Critical Animals :: This is Not Art

We have been promising you fine folk some news for a while now. It is finally here!

Excited?

We are!

We are very very happy to launch the call out for our upcoming journal project.

THE CRITICAL ANIMALS JOURNAL 2013

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Over the past ten years, the Critical Animals Creative Research Symposium has seen its dynamic community of thinkers and practitioners evolve and transform. To mark this milestone in 2013, we will be producing the inaugural edition of a Critical Animals Journal (title to be confirmed). This edition will reflect upon the extraordinary contributions and relationships that have emerged through this annual symposium since its inception in 2003. We will be looking for contributions from past and present participants in Critical Animals, encouraging submissions that exploit creative, analytical, written and visual formats. You may have a personal anecdote you wish to share, a particular concept or problem you want to examine, or a past contribution made to Critical Animals that you’d like to resubmit. You may even want to create and document a new work or write a love poem dedicated to Critical Animals. Whatever your inclination, we’d love to hear about it. Our target audience are people like you; so don’t be shy to express yourself in a scholarly, experimental or comical style.

To put things in perspective, 10 human years is equivalent to 28 pony years, 50 goat years, 53 dog years and 79 bearded-dragon years. Any way you look at it, this is enough time to start reflecting upon the status of critical thought and practice today. We’d like to know: What do you think it means to think or act critically? Has your understanding of this term changed over the past ten years? Can you envisage what challenges or opportunities the next ten years might pose for criticality? How has/does Critical Animals engage with criticality?

The deadline for contributor proposals is the 31 May. Please submit approx 100 – 200 words describing your proposed article/work for the Critical Animals Journal.

If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact Denise at criticalanimalsjournal@gmail.com .

Darling Animals.

There’s one week left to get your proposals in. We’re already seeing some brilliant ideas rolling in and can’t wait to see more. Did we mention it is our birthday? We’re 10! All we want for a present is you, your enthusiasm, ideas and creative passion. Panels, papers, projects, exhibitions, forums and any other crazy ideas you might have. We want to hear them all.

Check out the call out here

http://criticalanimals.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/call-for-proposals-2013-final.pdf

Proposals due April 1st.

It’s that time again, we’re looking for someone to join us make this wonderful festival happen.

The Critical Animals Creative Research Symposium is looking for a new Co-Director for the 2013 and 2014 Festivals. The successful applicant will work alongside current directors Beau Deurwaarder and Sophie Lamond and Festival manager Tulleah Pearce

Interested researchers, thinkers, artists and organisers should send a CV and covering letter to criticalanimals@gmail.com. Applications due MIDNIGHT FRIDAY FEBRUARY 1ST, 2013

Click Here to view the position description.

We can’t wait to hear from you,

Beau, Sophie and Tulleah.

In the weeks following Critical Animals ’12, we were offered this review by Melbourne based writer, Timothy Balfour, to publish on our site:

These are times of change, in the sense specific to rates of change. Change is happening all the time, at every micro-infinitesimal moment – here is the site of the new. But you already know that because you are reading a review of CRITICAL ANIMALS 2012, a festival that has undergone much change of late, whilst still adhering to the strictest of tenets and the most assiduous of principles.

This year’s symposium had both young and old blood at the helm, the mixture of which manifested a vibrancy to the weekend that complimented the thorough organisation and compositional deftness of previous years.

Panels ranged across discursive planes concerning performative diversity, the relationship between artistic Practice and its old flame Theory, construction of creative Identity, phenomenological encounters with spaces Real and Virtual, the state of engagement with the State via Symbols, and Fluidity in experimental literary/visual Production (deep breath) to say the least! Add to these incisive, considered and at times highly adventurous forums a literal menagerie of readings, performances, exhibitions and launches.  A hyper-colour spectrum of critical interactivity!

At times it feels like the affect of all that creative energy indeed changes one at a phenomenal rate, with those in attendance entering the symposium at the Lock-up on the Friday and exiting out the doors of the Gun Club on the Sunday, barely able to recognise a Self they once called their own.

In speaking with a fellow festival-goer in the time following, I found there was a distinct thematic that seemed to permeate CA 2012, one that may have occurred unconsciously or indeed at the hands of subtle orchestration: the adjunct/disjunct of theory and practice across all forms within the contemporary creative landscape. From this, when I say that these are times of change, I sense that Critical Animals understand this fact all too well. They understand the importance of a vessel (or arc, if you desire), a sanctuary in which difference can be articulated, where a discourse of experimentation and expression has free range, is protected from the threat of mono-cognitive executioners. A space in which we can uphold the right to critical thought.

We are occupied, preoccupied, with critical discourse. It is a preoccupation with connection, with the in-between of a past/future learning-teaching, a playing in the space of the seeing and acting present. We covet the new, yet preserve what has been for the sake of what must come. I say ‘we’ because CA, for me, is the encouragement of participation and communication, a trust in some commensurability with the Other, no matter how Big or small he, she or they is/are. Whether you be poet, play-write, journalist, dancer, architect, warrior for social justice, pioneer of psychology, budding geo-politician or just plain interested, you can be a critical animal. It’s your right.

Make sure to get to Novocastria for This Is Not Art in 2013 for a collective forum that can only increase in its vital capacity.  Critical Animals is an integral event for everyone who considers their world from the perspective of difference, growth and change.

T. Moth Rheopard

(Vice-President of the Rheopard Corrective)

Melbourne.