Ellipses […] is an online publication and peer reviewed platform for creative research realised in live, digital formats. For this issue of Ellipses [ … ] we are proposing a call for creative work across a range of disciplines that responds to another call: open the gates.

In his reflection on the making of the film October, Soviet film maker Sergei Eisenstein, talks of the mythology around the storming of the gates of the Winter Palace. In reality, the mass of people at the gates of the palace was too much to resist, and the guards had in fact simply opened the gates. However, as Eisenstein explains, in the filmic representation it made for a stronger visual narrative to portray this moment as a storming of the gates. At the announcement of the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, a Time Magazine article reports: ‘As the hour drew near, they taunted East German border guards with cries of ‘Tor Auf!’ (open the gate). In the Freedom Charter, drafted during the struggle against Apartheid, it is claimed that: ‘the doors of learning shall be opened to all’.

Open the gates thus suggests an actual and metaphorical opening of new possibilities, new assemblages and relations within sites of knowledge production. Here the place of the arts within the broader demands for measurable ‘research’ within university contexts are in question. Thus, it foregrounds questions of the creative act and the modes of representation necessary and possible in this space. The call asks for projects that re-imagine affective and political communities. It is about the possibilities of new and multiple languages, and the emergence of new modes of representation. It speaks to the potential to disrupt disciplinary boundaries within the arts, but also between arts and sciences. It is also a call to cross the divide between the physical, material space of production and digital modes of dissemination.

This is a call for existing works, new works or experimental projects that challenge disciplinary boundaries and forms of representation within the digital space. Existing work will be realised in a new form within the digital platform of the journal. Please note that the digital realisation of creative research is to be creative and therefore not a simple digital documentation of practice. The digital process is supported within the editorial process by a series of workshops and close communication with the development team.

Download call in full & journal details: Ellipses_2017_Call.
Download: Ellipses_2017_Submission-Form

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www.ellipses.org.za