[artinfo] INFECTED: VIRAL CALL for VIRAL WORK

[Sára Stenczer]

KURATOR and LX 2.0: Commissions and Residencies 2009



INFECTED: VIRAL CALL for VIRAL WORK

Artist commissions for 'Anti-Bodies: Beyond The Body-Ideal', the South West

Cultural Olympiad, UK





DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: 31 JANUARY 2009, sent by email to info at kurator.org



ANNOUNCEMENT OF SELECTED PROPOSALS: 19 FEBRUARY 2009,

in conjunction with the launch of 'Anti-Bodies: Beyond The Body-Ideal'



http://www.anti-bodies.net/





KURATOR and LX 2.0 are looking for a new work to infect the Olympics.

We will commission two online projects that respond to the idea of the
'virus' for 'Anti-Bodies: Beyond The Body-Ideal', a series of projects
that reflect on the ideal 'body-machine' of the Olympic athlete. By
virus we mean to draw attention to any agent that is able to reproduce
itself and spread over communications networks and infect the host
body. For instance, a computer virus describes the self-reproducing
activities of a program that can simply spread and affect other
programs, and thereby reflects the structural properties of the
computer and the network it operates through. Moreover, the cultural
form of a virus embodies the principles of negation in keeping with
the anti-bodies theme.



The commission fee is UK£1000. In addition, the artists will be
offered a short residency (up to 10 days) to develop the work with the
Art & Social Technologies Research group at the University of Plymouth
in UK (http://www.art-social.net). Accommodation and travel will be
covered (up to UK£500 /per commission).



There are a number of precedents for artists dealing with the virus as
metaphor in the broadest sense. An example is the 'biennale.py' virus
that contaminated the Venice Biennale's web site (produced by
0100101110101101.org with epidemiC, for the Slovenian pavilion of
2000). For the programmer Jaromil, the source code of a virus is
potential lyrical poetry. Related to this, the elegance of his Unix
shell 'forkbomb' (2002) encapsulates this aesthetic approach in
presenting only thirteen characters to dramatic effect. Once entered
into the command line of a Unix shell and run, the program exhausts
the system's resources, causing the computer to crash. It was also
included in the exhibition 'I Love You: Computer, Viren, Hacker,
Kultur' (held at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt am Main,
in 2002), referring to the 'I Love You' virus (of 2000) that spread
through the communities of the Internet. The destructive potential of
a virus operates in the spirit of auto-destruction and Dadaist tactics
to negate the destructive tendencies of the social world.

Anti-Bodies is co-ordinated by Relational, supported by Arts Council
England and has been granted the London 2012 Inspire mark as part of
the Cultural Olympiad.