people, each moving separately but each to the same music — the same code. You start to dance with one face, you inter-face. You meet, you connect, you communicate, if only for a second, and then the face disappears. One meaning out of many, but its all produced from the social structure of a dance. Now imagine yourself in front of your computer, you are probably already there, perhaps cue more procrastination more curiosity - more clicking. You are looking for something, that long lost face from the dance the night before. You type, you click, you communicate, if only for a second, and your search disappears into a world of stalking. Do you dare click on the link? One meaning out of many appears, and its produced from the structure of the database itself. But, sigh of relief, the face may never know you are searching for them even if you found their long lost high school photo, you are in protected mode.
Protected mode. The mode where you have control, where you know how to dance, and you know how to act socially. The friendly user of the dance floor, where you think your moves always look good, but do they really? The database is processing more data than ever, each subtle movement you make is feeding it. It needs you to have power. But you are only dancing a one way, the type of dance where you zone out alone among the techno beats, lost in your own head, a part of the bigger scene, but ultimately alone in your movements. The face never dances back - it takes, takes, takes - and you are caught in the beats of the user friendly.
We could create a database of dancing and a database of a databases and put them side by side. Music is the code of the dance. Software the code of the database. They both guide how the the dance/database is to function when it is run, when it moves, when it is a process. But most importantly, both dance and databases have rhythm. They have a time and space. They have a context in which they run - and repeat. After all, rhythm is the repeated pattern itself - the code and the looping. And we all dance to that. We dance to a choreography that is pre-programmed into the interface. This choreography has power: it is the planned moves of control. And yet we see it as user friendly, we can use it, we can search the database, we can grasp what it is about. But really we are just making the same old moves that everyone else on the dance floor is pushing out of their (seemingly) free flowing limbs. We dance, and we are part of the choreograph of control.
So why Dance at all?
Flee Immediately! is opening a call to explore just that. Or in other words, themes around dance/rhythm/movement and code/technology/database and how it all comes together culturally, visually, in design, in motion, in control… You interpret it - dance at your own rhythm and to your own beat….
(But we can make our bodies dance contra-tempo, we can search for all the wrong things, we can create error. We can dance to our own tune, dance against the faces, dance with the faces and perhaps that tune becomes all the next rage, the next viral video, the next software system: ‘Codes with compatibility problems begin to grow wild and to adopt the same opacity of everyday languages that have made people their subjects for thousands of years. The wonderful term source code becomes literal truth.’ Friedlich Kittler, ‘Protected Mode’ http://monoskop.org/images/1/1f/Kittler_Friedrich_1997_Protected_Mode.pdf))
The submissions can take any form (writing, images, design, performance….) and be as experimental as you wish, however, they will manifest in the form of a digital publication. This will not be just a website or a PDF to flip through - the form of the whole Flee Immediately! digital publication will also experimentally explore the theme and push the limits of what it means to be a digital publication or website today. The structure of the digital publication will come from the submissions themselves, so we can work together for your individual piece. And/or if you have ideas for how the overall structure of the publication (related to the theme of dance / technology and expanding the notion of a ‘webpage’ today) could take shape feel free to submit those ideas as well.
Please first submit a brief idea of what you would like to submit or create. This can be in written form, images, prototypes etc. Whatever works best to convey your idea. From there, we will begin a dialogue and eventually you can submit the final work to be built into the platform. Any questions, just drop us an email!
There will be a small fee given to the artist/contributor for each accepted submission (amount tbd and will be confirmed before publication)
Thanks to all who supported us in the Kickstarter campaign! You can see more about Flee Immediately! in the link as well as some updates, ideas and a way into the process. We will use these to fund this issue including: 1. fee for contributors/artists 2. fee for programmers of the platform 3. admin (hosting, domain management, backups) 4. workshops in collaboration with the Open Systems Association. Thank you!!!
Deadline for proposals or initial interests/ideas: 15 January 2016
Deadline for final submissions: 28 February 2016
Estimated Issue 02 launch: March 2016
Send submissions / and questions to: fleeimmediately[at]gmail[.]com
For more inspiration, and to stay up to date, check out our Facebook and Instagram.
Below are a few possible sources for inspiration, but really, feel free to take it any direction you wish!
The Rite of Spring
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rq1q6u3mLSM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF1OQkHybEQ
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/classicalmusic/10061574/The-Rite-of-Spring-1913-Why-did-it-provoke-a-riot.html
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/891643/twitter-image-encoding-challenge
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rq1q6u3mLSM, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF1OQkHybEQ
http://heartbleed.com
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/music-therapy-heart-cardiovascular/
Some writing/films I wrote/made on the Dance Epidemic of 1518:
http://www.thestate.ae/dancing-technology-and-the-plague-death/
http://www.thestate.ae/dtp2/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ij2aNJ-QUM
http://www.torquetorque.tumblr.com/
http://linkeditions.tumblr.com/torque1
http://choreographiccoding.org/