Invisible Structures: Open Call for submissions

Cartha’s Open Call is seeking contributions exploring the pre-organized structures that the contemporary individual is facing—the foundational, yet imperceptible, forces that shape society and emerging environments. 

Major shifts in the recent global narrative are less an exception to the norm than they are the heightened exposure of prescribed systems of social organization. These sprawling symbiotic systems have always existed, the cyclical nature of attempting to order the world and the social conditioning in return: between bodies and technology, wherein we simultaneously produce the apparatus and are produced by it; the virtual representations of the self and their deep reverberations within the psyche; or the environments we create and their resulting authority over our habits and routines. The ways in which things produce each other is inevitable, but complex: where do the biases lie considering the multitude of stakeholders participating to create new forms of organization? What sort of narratives emerge as consequence? What are the infrastructures of taxonomies: not only who writes the script, but how you read it, and in what space does it need to perform? 

Cartha released the Prologue, exhibiting perspectives on how these systems participate in the research of experts in computation, history, art, science and economics. Their submissions offer the Invisible Structures Open Call prompts for speculation, but not strict categories, intentionally departing from a long history of forced organization. Posing questions that unapologetically complicate architectural discourse as intersectional or transgressional, piecing together a more nuanced understanding of what’s at stake in the epochal shift underway:

What could be the spatial implications in our unstable reality, where predictability is heavily relied upon under the guise of certainty and personal happiness is indivisible from mechanized profiling?

What is left in the wake of cosmic design?

How can we comprehend the level of resolution in the development of organoids as possible futures?

In what ways has the evolution of technique introduced space for historically-marginalized information?

The Invisible Structures Open Call is seeking 300-word abstracts for papers, projects or research contributions. As primarily an online publication, we are open to a variety of proposal formats including, but not limited to: text, image, video and audio.

Deadline: October 5, 2020
More information at www.carthamagazine.com