Artworks

2021 Call for Artworks

Cities of the future: living together

The art exhibition will present artworks that manifest the conference themes of creativity, craft and design, applied to cities of the future to reflect the conference location.

Important Dates

  • Abstract and title submission due: February 1st, 2021, 11:59 PM
  • Full submission due: February 8th, 2021, 11:59 PMNotifications: April 9th, 2021
  • Camera-ready completion deadline: April 26th, 2021, 11:59 PM
  • Art Exhibition: June 23rd , 2021

Deadlines are specified as Anywhere on Earth time. The submissions site opens on December, 2020.

All virtual artworks accepted to exhibit at the C&C 2021 virtual conference will also be invited to exhibit at the C&C 2022 conference in Venice. Artists will be given the opportunity to update their presentations and artworks in 2022 to reflect new work, advances and lessons learned after the 2021 conference. Returning artists will also be offered a discount to attend the C&C 2022 conference.

Chairs

  • Silvia Casini,  University of Aberdeen
  • Camilla Salvaneschi, Università Iuav di Venezia 
  • Vladimir Kolzeev, City, University of London

Contact art2021@cc.acm.org

Call Description

Our cities are changing. Our modern world is making ever more difficult, often unwelcome demands on them. The challenges for our cities include the climate crisis and rising sea-levels, air pollution, global pandemics, the lack of affordable housing, mass tourism that commodizes everything and turns urban centers into amusement parks rather than civil spaces, roads that scar the landscape, and vehicle pollution that kills citizens.

In isolation, each of these challenges is a wicked problem. Taken together, the challenges are immense, and will require new forms of creative engagement and thinking to overcome. Each city will need to harness the potential and creative capabilities of its citizens and other stakeholders, including visitors, over long periods of time. Approaches will be increasingly inter- and cross-disciplinary, involving not only problem solving and design, but also citizens’ activism and the arts.

But how? What is the city of the future?

The C&C21 Arts Exhibition will explore ways in which citizens can engage in new cross-disciplinary forms of creative engagement with the major challenges that cities face. A profound act of imagination is needed to envision viable alternatives to the status quo.

Venice can become one of the model cities of the future. It is uniquely exposed to many of the above challenges. However, it also embodies a different way of thinking about and living. The loss of sociality is a festering wound of the megalopolis. By contrast, Venice is uniquely social, and has been since its heyday in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Being traffic-free, Venice encourages its people to walk everywhere and experience the city by water. Distances are shorter, everything is closer, and the people friendlier. The city’s labyrinth of narrow side streets (calli) and bridges offers opportunities to meet each other serendipitously, greet and talk. 

As a consequence, Venice offers almost unique forms of ordered and chaotic co-living, enabling and encouraging co-creation amidst its art, architecture, businesses and craftsmanship.

Furthermore, due to its medieval infrastructure, the pace of life and work in Venice is slower, a quality that can foster more effective incubation, reflection and creation.

The C&C21 Arts Exhibition will explore new forms of cross-discipline engagement with stakeholders in modern cities under threat due to the challenges reported. It will seek contributions such as virtual artworks and conceptual experiments from art, computer science, design and other, yet-to-be-named phenomena that provoke citizens and others to challenge and reflect on cities of the future, taking Venice as a possible model.

Works can be in a variety of forms such as interactive installations, virtual and/or augmented realities, experimental cinematic shorts, performances and/or works that are suited to special technological platforms that will be part of the exhibition venue, without excluding craftmanship (glass, textiles, printing, etc.) and design. You should indicate in your application the environmental needs of your work, i.e. needs to be in the dark/light, listens to sound/makes sound, can be outdoors, has a time duration, it runs once, it loops, etc. 

The Arts Exhibition will also engage its visitors to direct their emotions, reflections and ideas from exhibits towards evolving ideas to improve cities such as Venice. Facilitators will combine digital and analogue technologies to provoke both synchronous and asynchronous collaborations between citizens and others.

Format

We are accepting two forms of submissions: 1) submissions of existing works and 2) proposals for doing work with the infrastructure available at the venue. More information to follow.

  1. Existing works: Submit a document of up to 2000 words, excluding titles, references and figure/table captions which includes:
    • Links to a visual portfolio of the artwork
    • Images and video for time-based work
    • Narrative description of the piece, specifying both its conceptual goals and its functional operations
    • All technical and logistical requirements of the piece, including: equipment needed, whether you are providing that equipment, space requirements, any special auditory, lighting or other physical need, time needed for set-up, and whether the piece needs to be staffed during the exhibition. Please indicate if there are any safety implications (e.g., soldering) that may need health and safety compliance
  2. Proposed works: Submit a document of up to 2000 words, excluding titles, references and figure/table captions which includes:
    • A proposed description of current state of the project
    • Any existing documentation of the work in other forms
    • A proposed development path

For either form of submission, we ask for a PDF in the ACM SIGCHI submission template format (SIGCHI ACM new, standardized single-column format) that will be a part of proceedings for this exhibition.

All selected artists will get a free day of registration. We also explore support for limited funding for travel and practical expenses related to the exhibition pieces. More details soon.

Curatorial Advisory Committee

  • Professor Sarah Cook, Glasgow University
  • Professor Janis Jefferies, Goldsmiths, University of London
  • Benjamin Weil, Artistic director of Centro Botín Santander
  • Luba Elliott, Freelance curator, Producer, and Researcher
  • Professor Yasuaki Kakehi, University of Tokyo

 Where to submit

Please submit via the Precision Conference (PCS) website below:
https://new.precisionconference.com/submissions

Once you have logged into the PCS website, select the following options under “Submissions” and click the Go button.

  • Society: SIGCHI
  • Conference/Journal: Creativity & Cognition 2021
  • Track: Creativity & Cognition 2021 Artworks

Publications Policy

As a published ACM author, you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects.

Questions

art2021@cc.acm.org