MEMEFEST 2008

MEMEFEST 2008- EXPLORING RADICAL BEAUTY OF COMMUNICATION! Memefest, the International Festival of Radical Communication – born in Slovenia and rapidly reaching a critical mass worldwide – is proud to announce its seventh annual competition. This year\’s festival theme is RADICAL BEAUTY. Participants will respond to an excerpt taken from the movie Rize and comment on it with their works. Once again, Memefest is encouraging students, writers, artists, designers, thinkers, philosophers, and counter-culturalists to submit their work to our panel of renowned judges. This year, jury members will, among others, include: Geert Lovink, ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­new media theorist, activist and founder and director of the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam (http://www.networkcultures.org/) Dori Tunstall, a leader in field of Design Anthropology, and Associate Professor of Design Anthropology and Associate Director of the City Design Center at University of Illinois at Chicago P.K. Langshaw, the Chair of and Associate Professor in the Department of the Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec Jason Grant, Director of Inkahoots (http://www.inkahoots.com.au), the adventurous graphic design studio in Brisbane, Australia Gon Zifroni from the great design research collective based in Amsterdam and Brussels, Metahaven (www.metahaven.net), and Jernej Lorenci, theatre director virtuoso. Here is how we defined radical beauty in the context of Memefest 08: Beauty is a cultural creation that expresses dominant values. In the 21st century, beauty is often extremely commercialised. We define radical beauty as a cultural creation that expresses the desire for change in society. Radical beauty is about changing dominant values through action and creation. *Grassroots projects are often the vectors of these changings. They experiment new practices and express new values. Radical beauty – content of communication: poetic dialogue and action between the world and grassroots projects or processes that are existing or yet to be realized – process of communication: empowering relations between people – aesthetic: evoking a strong feeling of affection or love – with radical beauty we want to overcome the usual criticism of social construction of beauty, mostly regarding the representations of women in media. – radical beauty is a theme but also a communications approach. Therefore we need to channel the concept of radical beauty to specific problems/issues As always, those whose work does not take a conventional format can enter the *Beyond…* category, where the name of the game is challenging mainstream practices and beliefs! *Beyond…* continues to grow in popularity as a category not only because of its avant-garde appeal but because it is *open to non-students as well.* Memefest occurs completely online at www.memefest.org, and all entries will be available for full access and commentary in the site galleries. In 2007, Memefest received almost 500 entries from participants of every continent on the globe (\’cept Antarctica). We hope to get bigger, and to spread more of those good infectious ideas, so keep thinking- and creating. *Deadline for submissions is May 20th, 2008!* Good luck and best wishes! dr. Oliver Vodeb www.memefest.org