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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Open City
Utopian thinkers have imagined open cities in many ways. Whether material or
virtual, all versions propose to establish a transparent, cosmopolitan
metropolis, a place where culture can be efficiently exchanged. One version is
Ernst Junger's novel Heliopolis, a cybernetic fantasy in which a world of
fluid information enfolds all societies, including a South Pole city. Today
his Sun City is being promoted in the notion of an open web of virtual cities
on the net which, it is claimed, will join differences in a great liberal
conversation. Indeed, the 'Net's intersections, its accidental encounters and
air of intimacy, recall a sensuous version of the open city the urban
romanticism of Walter Benjamin's Parisian flaneur or Alfred Kazin's A Walker
in the City.
In other open cities the conversation is more severely limited in the
rational space of Japan's Kansai Science City, for example, which is to be
built on an island of garbage to extract profit from the research community
that will live there among the modems. In the City London's financial
district openness is more explicitly a matter of control. IRA bombs have
provoked government street blockades and comprehensive video surveillance that
prevent the flight of jittery foreign capital.
Theories of openness invoke a territory free of limits, but reintroduce
closure in disguised form. Every effort to enact universality or transparency
generates homogeneity and foreclosure the very ideology of openness itself
signals the closure it seeks to banish. It is a dilemma that offers no easy
way out.
The task of Open City is to think this impasse in its complications, knots,
and difficulties to sustain the open city in its troubling process of
construction. To this end we invite you to send us your written or graphic
work - in the genre of your choice - by October 1, 1994.
Alphabet City is an interdisciplinary magazine of culture and politics. Its
next issue, Fascism and Its Ghosts, will be on the stands in September.
Box 387 Station P
Toronto Canada M5S 2S9
Facsimile: 416 538 1210
e-mail: submit_opencity@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
end#-intacc.web.--------------------------------------------*
|This message was sent from MATRIX ARTS NETWORK |
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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Open City
Utopian thinkers have imagined open cities in many ways. Whether material or
virtual, all versions propose to establish a transparent, cosmopolitan
metropolis, a place where culture can be efficiently exchanged. One version is
Ernst Junger's novel Heliopolis, a cybernetic fantasy in which a world of
fluid information enfolds all societies, including a South Pole city. Today
his Sun City is being promoted in the notion of an open web of virtual cities
on the net which, it is claimed, will join differences in a great liberal
conversation. Indeed, the 'Net's intersections, its accidental encounters and
air of intimacy, recall a sensuous version of the open city the urban
romanticism of Walter Benjamin's Parisian flaneur or Alfred Kazin's A Walker
in the City.
In other open cities the conversation is more severely limited in the
rational space of Japan's Kansai Science City, for example, which is to be
built on an island of garbage to extract profit from the research community
that will live there among the modems. In the City London's financial
district openness is more explicitly a matter of control. IRA bombs have
provoked government street blockades and comprehensive video surveillance that
prevent the flight of jittery foreign capital.
Theories of openness invoke a territory free of limits, but reintroduce
closure in disguised form. Every effort to enact universality or transparency
generates homogeneity and foreclosure the very ideology of openness itself
signals the closure it seeks to banish. It is a dilemma that offers no easy
way out.
The task of Open City is to think this impasse in its complications, knots,
and difficulties to sustain the open city in its troubling process of
construction. To this end we invite you to send us your written or graphic
work - in the genre of your choice - by October 1, 1994.
Alphabet City is an interdisciplinary magazine of culture and politics. Its
next issue, Fascism and Its Ghosts, will be on the stands in September.
Box 387 Station P
Toronto Canada M5S 2S9
Facsimile: 416 538 1210
e-mail: submit_opencity@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
end#-intacc.web.--------------------------------------------*
|This message was sent from MATRIX ARTS NETWORK |
|tel:(416)-364-1421 |
|The views expressed in this posting are those of the |
|individual author only. |
#-----------------------------------------------------------*