ANIMALITY

Before the role of the animal in contemporary art—as an inspiration, a symbol, or a subject— is the question of how we define animality.

For our next theme, KAPSULA asks writers to consider what it means to be animal, and how the question of the animal resonates in visual art, new media and installation, film, literature, or other creative genres. Writers may choose to address the following topics:

• Categories of the human and nonhuman
• Animality as a complement to technicity/technology
• Bio-art and the aestheticized politics of microscopic life forms
• Forms of cross-species communication
• The significance of animality to anti- or non-Cartesian philosophies
• Complicating the logic of human exceptionalism
• Feminist, queer, and post-colonial approaches to the animal
• New materialism as critical method
• Biological cybernetics and responsive environments
• Finding subjectivity through animal and Other

The notion of the animal relies on those things that have been made into its opposite, much like any linguistically established category. With the ongoing development of posthuman discourse, a renewed interest in animality has emerged of conversations about the state of the human in a technologically saturated world, where flesh-and-blood can only take you so far. Writers responding to this call are encouraged to think critically about the significance of the animal, not only as an inspiration, a symbol, or a subject, but also as a fluid concept that begs re-definition in our current, battery-fueled moment. We are interested in contemporary art practices that work toward dismantling the opposites that have to this point defined animality

Submit abstracts, finished texts and project proposals by e-mail to submissions@kapsula.ca by midnight on March 4th, 2016.

We encourage all potential contributors to review our submission guidelines.