ELSE: The Journal of International Art, Literature, Theory and Creative Media

An annual journal that welcomes experimental and alternative forms of representing creative work. Peer-reviewed works, projects, and research thematically gravitating towards: Memory, Forgetting, Trauma and the Archive; Language/Image; Gender; Software, Materiality and Mediality; International Diaspora and Post-Colonialism; Cultural Engagement through Food; Role of Art in Peace Meditation; Performance Activism; Liminality; Space/Place; Temporary Architecture; Foreignness, Otherness and the Uncanny.

In this issue

Inspired by the question “Trans-what?,” the zero issue endeavors to embody an answer by presenting a transdisciplinary, transcontinental and transfixing approach which began with a symposium at the Transartfest Triennale 2013 in Berlin. Using the prefix “trans,” often indicating “across” or “beyond,” as an evocative point of reference, ELSE spans multiple subjects, mediums and fields of study from thought-provoking scholarly essays to transcendent art, even to video work. As the premiere issue is published in an online format, ELSE’s editors and peer-reviewers carefully curated its content with a bold sense of experimentation and exploration. ELSE’s issue 0 includes essays with new and innovative methods of research and thought such as James Layton’s consideration of the transformative power of Robert Wilson’s site-specific performance Walking, Alanna Lockward’s investigation of Sammy Baloji’s Memoire  and Wolfgang Sützl’s philosophical analysis of sharing. From Cara DeAngelis’ road kill and pop culture-filled still lifes that humorously subvert 17th century hunting tableaus to Ato Malinda’s conceptually rich and emotionally devastating video piece Mourning a Living Man, ELSE also features emerging artists alongside illuminating explanations of their own work, providing a conceptual basis to the visual aspects of the journal.

Our work takes up the charge to critically and creatively change, transform mad complexities through invention, proposition, and yes, more madness. We, as artists, theorists, historians, cultural critics, actors, readers, and repairers within a postmodern (should it be called ‘transmodern’?) time are compelled to construct fresh meanings from our contingent positions beyond Why. ELSE is a new journal that takes on the How by creating place/s, landing sites wherein multiplicitous voices risk across practice and theory, through disciplinary fields, changing cultural terrain as we venture forth. This journal offers speculative proposal, scholarly inquiry, creative research and artifact found in a host of languages – text, image, media and more. We at ELSE are provisional nomads willing to inscribe and to map possible nexts for indeterminate, and we think, propitious futures. We hope you will enjoy traveling with us.

Submissions

ELSE is now accepting submissions until January 1st 2015 for the next issue: “On Contemplation” and “Everything Else”. Guest editor Dr. Myron Beasley seeks essays, artists work, manifestos, videos, sound projects and reviews that will engage in what it means to contemplate: to examine this liminal space as a realm of discovery, of self, of cultural politics, of art. We invite a range and broad interpretations of the call including: Contemplation as practice; Writing as process of discovery; Toward a pedagogy of contemplation, Process versus Contemplation; The relationship between the sacred and art (-ist); Ritual, performance, performance art and contemplation; Contemplation and community engaged art, writing, education; Contemplation and the art review/art writing; Contemplation in contemporary art/popular culture and Everything Else.

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