Call for Bracket - sound, video, photo, etc.

http://www.experiencias36.com/?p=737

http://www.brkt.org/

ISSUE #1: ON FARMING

Please submit unpublished work (images, text, sound, video) addressing the theme of On Farming, including: urbanisms, emergent architectures, landscape interventions, crop circle mappings; irrefutable evidence; visionary manifestos for the future; apocalyptic scare tactics; survival strategies and recipes. Please indicate which sub-theme your submission applies to.

Upload submission proposals as a PDF in the form of:
- 1000-2000 word text with images / drawings
- Design images (built or unbuilt) / drawings with 300-500 word description
- Video
- Audio

Feb 2, 2009 - deadline

Jury Review: February 2009

Notification and Editing: March 2009

Book release: October 2009
Please see the Submit section to upload your submission

Please contact us for audio and video submissions.
The first edition of [bracket] is centered around the theme of farming. Once merely understood in terms of agriculture, today information, energy, labour, and landscape, among others, can be farmed. Farming harnesses the efficiency of collectivity and community. Whether cultivating land, harvesting resources, extracting energy or delegating labor, farming reveals the interdependencies of our globalized world. Simultaneously, farming represents the local gesture, the productive landscape, and the alternative economy. The processes of farming are mutable, parametric, and efficient. From terraforming to foodsheds to crowdsourcing, farming often involves the management of the natural mediated by the technologic. Farming, beyond its most common agricultural understanding is the modification of infrastructure, urbanisms, architectures, and landscapes toward a privileging of production.

With a global food crisis looming, even the traditional farm's impact on land, resources, and economics is in need of re-visioning. Other innovations have led to a growing number of people investing in shares of a local farmer's crop, reducing trips to the supermarket and the cost of shipping food. Energy farming has seen immense diversification in the last decade with essential innovations in renewable energies such as wave farms, wind, tidal, solar, and even piezoelectrical. Investment in wind power alone rose from an $8 billion per year plateau from 2002-2004 to more than $18 billion annually on average for 2008-2010, with most of the growth in North America and Asia. Information farming has also seen an incredible rise in the last 5 years and, in fact, could be architecture's newest building typology, the "data campus." Google recently completed a 30-acre server farm in Oregon on converted agricultural land. And Yahoo has recently purchased 50 acres of land in Quincy, Washington for a massive internet data-processing facility.

What are the logistics governing these examples of farming? How has technology informed the public realm of these processes? How are different forms of farming modifying our regions, cities, buildings, and landscapes?

Fish farms, server farms, energy farms, urban farms, information farms, wikipedia, facebook; our contemporary daily life owes so much to the resourceful, convenient intelligence of collectivity. How is it shaping or how could it shape our cities and buildings? How are these developments shaping our natural environment? And what are new potentials for these typologies? These are the issues and questions that designers and writers are asked to respond to.