Deadline: 12-Nov-21
The Unproductive Solutions has announced the Call for Artist Proposals to build lives of meaning. In this vision, you value connecting with others, patience, empathy, ethics, and the right to be lazy, unproductive, creative, complicated, and contradictory.
UnProductiveSolutions (UnPro) is an artwork/curatorial project presenting as an online “company” invested in revolutionary, values-based, ethical technologies. Italy-based curator Marialaura Ghidini and U.S.-based artist Rebekah Modrak invite artists to submit imaginative and conceptually rigorous proposals imagining technologies. Your technology will be presented as one of the products of the UnProductiveSolutions Company.
Imagined technologies may be digital, a combination of digital and analog, or post-digital (meaning, an imagined mode of transmission). Proposed technologies do not need to be plausible, may be fantastic, and should be sincere. Proposed technologies should be critical of existing ones in their attempt to generate alternative models, but UnProductiveSolutions is not skeptical or meant to be read as parody.
Benefits
- Five proposals will be accepted for artists to develop and complete the work. Artists will receive a $2,000 honorarium upon submission of the final work. As part of the program, they will arrange a studio visit with a specialist, such as a philosopher or astronomer, to further humanize and challenge the development of the work. Artists will receive the services of a videographer to create a marketing promotion for your technology. Artworks/ technologies will be displayed as a succession of featured “subsidiary companies” on the UnProductiveSolutions exhibition/website.
- Five proposals will be accepted in their current state as proposals. These will receive a $100 honorarium and will be presented in their proposal form as “future projects” on the UnProductiveSolutions exhibition/website.
Selection Process
- The Open Call will be reviewed by curator Marialaura Ghidini and artist/writer Rebekah Modrak. They have worked together as Modrak&Ghidini since 2015, starting with the project #exstrange (2017), an intervention into the online marketplace that they enacted between January 15 and April 15, 2017. This curatorial project developed their collaborative interest in disrupting the rhetoric of digital technologies, e-commerce, and the workings of online platforms.
- Ghidini is a curator whose work explores the intersections between art, technology and society. She is visiting researcher for the project curating online at the Exhibition Research Lab (ERL), Liverpool John Moores University in Liverpool (UK).
- Modrak’s practice is at the intersections of art, activism, critical design, and creative resistance to consumer culture. Her Internet-based artworks critique brand messaging. She is a professor at the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan.
For more information, visit https://unproductivesolutions.com/