call: What do we do now @ The Wrong Biennale
deadline: 31 July 2019
Call for Entries
At The Wrong Biennale
What Do We Do Now? is a Malta-based digital platform exploring our current coexistence with the digital. This year we are part of the Wrong Biennale for digital art – the largest digital art biennale on planet Earth.
This Open Call invites artists to show their work in the What Do We Do Now? online Pavilion and offline Embassy, between 1 November 2019 and 1 March 2020.
For this call, we look at
energy
dataflow, optic signals,
stable systems, destabilised systems,
digital colonialism,
Imbalance, impermanence,
the intersection between the tangible and the virtual.
We are looking for works that can be shown both online and offline and that respond to some aspects of the following writing:
“Our increasingly electrified, electronic, and data-driven society places steadily rising demand on reliable baseload power – that is, on electricity available 24/7/365. Servers never sleep, nor does air conditioning during hot nights, and in Asia’s megacities, subways and electric trains take only brief naps between midnight and 5 A.M.†Vaclav Smil
Crypto mining hubs are appearing in Arctic regions where energy is cheap and the ambient air temperature cools down servers. To mine the virtual pirate gold non-stop, without letting machines rest, one must consider the energy-intensive processes that occur in the background. At the other end of the continent, the southern crypto havens have been increasing their fibre internet connection speeds to attract the new digital colonial settlers and their energy consuming activities. They keep laying new underwater cables to increase connectivity, to ensure digital security and a stable growth. Crypto haven economies depend on light signals passing through a one-inch-wide fibre cable, which adds a vulnerability to the whole venture. The tangible meets the virtual in our decaying bodies. We fight against this decay with a gym membership or DIY bicycle-powered PCs. What happens to the body when we are engrossed in the virtual? Does time pass differently for our bodies when our minds are active in cyberspace? The energy consuming cyber exchange is also occurring in our bodies, where every interaction we have online slowly drains our resources. Maybe being able to upload our energy (our “selfâ€) to the cloud is not such a bad idea, if that means that we can stop battling our physical decay?
#energy #data #crypto #cryptomining #digitalcolonialism #climatemergency #sun #sea #air #airconditioning #elements #glass #fibre #light #rust #humidity #deterioration #connectivity #body #embodiment
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/events/459074254909646/
Send your submissions and portfolio links to
whatdowedonowww@gmail.com
