Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1203281410010.20861@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Cyberculture <cyberculture@zacha.org>
Subject: Leap second festival 2012: Call for entries (fwd)
Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2012 14:11:43 -0400 (EDT)
[Sorry for crossposting] Leap second festival 2012 Call for entries: Works lasting one second or less. The festival is also interested in texts and essays. The festival takes place on the leap second which occurs 30th June 2012 23:59:60 UTC. Submission at festival website http://noemata.net/leapsec/ See full announcement below. Please forward the announcement. The leap second festival is an open, free, distributed, international, non-profit festival for art, technology and precarity coordinated on the Internet. This is the first leap second festival. The festival marks the leap second as deviation and glitch, a bug in the machinery of time, and also a reality-check and celebration (glitz) of natural cycles and physical reality, taking place at the moment when the ideal time we have on our clocks is synchronized with the real time based on the rotation of the earth. The festival is open and free for anyone who wish to participate and submit work. There are no prizes or fees involved. The festival is documented afterwards. The festival is open to all types of artistic expressions. Even though the festival is coordinated and organized via the net the works themselves don't have to be based, or available, on the net. The festival is distributed in the sense that the works take place at a certain time and not necessarily at a certain place. The website of the festival will coordinate the works by organizing and listing, hosting, exhibiting, running, and documenting each according to its needs. The festival believes one second doesn't have to be an impossible limitation, but maybe a creative limitation, whether or not the works are realized as things, events or processes adapted to immediate human perception, or as programs or code that are executed or exhibited. An ordinary computer does a couple of billion things in the course of one second. The leap second itself is defined as 9,192,631,770 cycles of a cesium-133-atom. In the same way that the festival is partly conceptual despite the physical base in earth rotation and time, the participating works might revolve around ideas about time, virtuality, and physicality, in addition to notions about science, machines, technology and how they relate to natural and physical cycles. That said, there might be other aspects involved, each own to his own, for example... - The "formless"... The rejection of form and content and their traditional game, in favour of horizontality, pulse, entropy, gestalt, fleeting, and joke. The form is orderly enough - one second - but the order is almost in the order of joke, and in the horizontality, pulse and entropy of time - fleeting, virtual - as if to ask, did it really happen, or what is it for something to happen, or to be? - "one-off"... one-shot, a happening that occurs only once and is not repeated --happening, natural event, occurrence, occurrent - an event that happens, though with intended irregular repetition, an unstable jiggle of the ball, keeping one eye on the ball, the blink of an eye. - Precarity/Selfprecarization (turning on itself)... ?So here we are in the present: at a time when the old ideas and ideologies of the autonomy and freedom of the individual (especially the individual as genius artist) plus specific aspects of post-1968 politics have turned into hegemonic neoliberal modes of subjectivation. Selfprecarization means saying yes to exploiting every aspect of creativity and of life? The need to pursue other, less creative, precarious jobs to finance one?s own cultural production is something one puts up with. This financing of one?s own creative output, enforced and yet opted for at the same time, constantly supports and reproduces the very conditions in which one suffers and which one at the same time wants to be part of. It is perhaps because of this that creative workers, these voluntarily precarized virtuosos, are subjects so easily exploited; they seem able to tolerate their living and working conditions with infinite patience because of the belief in their own freedoms and autonomies, and because of the fantasies of self-realization. In a neoliberal context, they are so exploitable that, now, it is no longer just the state that presents them as role models for new modes of living and working?? From ?Critique of creativity? http://mayflybooks.org/?page_id=74 The leap second. Technology has made the leap second possible/necessary. The leap second is no natural event as are mid-summer, equinox, etc., even if all of them is about an adjustment of a natural cycle. The leap second doesn't have a cultural history before technology made it possible to measure the physical rotation of the earth accurately enough to intervene the ideal atomic time (the second defined by the cesium-atom). The earth rotation appears to be more variable, and the length of a day (a physical sun-day, a rotation of the earth around itself) is slowly increasing over time. In that way the leap second is introduced for the purpose of synchronizing the ideal time we have on our clocks with the natural time in the universe. The leap second festival, in this sense, can be seen as a new way of celebrating natural cycles, aided by technology, but contrary to the traditional celebration of eg. winter solstice or equinox, the leap second is not regular, but more a measure of instability, almost virtual, and having more character of being a bug in the machinery of time, a technological glitch one is trying to patch, at the same time that it is a reality-check and adjustment towards nature and physical reality. It is also this bug that is being celebrated, of the technological deviation from the natural cycle, and nature's deviation from technology, and their realignment in the leap second. The festival plans at taking place at each leap second in the years to come. The leap second are irregular and are announced by The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) half a year in advance. If the international society decides to abolish the leap second in the future because of problems updating and synchronizing all the world's computers to real time, the festival plan to continue like other pagan festivals around seasonal cycles. The next international debate about the future of the leap second will take place in 2015. Ordinarily the leap second is added to the universal time, but the possibility exists that it's subtracted. In that case the festival will receive works for deletion, and the submitted works disappear when the festival takes place at the second that is being taken away.