transplantations

- > o n g o i n g c a l l - >

d i g i t a l t r a n s p l a n t a t i o n s - >

more and more, at a vortical pace, our political, affective and social life spreads out (or is captured) from its original settings to become reinvested and restaged in the dominant, oligarchic form of this immaterial, electronic sphere we've all come to know as the 'virtual' or 'digital'. it is here, in this disembodied realm (in which the so-called generative plays an ever-increasing role), that our life recirculates, effervesces, and somehow reconfigures itself; so deeply and extensively that, for many, what is now felt as earliest is the virtual or digital itself. transfigured, it ceaselessly seeps back into our flesh and yet, time and again, it contuses us.

as a rapidly expanding overlay grows thicker seeking to grace digital with a human semblance, what's behind it emerges evermore clearly as a masked panoptical desire to optimise us further, to crush us deeper into a machine-like existence - humanlike machines and automatised humans, in an endless pursuit of life-exhausting metastability for the sake of capital and power. paradoxically, it seems that we already find ourselves far too immersed in this world, but all the same quite foreign to it. and, perhaps, one of the means, minor it may be, we might have at hand for apprehending such a shift in visual form may be by jelling and transposing some of the manifestations and inner workings of such malformation into the comparatively placid but phlegmatic (reflective) universe of materiality - a visual teratology that helps mark such descent.

it is in this sense that we here call all artists who may have or wish to develop ideas that transplant or distil the digital-virtual realm into visual paper works and may want to collaborate with us. we're looking for artworks, which will be edited and sold by arte menor, that, in any format suited to printing, make a critical dislocation of some region or ebullition of this virtual, or digital, cosmos into the material plane of paper. the works will be inkjet printed on acid- and lignin-free so-called archival papers, in open, but numbered editions (_/x). we welcome projects that are suited to inkjet and can live within the boundaries of a sheet of paper; not so much the book or pamphlet, but more the print (or series of prints), as the square or rectangular surface that harbours such displacement.

these open editions will be printed on demand, with the express agreement of the authors, who preserve all rights and may close them as and when they wish – arte menor retains printing and trading rights only for the duration of the agreement, which can be fixed-term or continue without a set closure. artists receive 60% of the profit for each work sold (less vat), from a price agreed beforehand between both parties.