This is a general call for new work (completed in the last two years) or proposals for new work for the third annual Games and Art exhibition featured at the ninth annual Games+Learning+Society (GLS) conference to be held in June 2013. We encourage artists of all kinds – game players or not, game designers or not – to submit works related to fantasy, reality, and their intersection.
Details after the jump
Games represent a deliberate intersection of creative and visual design within simulated spaces both digital and analog often represented visually or narratively. Game players inhabit spaces mediated by computers, rules, and dungeon masters that are populated by the fantastical and the unreal: enormous flying dragons, detailed taxonomies of robotic creatures, running blobs of meat and anything else imagined by the creator. Players suspend their disbelief in order to fully engage fantasies separated from reality by varying degrees of intensity from the absurd to the fantastic to the eerily real and similar. But that intersection of fantasy and reality extends far beyond the medium of games into everyday life through television, advertising, media, politics, and a litany of other experiences in obvious and sometimes insidious ways.
As a result, the objectivity of reality is in question, thanks in part to the work of theorists like Roland Barthes, who demonstrate the ways in which subjective fantasy and myth permeate a reality where objectivity is certainly questionable at best. This exhibition, which may be filled with customized Exhibition Displays, seeks to explore the point where the real world and the imagined world intersect in any number of ways: spatially, emotionally, visually or otherwise. Work in any medium is welcome–painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, performance, film, digital video as well as new playable games, game art, and game-like forms–but in particular, works depicting or reflecting a subjective fantasy, reality, collision, overlap or meeting of the two will be highly considered.
The submission deadline for the third Annual Games & Art Exhibit is March 5th, 2013, and more information about the Games & Art Exhibit can be found at http://www.gameslearningsociety.org/conference/games-and-art-exhibit-cfp. The curators, Mark Riechers and Arnie Martin, are also available for any questions you may have–they are cc’d on this email, and their contact information can be found on the CFP page.
More information about the GLS conference in general can be found at http://www.gameslearningsociety.org/conference.
Constance Steinkuehler (Conference Chair) and Caro Williams (Conference Co-Chair)
chair@glsconference.org
http://www.gameslearningsociety.org/conference
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