Open Calls: 2012 Exhibition Season

Flux Factory is pleased to announce open calls for two of its four major exhibitions in 2012!

JUNE EXHIBITION: Lawrence’s Hanging Garden
Calling all architects, urban planners, green thumbs, seed bombers, urban farmers, permaculturalists, builders, designers, and artists! Flux Factory requests your hacks and innovative approaches toward urban gardening and farming for Lawrence’s Hanging Garden, an exhibition that will debut June 2012.

Flux Factory’s venue houses a unique artist residency program and ambitious exhibition schedule. Our building features over 2,000 square feet of south-east exposed terrace roofs as well as a dark courtyard and a large gallery space. We’d like you to help us turn them into a garden, a social space, and an urban farm.

Lawrence’s Hanging Garden will reflect the diversity of relationships that New Yorkers have with their plants. Projects, installations, and artworks will be displayed in the Flux Factory gallery (naturally dark, cool, protected, insular), on its roof (unpredictable, exposed, bright), and ideally reaching out to the random patches of earth in our neighborhood of Long Island City (ripe with potential). Re-imagine urban spaces both private and public in an effort to bring resourcefulness and ingenuity to our immediate community.

We’re open to any suggestion, but are specifically looking for artists to design a deck, sitting area, shaded area, an outdoor theatre, a composting system, a water catchment system, and a greenhouse. The exhibition will be further enriched by a series of classes/workshops exploring various ideas presented, a gardening residency to maintain the plantworks and installations throughout the duration of the show, and a neighborhood fruit produce exchange.

To apply, email exhibitions@fluxfactory.org a multi-page PDF (5MB or less) containing your project proposal, sketches/images to support your proposal, examples of similar work, and resumé or bio, no later than March 15th at 11:59pm. Applicants will be notified of our decision the first week of April.

APRIL EXHIBITION: iSpy
Flux Factory is seeking proposals from game designers, technical wizards, emcees, performers, set designers, house bands, and all manner of mischief makers! We need your help to create iSpy, a live reality show meets stage show spectacle meets video game that combines game design and theater with the topsy-turvy power of networked cameras in public spaces.

The experience will revolve around players carrying networked cameras in public space, beaming images back to the gallery-turned-theater as they compete to finish absurd challenges with the audience’s help (e.g.: corralling strangers to swing at pinatas, in-store scavenger hunts, and impromptu games of Balderdash on the street). The Flux theater will be rigged with cameras and surprises too, turning everyone into unwitting players.

As an interactive and theatrical game experience, this project is not limited to the gallery. The production of iSpy will be highly collaborative, with all invited creators helping to form events open to the public during the last two weekends of April 2012.  We need collaborators to make mini-games, elaborate scoreboards, 70’s game show-style sets, spectacular lighting design, and surprising interactions, and we need house bands, emcees, actors, technical crew, facilitators, and much more to make it happen.

To apply, please submit the following to fluxfactory.ispy@gmail.com

I) A short proposal that details your conceptual or logistical involvement, 500 words max. Include any applicable sketches, designs, instructions, etc. as a JPG or PDF.
II) Documentation of previous related work or a list of applicable skills, maximum 2 pages, 5 images, or 5 minutes of video, sent as PDFs, JPGs, or a website link.
III) Resumé or bio, maximum 2 pages. Include a website if you have one.

Proposals are due no later than Feb 28th at 11:59pm, and applicants will be notified by mid-March.