PUBLIC: Screens
Call for Proposals

PUBLIC: Screens (2009) will be dedicated to the ways screens are used, viewed, imagined, placed, and made worldwide.  In developed countries, the consumption and use of contemporary moving images has moved off the Cineplex screen and out of the traditional museum space, onto billboards, outdoor screenings, and more privately to ipods, cellphones, computers .  At the same time movie theatres have been disappearing from developing countries, where DVDs and mobile screens pass through cities and rural areas.  Television productions are consumed worldwide through downloading and DVD rentals, such that one can watch Al Jezeera news streamed live from the Internet while sitting in a Buenos Aires café. The increased presence of screens in a variety of art forms and public places complicates and enriches patterns of consumption; cameras and screens are used for surveillance of nearly every aspect of civilian life. Artists and filmmakers respond to these new spaces of viewing and changing patterns of consumption with a variety of aesthetic, technological and distribution tactics.

This issue seeks submissions on local practices, as well as analyses of aesthetic, technological, spatial or social screen phenomena, from around the world.  We are looking for personal as well as theoretical pieces, short or long,  artist projects, creative writing, how-to manifestos, image archives, etc. Themes of interest include, but are not limited to:

--mobile cinema sightings
-- locating global screens
--projections in museums, opera, theatre, etc.
--new phantasmagorias
--surveillance and enforced screenings (prisons, school curricula, info screens, ambient screens, etc)
-- screen architecture
--public/private screens
--screen memories
--clandestine screenings (censorship, copyright, political organizing, pornography, etc.)
--walls, divided cities, frontiers
--hand-held screens/screens on the street
--activism--piracy
--cultural institutions (biennales, film festivals, sports, etc)

A dossier on mobile cinema is edited by Tamara Falicov.


Proposals (up to 500 words) are due by Sep. 15, 2008.   Final submission is due April 1, 2009.  Editors: Jennifer VanderBurgh, Susan Lord, Dorit Naaman. Please send all correspondence (incl mobile cinema dossier) to Dorit Naaman <[log in to unmask]> .

PUBLIC: Featuring Canadian and international artists and writers, each issue curates a unique assemblage of art projects and writing that reflect a contemporary theme.  PUBLIC encourages a broad range of dialogue by bringing together artists, theorists, curators, philosophers, creative writers, and historians; by always publishing a diverse range of contemporary artists' projects; by experimenting with alternative forms of dissemination (i.e. DVD's); and by inviting guest editors from a variety of communities and organizations. Website: www.publicjournal.ca.

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Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite
http://www.ScreenSite.org