The closing date for applications is March 22.
THE SOCIETY FOR CREATIVE INTOXICATION
The Society for Creative Intoxication is currently accepting applications for the funding and development of performance-based work that depicts the influence of original fictitious psychoactive drugs in public settings. This year the SCI celebrates its twenty-fifth year as an organization, and has created the following grant in order to enrich the practice of creative and/or narrative intoxication.
WHO IS ELIGIBLE
Anyone who is nineteen years or older—and who can perform in the Greater Vancouver Regional District on any date within one calendar year of being selected—is eligible for this award.
HOW TO APPLY
Provide a written description of your originally created fictitious stimulant, narcotic, or hallucinogen. This description must be no more than 500 words in length. Be sure to include your name and preferred contact method in the spaces provided. Mail to the address below. Handwritten descriptions are preferred. Applications must be received no later than November 17.
ADJUDICATION
A committee composed of senior SCI members (in good standing) will create a shortlist of the best three applications. The top three applicants will then be contacted and asked to audition at the SCI office, providing an early “sketch” of their performance. (For out-of-town applicants, a video audition is acceptable.) From this shortlist, the committee will then award a grant winner, a runner-up, and an honorable mention. The latter two will not receive funding but will be cited in all communications and press releases.
PAYMENT AND PERFORMANCE
The winning applicant will be awarded $10,000 and will be expected to complete their performance within one year of receiving the grant. Performances may last any period of time (depending on the side-effects of your fictional drug), and must take place in any public setting within Metro Vancouver. Traditionally, performances are not announced, but are rather received by the public without knowing they are witnessing a performance. Actors are asked to refrain from excessively aggressive or offensive work, and are responsible for keeping their performance within the limits of the law. The SCI is not responsible for performances that transgress public order.
OUR ADDRESS
Submit all correspondence to:
Performance Grant Selection Committee
The Society for Creative Intoxication
738 E. Ginger Goodwin Blvd.
Vancouver, BC V6A 2ΩA
THE NORTH AMERICAN COUNCIL OF PSYCHOGEOGRAPHICAL BROADCASTERS
The North American Council of Psychogeographical Broadcasters’ philanthropic grant stream for independent radio networks operating in the medium of In Situ Counterfactual Traffic Reporting is open to ongoing applications.
Our In Situ Counterfactual Traffic Reporting grants assist the creation and maintenance of temporary and mobile radio stations, in any metropolitan area in Canada or the United States, for the purpose of broadcasting imaginary traffic reports for imaginary cities during high volume commuting periods in actual cities, receivable by car radios within a radius of one kilometre (0.6 miles) or more.
Applications eligible for funding may make reference to alternate and imagined streets, freeways, bridges, tunnels, public transit, ferry routes, and other systems. Counterfactual traffic reporting may blend your locale’s actual infrastructural points of reference with imagined cityscapes (for heightened disorientation) or may be wholly mythical. Similarly, “traffic” can be freely interpreted and need not refer to conventional vehicles but may include anachronistic or speculative transportation technologies, beasts of burden, mutated locomotive abilities, teleportation, subterranean burrowing, propulsion by extrasensory perception, weather control, ludic determination, and so on.
Deadlines: January 11, May 11, September 11.
Maximum Support: $50,000.
Recommended Submission Elements:
1. A textual treatment of your broadcast.
2. A detailed map of your imagined cityscape (if applicable).
3. A project budget.
4. A production timeline.
5. Reference to your experience with extralegal broadcasting and knowledge thereof.
(Interested parties may apply without use of real names, or as groups using pseudonymous call-signs.)
After breaking the code below, submit your application to the address revealed. Please provide your return address and/or email address in a comparably difficult code.
X#A(((XD #)))#DY+
^HMMM, LI$%)))(((#
GK!!!*H
_::_
SUBJECTIVE JOY FOUNDATION
Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.
—Carl Jung
Nominations are currently being accepted for individual candidates to our Simulation of Bliss (Long Term) program unit. Groups interested in nominating a candidate are to submit an application with the following specifications:
Eligible candidates must…
…be practicing artists or political activists, with a reasonable expectation that these activities will be part of their lifelong development.
…be of reasonable physical health (to ensure a substantial tenure).
…be citizens of Canada.
…have no connections to the Foundation, professionally or socially.
Nominating applicants must be composed of groups of seven or more people. For notes on group structure and annual reporting requirements, see NOTES ON GROUP STRUCTURE AND ANNUAL REPORTING REQUIREMENTS.
In accordance with Our Founder’s belief that self-actualized joy is largely, if not entirely, a matter of subjective experience, and that the mind-events of one are the mind-events of all, our Simulation of Bliss (Long Term) remuneration program is available as an award to a group of applicants committed to, ideally, the decades-long (or, perfectly, life-long) project of singling out one deserving artist or activist and targeting him or her with the tactic of Expansive Ensconcing—whereby the artist or activist is, without his or her knowledge, buoyed up “behind the curtain” by our committee—i.e., shadowed, supported, and made, as much as our team can achieve, successful, on their terms, which become, by proxy enjoyment, our terms also. Selected applicants will buy the artist’s art, bestow funds upon him or her through front-group grants, publish positive reviews, blogs, books, theses, and dissertations praising the target; winning applicants will follow their activist or artist through his or her various endeavours, which they will support from the penumbra of the target’s life, leaving the development and theory to him or her, honouring this reservoir of bliss. In the form of supposed citizens’ groups, you will heap upon them letters of support and written profiles, stage demonstrations and incidents that coat the target in the lustre of heroism, advance the candidate’s particular ideological or artistic bent in as much subtle and specific detail as you can summon, without thought to your own beliefs. In this way you will make this one subject’s singular genius or revolutionary role real, and you, from without, will harvest the ecstasy you have sown—proximately, quietly, vicariously, voraciously.
Endowment Release
$7 million (CAD)
For the current application form, see CURRENT APPLICATION FORM.
SOCIAL ECONOMICS FORUM
Crisis, Crash, and Chronometry Grant
The prestigious C3 Grant from the Social Economics Forum (the research wing of the Undollaring Society) is administered with the intention of funding projects that develop original time-keeping and calendrical systems drawn from the cycles of market collapse.
Past recipients include—
—Julia Besse, for a bubble clock that expands in volume relative to the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average multiplied by years since the last crash
—George Goçgulyýew, for a Stonehenge-inspired megalithic astronomical calendar set to twentieth- and twenty-first-century recessions and recoveries
—Alex Brady, for a digital, Wi-Fi-capable pocket watc
h with a webcrawling bot that paces the gears to tick only when it finds the phrase “economic crisis” in the headline of a news site
Apply by sending a detailed description of your project to:
Box 17
983 Arrow St.
Vancouver, BC
V6A 9O9
Your application must be received by January 15. The grant value is $5,000 CAD.
COMMITTEE FOR THE INSTATEMENT OF PARACOSMIC ARTS COMMITTEES
Many people mentally build towns, cities, countries, and empires as a form of serialized daydreaming. The creation of paracosms is more common among children than adults. Some, however, like the Brontë sisters or C.S. Lewis, continue to dream of these imagined realms of their childhood well into adult life.
We at the Committee for the Instatement of Paracosmic Arts Committees (CIPAC) have initiated a new program for those with active paracosms who are interested in adding a cultural mandate to the world they have created through their own private Genesis. That is, if you are interested in your inner world having a healthy local, national, or international arts infrastructure, including material support as well as support in the form of official honours, then our program may be for you.
While we anticipate the definition of “art” in your paracosm may include visual art, music, theatre, dance, writing, film, digital media, and so on—that is, the broadest definition of creative practices—we also understand that specific paracosms may have unique and unusual traditions and forms. CIPAC embraces such diversity and we encourage our jurors to consider this when examining forms that operate beyond the bounds of standard, real-world genres.
Our funding is for, but is not limited to, the following types of in-paracosm development:
•Establishing an institutional body with the funding and expertise to disburse grants aimed at whatever arts are important in your paracosm’s cultural milieu.
•Building a system of arts awards and prizes, public, private, or mixed in funding origins, for new and established artists.
•The establishment of artist residencies, festivals, conferences, centres, schools, galleries, and archives.
•The creation of advanced social support for artists such as pensions, retirement homes for artists, the use of artists in public health initiatives, education, trauma recovery, conflict resolution, rehabilitation of violent offenders, and other projects considering art in the social sphere.
TO APPLY
Please create a detailed description of your paracosm, with particular focus on its artistic and cultural life.
Your description should be no more than twenty pages, and should include some indication of the government or social organization most amenable to housing our proposed committee.
Your application should not be sent. Once completed, it will be sent for; it will be sensed and will attract those within our fictions who circulate, seek, and locate such desires. These agents will smell the yearning your application exudes. They will arrive at the site of your application. They will see through the aperture of your application. They will self-form in your space and appear or filter through or settle there, with you, like moss on a yew or damp on a dockside bollard. These agents will appear according to your abilities of perception—shapes of heavy smoke, ash-light swarms, swallowed laughs with eyes—these will come to collect your proposal.
Approved applications will be appointed a CIPAC officer who will initiate the process of organizing an active and vibrant arts infrastructure in your paracosm within thirty days.
You will know in your heart if your application has been successful.
You’ll feel it beginning.
THE OUTER HARBOUR
The girl is standing on the rooftop, staring at herself.
Her corpse is on the gurney. She knows that the body is lifeless, but they do not, so the people from the city are trying to save her. She stands beside them as they work, looking down into her own hollow eyes.
They wheel the bed to the helicopter and load it in. The chatter of the blades shatters the moment.
Her parents are not allowed to go with her body and are forced to watch the helicopter rise into the black sky and veer toward the lights on the shore across the water. She watches her parents watching them take her away.
On the roof of the ten-storey building, standing on a massive white “H” enclosed by a circle, left behind are five staff members, the girl, and her mother and father.
Eventually the staff escort her parents back to their unit. She follows. Watches them weep and scream in their home.
When she can’t take any more, she learns how to leave.
Review of Mercenary Dreaming: A Curious Story of How Fantasy Gaming Innovated the Technology of Repression (89 mins., Documentary, Dir: Donald Abbey)
The most important adjective in the title of this new documentary, which premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival this week, is definitely the word “curious”—because, like the line spoken by Alice upon entering Wonderland, the tale that first-time filmmaker Donald Abbey gives us gets curiouser and curiouser as it goes. If your interest is piqued by the unlikely connection between play and policing, then the free-fall down this particular rabbit hole will prove well worth the vertigo.
How curious? Well, the film begins with the director’s own strange personal journey as a conjoined twin who grew up in Vancouver and survived an operation severing him from his brother. Before being separated, the twins had a brief musical career together. That seems like quite enough to be the entire topic of a film, but that’s not at all what this documentary is about. In fact, Abbey’s background is summarized in a voiced-over montage before the real story begins, tangentially enough, when the director becomes involved with a Vancouver-based LARP—a “live action role-playing” game that is like a cross between a Renaissance fair and puzzle-solving collective theatre. In the documentary, Abbey describes how he became obsessed with the game—which is called “The Secret Commonwealth”—after being introduced to it by his ex-girlfriend, and how his initial intention was to make a feature film about a character who is similarly drawn in. But in the process of filming, something else emerges—namely, the shadowy figure of the game’s creator, Jamie Langenderbach, who leads the strange subculture of fans involved in the Secret Commonwealth. (The name comes from the title of a centuries-old Scottish guidebook about mythical creatures.) What begins as a film about making a film soon becomes a real-life mystery, as Abbey tries to get a fix on the man behind the curtain.
The key detail that initially puts Langenderbach on the filmmaker’s radar is that, while researching the Secret Commonwealth’s network, Abbey spots the LARP-master’s name on an employee list at Enfortech, a firm that designs products used for non-lethal crowd control. (Think tear gas and Tasers, but weirder: net guns, acoustic cannons, and even some kind of prototype heat ray appears on their website.) What is the link between Langenderbach and all this exotic law enforcement hardware? Most of the movie consists of Abbey trying to figure out just that, and it leads him through a strange underground seldom perceived in urban North America.
And when I say “underground,” I mean it almost literally. As we discover, the game uses an imaginary spatialization of the Lower Mainland into “realms”—each a fantasy turf over which the Secret Commonwealth players squabble, divided into warring factions with battles played out through Langenderbach’s algorithm. These imaginary cantons are superimposed over the topography of real-life Vancouver and its outlying suburbs. (Looking at the website, I was somehow unfazed to find that my own East Vancouver neighbourhood, for example, is designated as a series of subterranean caverns called “the Shadow Realm.”)
As Abbey gets closer to the game’s creator, it becomes clear that Langenderbach is using his game design experience to create some sort of paramilitary device for Enfortech, and that he has used the Secret Commonwealth LARP to test-run the device. The Magister Ludi of this nutty scene turns out to be an exacting figure who created the Secret C
ommonwealth out of a small group of gamers and nerds, growing it into a thriving business with a massive online component. While it’s too complex to describe here, the game is basically always running, and although the face-to-face meetings that players hold monthly during the spring and summer in parks and campgrounds are important, their movements online also extend play into a real-time, 24/7 digital experience—at home, at work, at school, always. The storylines that hold it all together are carefully crafted by Langenderbach behind the scenes, with players acting out their roles through various platforms—though how much control players have in influencing the plot seems unclear. The players, at least, believe they are co-creating their own epics, but to hear Langenderbach talk about it, he can and does manipulate the results he desires. Without spoiling the film’s ending, I’ll just say that after Abbey covertly films the use of holographic antagonists at a Secret Commonwealth campsite gathering, exactly what Langenderbach is up to in his side-career with Enfortech starts to become unnervingly clear. The interview that Abbey manages to finally arrange on camera is shocking yet interpretable in multiple ways.
The film’s last surprise is Abbey’s own skill. One appreciates the risks this debut takes. For example, the film concludes with a series of images that invoke the implicit parallels and paradoxes evident in documentary filmmaking, the nature of the camera, our attraction to secret societies, and the uncanny future of interactive holography. We circle back to the filmmaker’s own odd origins and, without making this all about him, Abbey manages to explain the appeal Langenderbach’s world has for those who feel themselves to be outcasts and misfits, like himself. Although at first Abbey resisted partaking in the Secret Commonwealth, he explains how he came to feel enveloped in an atmosphere of acceptance, which he suggests remains the subculture’s best feature. It’s a place where weird is welcome. But how this translates into Langenderbach’s worrisome laissez-faire ethos is not plainly spelled out. Abbey lets viewers process on their own whatever moral questions remain. No matter what one makes of it, the exposure of this otherwise unseen world reveals something about the nature of adult make-believe in the twenty-first century. In our time, this film seems to suggest, the pastoral innocence of play may always share an uneasy border with the castle-keep of force, security, and an armed peace.
The Outer Harbour Page 10
