Please propose narrative, performance, and visual art about programming to my festival!

[brainwane]

On May 3rd, 2019, two friends and I are hosting "The Art of Python", a miniature arts festival at PyCon North America 2019 (Cleveland, Ohio), focusing on narrative, performance, and visual art. We intend to encourage and showcase novel art that helps us share our emotionally charged experiences of programming, particularly in Python. We hope that by attending, our audience will discover new aspects of empathy and rapport, and find a different kind of delight and perspective than might otherwise be expected at a large conference.

There's more about this at my co-organizer Erty Seidohl's blog post, including an invitation to also propose your "not-talks" to !!Con.

In short, we are interested in how fictional narrative, visual and performance art, and different presentation formats can make different kinds of teaching and representation possible.

"The Art of Python" is seeking your proposals now and the deadline for submissions is 28 February. And if you've never written a play and want guidance so you can write your first, we'll have a guide up on 1 February to help you!

Thanks to Erty and to Brendan Adkins for co-organizing "The Art of Python" with me! Thanks to PyCon's Hatchery program for new PyCon events, which makes this festival possible! Thanks to Jackie Kazil for the festival name! (My codename was "Spectacle!" which is probably misleading and less accessible.)

Comments

[lindseykuper]

This is so cool! I didn't realize that the !!Con part of this was coming (as you probably already know, I'm taking a break from !!Con proper to focus on !!Con West), and I'm stoked about an expanded !!Con aesthetic.


One thing I'm a bit confused about is what's in scope. The call for submissions starts out with "narrative, performance, and visual art", but later on you say that the format will be "a series of plays and other performances", and at one point you even call it a "play festival". So it sounds like this is not really a venue for visual art that doesn't have a performance component. Is that true?

non-performance visual art

[brainwane]

Glad you are stoked!

Thanks for sharing your confusion. I have taken out the phrase "play festival" and need to find a way to revise the CfP and pycon.org pages to say, concisely:

We're open to a lot of kinds of art! We KNOW we want performances, and are planning to showcase them. AND if anyone submits non-performance art, and we want to accept it, we will figure out how to showcase it as well, especially if you are open to having it auctioned at the PyLadies charity auction the following night!

I'll speak up and let you know when that revision is complete. Thanks again for the bug report and sorry for being confusing.

Re: non-performance visual art

[lindseykuper]

Thanks! For the record, I think a play or performance festival would be fantastic, as long as it's clear that that's what it is. I actually think there's something to be gained from narrowing the scope to a specific type of submission.

When Alex and I got married, we asked people to submit "stuff", and (a) almost no one did (although that might also have had to do with the fact that even finding the call for participation involved decoding a coded message on the save-the-date card), and (b) the few submissions we got were varied enough that there was no coherent way to incorporate them in a "proceedings", so nothing ever came of it. The feedback we got later was that people didn't know what we wanted.

Re: non-performance visual art

[brainwane]

I totally understand and have been conflicted about whether to focus more on performance or also to give shyer people a way to do something much less performance-y and more "do a lot of painstaking visual work ahead of time and then display it at the con". I decided on the latter.

I've altered the CfP to explain that visual art is welcome, e.g.,

We are seeking many types of creative work, such as music/dance performances and visual art such as paintings, but expect the main body of the event to consist of short one-act plays about the experience of programming, running from five to twenty minutes in length, plus a short visual art showcase presentation where the artists will briefly display and discuss their work.

So now I believe the revision is complete. Thank you for talking about it with me and thanks for publicizing Erty's blog post! If you could get the !!Con Twitter account to RT you that would be LOVELY.

Re: non-performance visual art

[lindseykuper]

Yeah, I totally understand that conflict!

As far as RTing from the !!Con Twitter account, I could certainly do that, but I kind of think that someone who's actually on the !!Con team this year should be doing things like that. I'll bring it up!