This is a call for submissions for vol iii of THE STATE, a journal based out of Dubai, U.A.E. The deadline is August 22, 2012, and commissioned pieces receive up to US$500. The journal editors especially encourage submissions from women, glbt*qui folks, and people of colour.
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Often, smell can feel like the last sensory frontier. Still a little visceral, still less explored—and exploited—than its other, far more interfaced and corporatised counterparts. When we talk about scent, too, we tend to turn to the natural as a means to efface the natural—sea breezes and floral bouquets to mask perspiration and cooking smells. But then there’s indolic smells, or those fetid-sweet, narcotic compounds found mostly in white flowers like jasmine, nargis, tuberose and honeysuckle. Seductive as they might be, there’s something in them that’s a little bit putrescine, cadaverine. The smell of something rotten in the social factory.
We are thinking about the secret semiotics of scent, precarity, atomisation, diffusers and crystalline renderings of femininity, the flavour industry, deodourants, Calvino’s noseless man of the future, human and animal pheremones, the vanilliac lignin of old books, decoctions, bloodied sawdust in butchers’ cold rooms, tobacco flowers and carcinogents, cremations, sewers and drainpipes, nostalgia, literature that transgresses the Proustian madeleine, saffron threads and oud, fetishised decadence, orientalism and exoticism.
And you?
We welcome submissions around the theme of ‘The Social Olfactory,’ and encourage experimentation with form, transmedia, and (web)site-specific installations; critical texts, interrogative narratives, slow journalism, sensuous net-artwork, moving or still images, psychogeographic mappings, place hacking, manifestos and conversations, among others. Because of the nature of THESTATE, please do not feel restricted by the above; please feel free to alternatively submit a wall of text.
The state is a journal and sociohistorical forum. It investigates the space between print and audio-visual experiences and their transition to mediated online forms; transgressive cultural criticism and the sensuous architecture of this “printernet.”
Please send your submissions, along with a brief bio, to info@thestate.ae, by AUGUST 22nd, 2012. We ask that you submit new works, but are willing to reprint pieces that have not been published in English; however, we are unable to translate ourselves. We are open to pitches, but please get in touch by the 12th of August. Commissioned pieces will receive up to US$500.
CONTACT INFORMATION:
For queries/ submissions: info@thestate.ae
Website: http://www.thestate.ae
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