openwork Issue 2: Call for Proposals
Theme: pre- / post-                                                                                       
Submission Deadline: January 29, 2024                                                                           
Looking for: Artistic and scholarly engagement with and around experimental music.
Peer review process: Developmental, double-blind, collaborative. 

 Notions of ‘pre-’ and ‘post-’ establish dynamic fields of temporality, suggesting movement, direction, sequence, and interactions of entities in transformation. Issue 2 of openwork aims to enter the extremities and in-between territories demarcated by ‘pre-’ and ‘post-’. We invite proposals from researchers and creative practitioners engaged with sound who critically explore overlooked and under-represented temporal narratives, be they musical, historical, or otherwise.  

 Navigating temporal relations, sonic works form complex networks where practice-based traditions, auditory capacities, sociocultural contexts, technological developments, and psychologies intersect and shape meanings. They also allow the anachronistic and synchronous to coalesce, creating temporalities that challenge the sequential understanding of time. In Issue #2, we ask how such sonic affordances can be harnessed to problematize and interrogate temporalities, materialities and subjectivities. We seek contributions that critically engage with themes including, but not limited to:

• Causality in experimental music processes
• The Anthropocene and notions of pre- and post-humanity
• Reflection and analysis of musical and sonic work
• Temporalities, spatialities, and voices within the Global South
• Manifestations of pre- and post- in center-periphery relations and the margins
• Creative authorship and self-transformation
• Experiences of music and sound in everyday life
• Narratives of pre-/post-modernity and pre-/post-digital
• Musical memory and imagination
• Rhythmanalysis
• Urgency, precarity, emergency, apocalypse
• Temporalities of performance
• Evolution of musical instruments and technologies
• Pre- and post-auditory, sonic, and disciplinarity
• ‘Fade-ins’ and ‘fade-outs’

Submission formats

We aim to represent diverse works across disciplines, welcoming contributions from both academic and non-academic spheres, particularly those not typically suited for conventional journals. As an online journal, we encourage digital media, including videos, audio, images, and animation, as well as imaginative uses of digital formats and online presentational possibilities, such as audio essays, interactive essays, and digital exhibitions. 

We are seeking proposals for the following formats:

• Full-length academic essays (about 5000–7000 words)
• Shorter creative pieces (about 500–2500 words)
• Cultural, political, theological (etc.) commentaries, manifestos and polemics.
• Artistic reflections
• Multimedia formats that use text 
• Surprise us! 
• Artworks
• Music: stand-alone pieces, albums, DJ sets, music videos etc.
• Duration: submission cannot exceed 50MB 
• File Format: mp3, mp4 (for music videos)
• Poetry 
• 2500 words maximum
• Short films, photo collections, essays or collages 
• Duration: submission via an outside link
• File Format: mp4

Proposal Submission Guidelines

• Proposals should be no longer than 250 words, may include a selected bibliography, and should address the following questions:
• How will your planned work explore the issue’s themes?
• How does your proposed work engage with sound and/or relate to the broader context of experimental music and sound art?
• What format will your planned work take (see submission formats)?
• How do you plan to utilize multimedia elements (audio, video, images, etc.) to enhance your submission, given the online nature of the journal?
• We also welcome short (250-word max) bios or CVs, but they are not required.  
• Authors may choose for their proposals to be reviewed anonymously. In this case, your materials must not include any identifying information. 
• If your proposal is best conveyed using audio, video or image materials (for example, references to past work or sketches of proposed work), please include up to three links to these using Dropbox, Soundcloud, Google Drive, your personal website, etc. in the body of your proposal. Please specify which aspects of the linked materials the selection committee should focus on using timestamps or explanatory notes. 
• Proposals must adhere to the deadline and word limits. 
• Proposals from both individual authors/artists or groups will be accepted. Only one submission is allowed per individual or group.

Submitting Your Proposal

Proposals and CVs / Bios should be submitted as PDF files.

Use the file naming convention: Lastname_ProposalTitle.pdf; Lastname_CV; Lastname_Bio

If you would like to remain anonymous, please use “Anonymous” instead of “Lastname” in your filenames.

Please email your proposal to the openwork editorial team at openworkjournal@gmail.com with “openwork-2 proposal” as your subject line. 

If your proposal is accepted, you will receive an email notification by February 5th, 2024

Peer review process

Our peer review process is dialogic, fostering open conversations between contributors and reviewers. This collaboration extends to co-curating these dialogues for publication with our editorial team, seeking to foster a transformative scholarly discourse. The peer-review process works in two stages. The first stage consists of a traditional double-blind process. In the second stage, authors can choose to engage in an open dialogue with peer-reviewers and to co-curate, together with the openwork editorial committee, selections of the dialogic exchanges to be included in the published issue.