Cries from the guts
Call for artworks in Sound and Writings: Cries from the guts
Part of the *Experiments and Intensities* Series published by Winchester University Press
Co-curated/edited by:
- Yvon Bonenfant (vocal artist/interdisciplinary artist, University of Winchester)
- Will Edmondes / Gwilly Edmondez / Virginia Pipe / Cox Ring / Gustav Thomas (post-vernacular musician, University of Newcastle upon Tyne)
- Micah Silver (Sound/Installation Artist, curator of sound, Experimental Media and Performing Arts Centre, Independent Curator)
Sound art proliferates. Sound technologies become ever more user-friendly and intuitive. Specialist training is no longer necessary to make musicalized sound. Some see this as the end of virtuosity, the end of music as 'high art,' the end of refinement. Others herald a continued, exciting era of musical expansion based on a new accessibility of sound creation, recording, generation and manipulation technologies, within which fresh voices, structures, and attitudes penetrate and permeate an exciting panorama of recombinatory soundscapes, forever in flux, forever transient. Some think the brave new world of sound is both, or that's it's actually not so brave and new.
This volume of Winchester University Press's Experiments and Intensities series (see www.winchester.ac.uk/intensities for mission statement) asks artists working in and through sound to submit works that respond to the title Cries from the Guts. The title could be read as being inspired by Diamanda Galas' early writings defining 'Intravenal Music' as a direct reference to voice, sound and viscerality and the evolution of extended vocal, instrumental or technological practice, as an interrogation of the 'hyperemotional' qualities of music and sound across genres, as a reference to sound as a manifestation of 'gut instinct', or literally, as exploring the sounds of the entrails, the intestinal worm, the soft organs of the abdomen. In fact, the title is borrowed from a little-known 1977 article in the body psychotherapy journal Energy and Character, volume 8, number 2, by Gerda and Mona-Lisa Boyesen, which articulates some of the theories and practices developed by Gerda Boyesen. These involve a technique of listening to the large intestine with a stethoscope as a kind of biofeedback, and a developed theory of why the intestines make sound and how they 'digest stress,' including the notion of the intestine as the literal id-canal. This roping together of the aesthetic qualities of sound and an understanding of the guts having their own sonic language is an interesting starting point for interrogating the relationship between urgent corporeal impulse, guts and gutsiness, and the impulse to create sound in 2011.
We are most interested in works that ask or respond to the following questions: what is urgent about sound work today? Why does it matter? How can the body's most urgent, most striking, most excited impulses interact with and interface with the aesthetics of sound? Why might audiences want to 'listen' to the guts metaphorically, or literally, within a contemporary cultural context? What do the guts have to say? Who's listening to them and why? Can the guts and technology dialogue fruitfully? What is the nature of that dialogue?
In response to these questions, we ask researching artists to submit sound works. Ideally, these will be between 3 and 10 minutes in length, though we will consider shorter and longer works if you can convince us of the necessity. These works might be:
- Documentation of performative events or artworks
- Existing made-for-sound performative art works
- New sound works made in response to the call
- Spoken words and text
- Recordings/technologically generated/edited work, combinations of these
- Anti-sound or not-sound
- Hybridizations of the above
They can be accompanied by:
- Artist writing (interpret that as you will!)
- Manifestos (ditto!)
- Theorization
- Hybridizations of the above
- No writing
Note that the final layout of the online publication will display the sound player, alongside one image, on a first page with a link to the written text on a separate page. Therefore, you should not submit proposals that require integration of text and sound. The sound work should speak for itself as much as possible.
Note that we will be consulting with our curatorial board about your work and we may come back to you with suggestions to modify the work in order for it to be included in the publication.
Formatting
Submit by sending an email to yvon.bonenfant@winchester.ac.uk before June 15, 2011.
That email should include the following:
1. Artist-researchers should submit a single page word document that details:
a. The title of the audio work or submission
b. A maximum 40-word description of the submission that would be published just beside the video to contextualize it.
c. One (and only one) still image to sit alongside the sound work. At this point, it can be in any format. We will ask you to resize the image when the design of the pages is finalized.
c. A link to the sound work online.
The writing component should be in a separate document (see 3 below).
2. Sound works: Send us a link to the sound work. Please do not send files via email, or CDs by post. All non-public domain sound works should be posted to a password-protected location somewhere in cyberspace. If the sound work is already in the public domain, it need not be password-protected, and you need to be willing to obtain all permissions for it to be reproduced in Cries from the Guts. If your work is selected, we will ask you to post us an aiff or mp3 sound file, burnt to DVD or other hard media. Though we can convert your files to our preferred format we may ask you to do so to ensure that the quality of your sound is optimized. We cannot support files that distribute in more than two channels, including surround sound files. Please ensure your sound?s maximum spatialization is in stereo.
3. Writings: We will only accept text submitted in MSWord format (.doc or .docx). Texts should be as short or as long as is necessary, but we prefer less than 3000 words. We prefer the Harvard referencing format if you use referencing. Note that we will be adapting your submissions to html format and therefore be patient regarding formatting. Keep references to a minimum and make the bulk of your argument through the art.
4. Copyright: If your works are selected, you will sign a contract with us that maintains your copyright control, but that grants us permission to post your audio work in perpetuity in the context of the publication. We cannot be responsible for illegal theft of your work from our site via unauthorized recording or hacking. You can also choose to use a creative commons license should you see fit. This volume of the publication is free-to-user via internet and we will therefore not pay royalties.
We aim to keep this publication active for ten years from today, depending on the speed of evolution of internet technologies. The publication may go 'out of print' at some point and be archived to hard storage. It will also be stored in an appropriate research repository.