CALL FOR PARTICIPATION!!!!!!!

in German/ in Spanish / in Farsi

I  am developing a new project that explores publicness and intimacy during the global pandemic. It involves asking people to make videos of the sounds and silences you hear and make around wherever they consider home, using your smart phones. It is very simple to participate and there is no immediate deadline. I’ll be collecting videos at least through the summer. I’m making the project for  Urbane Künste Ruhr. More details and instructions below. Thank you for considering it. ♡♡

Ghost game screenshotWatch the Ghost Games Teaser here

Ghost Games*
What does the global pandemic sound and look like from home? Since the coronavirus began spreading around the globe in early 2020, the idea and meaning of staying at home has changed. Today, one of the ways to care for others in the community, especially those who are the most vulnerable, is to keep your distance and stay at home as much as possible (if you are lucky enough to have a home). What are the altered states of being and doing that emerge in this strange and ongoing space of semi-solitude and separation from the public and from public space? What are the sounds you make  and hear in this self imposed space of isolation or semi-isolation. What stories do they tell? What sounds are soothing and which evoke the catastrophe of Covid-19?

I am inviting people to record short videos of a sound or a collection of sounds they notice and listen to and/or make from wherever they consider their homes, as well as what they see when they hear or make those sounds.

I will use the videos you share to construct a sonic and visual portrait of the collective experience of isolation. The portrait will depict a time and places where one way to come together as a society is to stay apart, a paradoxical situation where confining yourself to private space, for those who are not working outside the home, caring for others, or on the street protesting against systemic racism and police brutality against black people, becomes a caring public action.

Instructions for shooting
1. Record the sounds and silences you hear and make in your home, ordinary sounds and silences that you hear from the outside, the street, the yard and your neighbors. You can point the camera at the sound as it is being made or point it outward at something else as you listen.

2. Make as many videos as you like, the more the better! Also, no matter what else you shoot, please make one video recording out your window, holding the camera still for at least 30 seconds as you record. The videos you make can be between around 45 seconds and 4 minutes (or longer if you prefer).

3. Think of these recordings as documents of your encounters with the world at home in a time of a global pandemic. The sounds can be the most ordinary—from a sounds of receiving a text message to the sounds of your own or others exercising, chopping food, locking or slamming doors, mixing a drink, uncorking a bottle, to dogs barking, the sounds of your family in the other room, or electronics beeping. You can record a single isolated sound like a ball dropping, or sounds that last longer, like the chatter of birds, the sounds of protests on the streets, of helicopters, footsteps overhead, the neighbors,  music, radio, or TV heard out your window or in the other room. Record silences as well, the ambient sound and silences of your home, or out your window, or in your front or back yard, if you have one.

4. Very important—please shoot in landscape mode, holding the phone horizontally. Hold the camera steady and still unless it needs to move to follow something you are recording. You can prop your phone against something to keep it still while you record.

5. Videos can be between around 45 seconds and  4 minutes, or slightly longer if necessary. Record longer than you think you need to, holding the camera on whatever you are recording even after the sound has been made and before if it is possible. Take your time recording ambient sounds and silences, more is better than less!

6. Send the videos to me by dropbox or email

🌏 Dropbox: drop videos into the folder here

🌏 or email me at ghostgamesmedia@gmail.com

7. If you include your name with your submission, I will add it to the credits on the website once the project is completed. The work will first be shown as a public installation with Urbane Künste Ruhr and later will be viewable online.

*Ghost Games (or Geisterspiele) is a German term used for soccer games that are played behind closed doors where there are no viewers in the stadium.

Please share this call among your networks.  Thank you for participating!