Please circulate widely
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Call for Proposals/abstracts: 

Pleasure Dome, Toronto's experimental and alternative film and video
exhibition collective would like to invite submissions for its next
publication titled:
Excesses and Extremes in Film and Video.

In this book, which sets out to examine excesses and extremities, and
thereby also liminality, we invite submissions on a range of explorations
that consider creative excrescence and the immoderate in film, video and
expanded cinema.

This collection forays into creative impulses that are extremist in kind,
and also considers the liminal spaces in which such experimentations in
art and thought move.  Essays will take as their point of departure an
exploration of this overarching theme of excess and the "irrational"
through which images in film and video stretch tensile, convulsing to
their edges, producing a shock to thought and topographies of foreignness.

Experimentations in film need the movements of images, sounds, words,
rhythms and anti-rhythms through which the film courses, and through which
the forces within the film itself can be sensed.  In what ways do we
encounter the excesses and extremes in films that pulverize our ordering
of the senses?  And, consequentially, how can we come to characterize such
intensities in sound and images, of forces from the depths in order to
render ephemera in the language of words, in the construction of critique
and in the crystallizing impulses of philosophy?

What is production of the extreme in film, video or expanded cinema?  In
which way(s) does the extreme act upon our senses by disrupting,
interrupting or agitating?  Or, conversely, how does the extreme present a
bodily intemperance in how moving images come to be experienced?

Submissions of such explorations may include a range of forms such as
critical essays, cartoons/comics, visual compositions, story-boards or
film treatments.  Explorations might consider, but are not limited to some
of the following suggestions:


· What are art's becomings in their terrorizing impulses?

· Can the intemperate of art dissemble the senses?  What is created and
lost in the body through such forces and affects?

· How do intensities become extreme?

· Can we accept in art what we condemn as destructive such as the
annihilative passions of violence and greed?  For instance, can the
extremes of making art, which sometimes indulges in animal cruelty,
defilement of corpses or sexual sadism elicit more than shock? Can such
destructive impulses produce lines of flight from the constant
colonization of consumer capitalism?  When sadistic desire and unbridled
cruelty are transposed to an artistic medium, can what is dangerously
antisocial, hateful and intolerant become an expression of pure joy?

· What kind of release whether by virtue of addictions, obsessions or
psychosis is productive in the land of excess?

· Do rebellious/radical impulses in art recuperate what are dangerous and
toxic waste products?

· Can the ephemera and esoteria of the occult, such as becoming minor
through the dark chthonic impulses found in becoming-witch, satanic or
alien deterritorialize art for a post-capitalist becoming?

· Recycling abandoned detritus of mass media over-production

· In facilitating the shock of trauma, can extreme art produce an
imbalance of forces releasing trapped energy, in what could be considered
a paradox of brutality?


Please send your submissions to:
[log in to unmask]

Co-Editors: 

Firoza Elavia
Experimental filmmaker and
Ph.D. Candidate in Film and New Media Studies

Linda Feesey
Filmmaker, programmer and reviewer 

Deadline for proposals: September 30/2006
Length: 500-800 words

Pleasure Dome is a film and video exhibition collective dedicated to the
presentation of experimental film and video by artists. Programming since
1989 Pleasure Dome is committed to exhibiting local, national and
international work which features shorter length and small format work, as
well as non-traditional work that mixes film and video with other media
such as performance and installation. We organize approximately 20 events
per year into a fall/ winter/summer schedule. Pleasure Dome also publishes
critical texts and catalogues on film/video artists and their work
including the recent catalogue on Barbara Sternberg Like a dream that
vanishes and the anthology Lux: A Decade of Artist's Film and Video.


Firoza Elavia
PhD Candidate,
Philosophy of Film 
and New Media Studies,
York University,
Toronto, Canada

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