TOPO, artist-run centre for digital arts, is launching a new call for submissions for projects for its 2021-23 programming. This series of on-site and online exhibitions during TOPO’s next season of activities, beginning in the fall of 2021, will take place under the theme of fluidity.
In an age of heightened changeability, the notion of fluidity will initiate abundant and open ideas about the impermanence of harmonies. Something fluid flows easily, without resistance, but it is also difficult to grasp and define. When events unfold smoothly they are fluid and clear; fluidity is reassuring because it is predictable and controlled, “flowing from the source.” But everything about stability is mere appearance, because stability is subject to a constant flow of dynamic interactions coming from every quarter.
The concept of fluidity has been employed by various disciplines (physics, sociology, economics, etc.) and most often embodies contrasting paradoxes. The Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has long explored the corollary concept of “liquidity” to describe our lives and our cities, caught in constant fast-moving flows of perpetual movement and change. Although this fluidity is a threat to social structures, it is also an opportunity, because it is synonymous with flexibility. Fluid life bends out of shape to adapt to its environment, it is constantly recomposing its networks, it is open onto the outside . . .
Call for Submissions
TOPO is opening this call for submissions under two categories:
- Interactive media installations for our window display: a 12 sq. m. (125 sq. ft.) located in the hallway on the ground floor of the Pôle de Gaspé, home to commercial, cultural and artistic spaces, including nine artist-run dissemination and production centres. In this environment, the display window captures attention and prompts diverse responses to the way the space is used and how on-site activities are taking place.
- Web art: TOPO wishes to bridge its web DNA and contemporary artistic production by paying tribute to Internet culture. What, in a “post-everything” context, are the orientations visible in artworks created by, for and with the Internet today? The web artworks selected will be grouped together in series and promoted online on the TOPO website, accompanied by a text by a curator.
