[Reader-list] call for submissions: THE STATE vol iii The Social Olfactory

[rahel aima]

Hi all

I'd like to pass on the call for submissions for Vol iii of  THE STATE: The
Social Olfactory. The deadline is AUG 22, 2012, and commissions will
receive up to US$500; the call is pasted below, and can also be found at
http://www.thestate.ae/submissions. Please do circulate and pass this on to
your networks, and feel free to get in touch with any questions.

Thanks and best,
---
rahel aima
editor, THE STATE <http://thestate.ae/>


OFTEN, SMELL can feel like the last sensory frontier. Still a little
visceral, still less explored—and exploited—than its other, far more
interfaced and corporatised counterparts. When we talk about scent, too, we
tend to turn to the natural as a means to efface the natural—sea breezes
and floral bouquets to mask perspiration and cooking smells. But then
there’s indolic smells, or those fetid-sweet, narcotic compounds found
mostly in white flowers like jasmine, nargis, tuberose and honeysuckle.
Seductive as they might be, there’s something in them that’s a little bit
putrescine, cadaverine. The smell of something rotten in the social factory.

WE ARE THINKING about the secret semiotics of scent, precarity,
atomisation, diffusers and crystalline renderings of femininity, the
flavour industry, deodourants, Calvino’s noseless man of the future, human
and animal pheremones, the vanilliac lignin of old books, decoctions,
bloodied sawdust in butchers’ cold rooms, tobacco flowers and carcinogents,
cremations, sewers and drainpipes, nostalgia, literature that transgresses
the Proustian madeleine, saffron threads and oud, fetishised decadence,
orientalism and exoticism.

AND YOU?

WE WELCOME submissions around the theme of ‘The Social Olfactory,’ and
encourage experimentation with form, transmedia, and (web)site-specific
installations; critical texts, interrogative narratives, slow journalism,
sensuous net-artwork, moving or still images, psychogeographic mappings,
place hacking, manifestos and conversations, among others. Because of the
nature of THESTATE, please do not feel restricted by the above; please feel
free to alternatively submit a wall of text.

THE STATE is a journal and sociohistorical forum. It investigates the space
between print and audio-visual experiences and their transition to mediated
online forms; transgressive cultural criticism and the sensuous
architecture of this “printernet.”

Please send your submissions, along with a brief bio, to info at thestate.ae,
by AUGUST 22nd, 2012. We ask that you submit new works, but are willing to
reprint pieces that have not been published in English; however, we are
unable to translate ourselves. We are open to pitches, but please get in
touch by the 12th of August. Commissioned pieces will receive up to US$500