Audible Observatories San Francisco 2012
Call for Submissions
Deadline: July 15, 2012
Ethnographic Terminalia seeks submissions for Audible Observatories, an exhibition to be held in San Francisco in November 2012. Artist-researchers, collaborators, anthropologists and other scholars working in art are encouraged to submit their proposals prior to July 15, 2012.
Audible Observatories makes a playful connection between research-based art and place-bound exhibition in order to animate a curatorial vision that foregrounds audio-centric works within a broader rubric of site-specificity. We conceptualize the audible observatory as either a mobile or a stationary site of perception that is sensible to others just as it is a place from which sensing the world happens. Audible observatories are points of sensory convergence. They are nodes where worlds perceived through the senses intersect and begin the labour of transforming independent events into knowable and meaningful claims. They speak and they are spoken to.
Audible Observatories will be a distributed public event in San Francisco with an amalgam of location specific points and zones of exhibition. We are looking for research-based audio focused works to exhibit. These might include digital media, image, and sound files, websites and other interactive media, video works where audio figures prominently. Sculptural and other works will also be considered. In some cases we may be able to support installation. As in past shows, we will work with our exhibitors (if necessary) to develop installations and short statements about their work which point to larger interpretive frameworks.
This project ties in with and is supported by the meetings of the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Visual Anthropology. A round table discussion featuring Steve Feld, John Wynne, Angus Carlyle & Rupert Cox has been organized and will be taking place during the course of this event. We also expect to be exhibiting work by these artists.
Ethnographic Terminalia is an initiative designed to celebrate borders without necessarily exalting them. Now in its fourth year of exhibition, it is meant to be a playful engagement with reflexivity and positionality; it seeks to ask what lies beyond and what lies within disciplinary territories. Ethnographic Terminalia is an exploration of what means to exhibit anthropology – particularly in some of its less traditional forms – in proximity to and conversation with contemporary art practices.
www.ethnographicterminalia.org
The terminus is the end, the boundary, and the border.
It is also a beginning, its own place, a site of experience and encounter.
