Fictiocracy

Call for participants: Fictiocratic Operation no. 27C

2013-11-13

Call for participants is open till 20 Nov 2013

Our social life is based on conventions: conventions of how to behave in cafés, shops, lectures and family dinners. All of these conventions are creations. They are not creations of one author, but something that has been collectively brought to being through the passage of cultural phenomena. Nevertheless, they are creations in the same sense than an artwork is a creation. Such behavioral patters could be created just as artworks are, and offered to the society as potential conventions. Fictiocratic Operation no. 27C laboratory aims to acknowledge and explore such possibilities during the New Year’s holiday, a time full of repeatable, socially accepted rituals often created on a fictional basis, the same fiction which artworks can be. After all, Santa Claus or New Year’s dress parties are the same fictional formations as a film of a worldwide catastrophe or a murder which happens on a theatre stage.

Fictiocratic Operation no. 27C is another embodiment of Migrating Art Academies, hosted this time by Ptarmigan (Tallinn, Estonia). Ptarmigan is a project space for unusual events of a participatory nature, focusing on critical, creative aesthetics and open-form interactions. Fictiocratic Operation no. 27C advocates the cause of designing everyday life, and providing a framework for these to be sustainable and public. Such experimentation can be treated as an (art)work itself. Just as we have the format of a novel, a play or a film, we can establish the format of an experiment, with its own characteristics and techniques. Of course, these characteristics and techniques are yet to be developed – their development is a goal of the laboratory.

Emerging artists interested in co-operation between arts and all other fields (not limited to activism, anthropology, game design, performance, etc.) which serve the creation of innovative architectures of social convention and utopian fantasy productions, is welcome to reply to this invitation. Selected participants will be encouraged to blur the borders between art, social rituals and life itself by any accessible means, whether re-inventing habits characteristic of the turn of the new year or re-designing the organisations which host them. This will be accompanied by the fireworks of a capital city celebrating the start of 2014 in the most central and institutionalised part of Tallinn, full of governmental buildings and embassies.

Fictiocratic Operation no. 27C laboratory is a part of Fictiocracy, a meta-reality social movement by Pekko Koskinen from Reality Research Center http://www.todellisuus.fi/en/ (Helsinki, Finland) and will be maintained to Tallinn’s conditions by Agnieszka Pokrywka of Ptarmigan http://ptarmigan.ee/ (Tallinn, Estonia). The laboratory is supported by the European Commission Culture Programme. Migrating Art Academies is a network for innovation and exchange in arts teaching and research.