The Imaginary App: Call for Artists

For The Imaginary App, an anthology of art and scholarship on app-computing that I am co-edting with Svitlana Matviyenko, invite artists and designers to submit entries for a traveling art exhibition and publication of selected works in our anthology. Our exhibition will feature original icons of nonexistent apps.

Apps are placed at the tips of our fingers on mobile screens. They offer themselves as channels that navigate us through uncanny media networks and rhizomes. They are shortcuts that guarantee direct and immediate access to what we need beyond the screen. We live in the hope that ubiquitous computing will help us maintain our public and private lives – relationships, work, and leisure – and apps promise to make computation even more seamless and the media environment even more subliminal. If anything, apps reveal how much we depend on this promise when we imagine our being with each other as being with technology.

The goal of this project is to challenge the limits of technological assistance endorsed by the slogan: “There’s an app for that.” What are the most desirable, terrifying, or ridiculous apps that haven’t been and, possibly, will never be released?

Formulate a concept of an app. Translate it in the language of design. Send your work to theimaginaryapp@gmail.com by October 15, 2012.

Submit:
1. app icon (4×4 inches, TIF, 300 dpi)
2. app concept (600 characters max.)
3. bio (100 words max.) + website, twitter (optional)

The works will be selected on the basis of the following criteria:
Concept: originality and critical potential
Design: clarity and aesthetics of presentation

Read the Book Prospectus [LINK: http://djspooky.com/media/The_Imaginary_App_CALL.pdf]

For inquires: theimaginaryapp@gmail.comTweet