The Interstitial Arts Foundation
About the IAF

The Interstitial Arts Foundation is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the study, support, and promotion of interstitial art: literature, music, visual and performance art found in between categories and genres – art that crosses borders. Find out more!

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Applications are Open for the 2012 Indy Convergence
by Erin Underwood | January 4th, 2012 | No Comments »

(Eds. Note: We’ve just received this announcement from IAF Working Group member Ellen Denham, who is working with the  Indy Convergence, the annual 10-day “make-a-wish foundation for artists.” You can also find out more about the Indy Convergence by reading the March 11, 2011 IAF interview with founder Caitlin Swihart — we are very excited about this event and look forward to what this year’s Convergence will hold!)

Applications open for 2012 Indy Convergence Categories: 2012

Applications for the 2012 Indy Convergence are now open.

Deadline to apply with funding is January 15, 2012.

The Indy Convergence seeks out professional artists with a passion for exploration and a unique talent or approach that will contribute to the ensemble. Participants also have the opportunity to focus on their own genre specific works and are required to teach a workshop that is open and free to the Indianapolis community. The goal of the Indy Convergence is for working artists to gather, collaborate, learn, share and teach.

The 2012 Indy Convergence will be May 7 -18.

Over two weeks each artist:

  • Participates in one collaborative “Umbrella Project”
  • Works on one or more personal “Side Projects”
  • Teaches at least one “Workshop” in their field of expertise.
  • The Indy Convergence concludes with a culminating presentation where work is shared in an open lab environment. All workshops and events are open to the public and free of charge.
  • At the core of the Indy Convergence we are “artists at work” — at work in our community and at work with one another.

*Join us in Indiana this May to share space with other dedicated artists for 2 weeks of open space. *

*To Apply, visit the application page by **CLICKING HERE**

*To view video and images from the last convergences, check our archives to see the artists at work!*


Writing Excuses podcast interviews Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman about Interstitial Art
by Mike Allen | December 18th, 2011 | No Comments »

Interstitiality made an audible stir this past week when Writing Excuses posted an interview author Mary Robinette Kowal conducted with IAF co-founders Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman (click this link to read and to listen):

Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman from the Interstitial Arts Foundation join Mary and Dan at World Fantasy to discuss things that fall into the gaps between the genres.

How do publishers, agents, and booksellers deal with titles that are speculative, but that cannot be easily categorized as science fiction, fantasy, horror, paranormal romance, steampunk, or one of the other readily shelvable genres? And how should authors approach writing such titles?


The post even offers a writing prompt:


Writing Prompt: Try to write something that doesn’t fit neatly into the genres you’re familiar with.

A lively discussion has ensued in the comments there. Please listen, read and add to it, either there or here. We’d love to know what you think.


More Calls for Papers
by Felice | December 12th, 2011 | No Comments »

Geoffrey recently posted a Call for Papers from a fascinating organization: the Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung (GFF) – that is, the Association for Research in the Fantastic – based at the University of Hamburg. The submission deadline is January 7th, 2012, for its 3rd Annual Conference at the University of Zurich. (The theme of the conference? “TRANSITIONS AND DISSOLVING BOUNDARIES IN THE FANTASTIC” Be still, our beating hearts!)

The GFF’s Call for Papers site has several other listings as well, including a call for articles about performance art (“theatre, music, dance, magic, and/or ritual”) from the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and a call for meditations on urban apocalyptic landscapes from the Science Fiction Research Association.

Check it out!


Interfictions Zero resumes in 2012.
by Geoffrey | December 11th, 2011 | No Comments »

A quick note from Delia Sherman and Helen Pilonovsky, the co-editors of Interfictions Zero:

The editors of Interfictions Zero apologize for the spotty nature of our updates. We have been overtaken with Life Events, entirely of the good variety, but still overwhelming. Come January 2012, however, we will be back, with S.J. Hiron’s “The wu of Nazi Literature in the Americas,” which weighs Roberto Bolaño’s second novel against Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High House as well as Bolaño’s own, more famous study of the nature of evil, 2666.

Thank you for your patience.


CFP: Transitions and Dissolving Boundaries in the Fantastic.
by Geoffrey | December 11th, 2011 | No Comments »

Courtesy of the IAFA-L mailing list, a call for papers that should be of interest to the interstitially-minded. Hurry, though – the deadline for the initial proposal is January 7th, 2012:

CALL FOR PAPERS
TRANSITIONS AND DISSOLVING BOUNDARIES IN THE FANTASTIC

Third Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung (GFF)
at the University of Zurich from 13th to 16th September 2012

Transitions and the dissolving of boundaries are crucial to the fantastic in all media manifestations. Fantastic texts include, among other things, crossings into other worlds, time travel, metamorphoses, hybrid creatures as well as a variety of transitions and transgressions. Hybrid genres and genre reconfigurations as well as various forms of intertextuality featured in fantastic literature(s) are based on transitions between texts and the dissolving of boundaries between topics and motifs of diverse origin. In this sense, the fantastic provides the potential to disintegrate the artificial line of distinction between high and popular culture or between supposedly good and bad “taste”, which can arguably be seen as a form of provocation. The fantastic raises a significant number of questions about cultural and social developments and challenges existing boundaries. By creating hybrid zones of autonomy, the fantastic provides alternatives to conventional understandings of, for example, world, knowledge or identity. Fantastic elements serve to unveil social discourses and to articulate complex physical and psychological processes as well as abstract figures of thoughts.

Transitions pervade the fantastic and manifest in numerous forms, such as in the shape of intermedia adaptations (from texts to film, comics, games, radio plays, novels), transpositions into new media (as, for instance, done in fan fiction or the case of multimedia franchises), as well as in various forms of crossover as exemplified in the increasing trend of generation-spanning all-age literature. With regard to transitions and the crossing of boundaries, the focus of this conference will lie on objects, norms, knowledge, ascribed meanings and potential spectrums of interpretation associated with the fantastic. The aim is to explore representations of worlds and subjects, reality and fiction, in order to contribute to a further assessment of the cultural relevance of the fantastic – in its contemporary, historical, social and medial dimensions.

We are open to scientific papers in German or English on the entire scope of the fantastic: analyses of specific texts, on the interconnection of text, image and sound in various media or different media formats, literary or visual genres, as well as theoretical contributions to the fantastic and its cultural significance.

All interested in contributing to this conference are requested to send a proposal of maximum 350 words including a brief description of the project, contact data and relevant biographical information to the organisational team by 7th January 2012, preferably via e-mail. We would particularly welcome contributions relating to the overall theme of the conference. However, there will also be an open track in which substantiated yet innovative papers on other topics regarding the fantastic may be presented.

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Ingrid Tomkowiak
Institut für Populäre Kulturen
Universität Zürich
Affolternstrasse 56
8050 Zürich, Schweiz
Phone: +41 44 634 24 36
E-Mail: fantastik2012@ipk.uzh.ch


From a co-founder: Occupy [Artistic] “Wall Street”
by Ellen Kushner | October 9th, 2011 | 1 Comment »

Listening to this week’s NPR On the Media segment with host Brooke Gladstone speaking with Occupy Wall Street representative (and former AIDS activist) Bill Dobbs made me think of the early days of the IAF.

When Brooke presses Dobbs to say what genuine action the Occupy Wall Street protests are achieving, he says that they’ve gotten a ton of media coverage, and, most importantly, made people aware of the issue, made it a topic of discussion and debate.

That’s pretty much what we were thinking when we started urging people to think about “interstitial art” and to join the IAF.

Then everyone started mocking us for doing nothing but talk.  So we published two paper anthologies (with study guide), an online story annex, an online anthology of academic criticism, a ton of blog posts, created an art auction and a series of multimedia music/reading/video events,  and locally-run Salons.

Like the Wall Street protesters, though, we’ve always hoped that, encouraged by our efforts, people will take matters into their own hands.

What are you up to these days?

Ellen Kushner, Co-Founder,
President Emerita,
IAF


New Interfictions Zero essay: “Interstitial International? Ibrahim al-Koni and the Question of Genre”
by Geoffrey | September 19th, 2011 | 1 Comment »

(The next in our series of Interfictions Zero essays is now available in the Projects section of our site: Sofia Samatar’s “Interstitial International? Ibrahim al-Koni and the Question of Genre“. Samatar is a PhD student in the Department of African Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studies 20th-century Arabic literature with a focus on Egypt and Sudan. Her poetry is forthcoming in Stone Telling and Bull Spec, and her debut novel, A Stranger in Olondria, will be released by Small Beer Press in 2012. Here’s an excerpt to get you started, with illustration by the inimitable M. W. Kaluta.

REMINDER: Interfictions Zero essays appear monthly on this site. We’re accepting rolling submissions for IF0, so if you have an idea for one, please see our Submissions Guidelines.

Let us know what you think about Samatar’s essay in the Comments section of this post; and see what others have said by reading All Comments.)

Interstitial International? illustration by Michael William Kaluta
illustration by M. W. Kaluta

The pivotal moment of Ibrahim al-Koni’s 1990 novel Nazīf al-ḥajar, translated as The Bleeding of the Stone, is a scene in which the isolated shepherd Asouf undergoes a life-and-death struggle with a waddan, a nearly extinct wild sheep. Asouf begins by hunting this mysterious beast and then, after hanging from a ledge over a gorge for more than a day, is rescued by the very creature he tried to destroy. In that moment, he recognizes the waddan as his dead father. As he makes his way back through the desert, bruised by the battle and tortured with thirst, he enters a liminal space: “There’s another life, between life and death. A third state neither void nor existence. He was in that state now, crawling along the wadi like a snake, his eyes blinded” (64).

The evocation of a “third state” hints at the novel’s preoccupation with the bridging of the ordinary and the extraordinary, which becomes explicit when Asouf, in order to escape conscription into the Italian army, actually turns into a waddan (73). This miraculous transformation, together with other fantastic elements in the novel, such as gazelles that make covenants with human beings and the horrific cannibal, Cain son of Adam, suggest that it might be useful to read The Bleeding of the Stone as an interstitial text. As far as I know, this has not yet been tried, but the novel has certainly been described as an example of magical realism – in fact, if someone in a group of people who study Arabic literature says “magical realism,” someone else is certain to say “Ibrahim al-Koni.” Magical realism’s strong association with postcolonial writing makes it the obvious choice to describe a work from a former colonial state that resists the conventions of the realistic novel, and such has been the case with al-Koni. Is there room, then, to discuss al-Koni’s works as interstitial? If magical realism and interstitial arts both mix fantasy with conventional reality, if they both encourage revolt against the traditional constraints of genre, and if writers like Angela Carter can be placed in both categories, then why do we need both terms? More importantly, by embracing the concept of the interstitial, do we risk damaging the position of magical realism, through which, especially since the 1982 Nobel Prize award of the grand old man of the genre, Gabriel García Márquez, so many works from around the world have been read, critiqued and taught? In these reflections, The Bleeding of the Stone, the award-winning novel by the prolific al-Koni and the first of his works to be translated into English, will provide not merely a passive testing ground for these theories, but an active model of how one might begin to theorize the interstitial in an international context.


Maybe we should’ve been the “Betweenity” Arts Foundation?
by Ellen Kushner | September 19th, 2011 | No Comments »

If you Google “betweenity,” you’ll find that Amazon has a book on sale called BETWEENITY: A DISCUSSION OF THE CONCEPT OF BORDERLINES. Apparently Horace Walpole’s own definition, from 1760, is “evoke the twilight between documentation and dramatisation.” Charlotte Bronte also picked up “betweenity” and used it. — Gardner Dozois


Sad news from Weird Tales
by Mike Allen | August 23rd, 2011 | No Comments »

Ann VanderMeer announced today at the Weird Tales website (click the link to read) and on her husband Jeff VanderMeer’s blog that she’ll no longer be the magazine’s editor. Marvin Kaye, who is purchasing the magazine from Wildside Press, will also be taking the editorial helm.

IAF co-founder Ellen Kushner notes: “Under Ann’s leadership (with a lot of encouragement by IAF’s Stephen Segal), Weird Tales had become pretty much an Interstitial Fiction haven.”

Not to mention, it won a Hugo Award in 2009, the first in the magazine’s history. We wish Marvin luck, but we’re definitely sorry to see Ann leave. We’ll look forward, though, to her new ventures, including the VanderMeer’s upcoming anthology THE WEIRD.


Words to wear: “Honey Month” becomes “Honey Corset” (plus bonus shark net)
by Mike Allen | July 28th, 2011 | 1 Comment »

The blog editors have given me permission to be self-indulgent with this post, or more properly, to indulge my wife, Anita Allen.

During Interstitial March we ran an interstitial book review by C.S.E. Cooney of Amal El-Mohtar’s boundary-bending fusion of prose, poetry and food writing, The Honey Month. We also ran a lengthy interview with Amal, and with the book’s publisher, Erzebet YellowBoy Carr.

The Honey Month Corset, side view

Since then, there’s been a further development in the Honey Month saga that stretches its interstitial credentials further. After seeing dresses made from Little Golden Books, Anita conspired with Erzebet to create a corset out of pages from Amal’s book. Erzebet describes the process on the Papaveria Press blog, with links. Here’s an excerpt from Anita’s description of the creative process:

“I had never seen this new fad of creating outfits from book pages and maps, so as a costumer I was intrigued. Erz said how awesome it all was and I said how much I wanted to try my hand at it but buying all those books was prohibitive. Erz said she still had the leftover pages from Amal’s books, they were too pretty to toss out, but she didn’t know what to do with them. I said I would take them and make something for Amal. Erz had a corset she thought might fit Amal and so mailed me a package. I conspired to get Amal’s measurements. The corset came in close enough that I left it unaltered, it can be taken in with darts along the lacing panels to get a better fit later.” Read more…


New Interfictions Zero Essay: “Don’t Let It Be Forgot: The Once and Future Story”
by Erin Underwood | July 9th, 2011 | 2 Comments »

Interfictions Zero co-editor Helen Pilinovsky writes:

Our latest essay, “Don’t Let It Be Forgot: The Once and Future Story,” written by Kat Howard, is now up at these addresses (the first takes you to the front-page and synopsis, the second is a direct link):

http://www.interstitialarts.org/projects/interfictions0.php
http://www.interstitialarts.org/projects/interfictions0_dontletitbeforgot.php

This month, Kat Howard gives us a fascinating meditation on the nature of legend, specifically, the legend of King Arthur, and all the connotations that he bears.  “The Once and Future King,” a term from Malory interpreted somewhat … literally … by T.H. White, is a figure who is now nigh-on impossible to consider at a single point on his continuum.  Arthur implies Camelot implies its Fall, in what’s thus far been an endless circle … albeit one that, paradoxically, promises a resolution.  Kat Howard of Stony Brook University, critic and author (her communal blog, Fantasy Matters, tackles fascinating topic after fascinating topic, and her story “A Life in Fictions” is just out in the recently published Stories, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio), does full justice to the topic in the cleverly titled “The Once and Future Story.”

REMINDER:  Interfictions Zero essays appear monthly on this site. We’re accepting rolling submissions for IF0, so if you have an idea for one, please go here for Submissions Guidelines.

Want to respond to Don’t Let It Be Forgot: The Once and Future Story?

Let us know what you think  RIGHT HERE in the Comments section of this post; and see what others have said, too, by reading All Comments.


The Spider Inside
by Erin Underwood | June 28th, 2011 | 1 Comment »

[Ed. Note: Guest Blogger Kris Saknussemm brings this essay on the interstitial creative process. Kris Saknussemm is the author of the novels Zanesville, Private Midnight and Enigmatic Pilot, along with a short story collection, Sinister Miniatures.  A multimedia artist, his paintings have been published as a portfolio book The Colors of Compulsion, and he records music with several collaborators, most notably Steve Joseph in Houston and Lou Mulkern and Eric Wyatt in New York.  Dark Coast Press will bring out his most significant work, Reverend America, in February.]

~

Web-spinning spiders are interstitial artists par excellence.  Their highly visual creations are often invisible, depending on the light.  They’re sculptural, architectural—and also musical, as you can discover, should you chance to find a large blowfly entrapped.  No one ever said art wasn’t a matter of life and death, or they weren’t making very interesting art if they did.  And yet…what could be lighter or more fragile than a spider web?

As an interstitial artist myself, I see that my challenge is to be both the web spinner—and to also allow myself to become ensnared in the fascination of the work.  Or just pure fascination.

The first thing I do in regards to each book I write is to develop an outline—just as so many writing manuals recommend.

Then I abandon it completely for the freedom and adrenalin rush of discovery, of going on a journey with my characters.  No matter what kind of story I’m embarked on, I spend a lot of time taking photographs and making tape recordings with a quality field recorder.  I purposely don’t focus on big important subjects or special scenes.  Most of the time I’m photographing cracks in pavement, flecks in walls, odd growths of rust or lichen—or perhaps the way a flattened pie pan can become a kind of discarded mask in the right light.  I’m an inspector of rubble and vacant lot rubbish.  Ever since my earliest memories of childhood I’ve been obsessed with the secret stories and hidden dramas in seemingly random patterns—the monster head lurking in the pine knot, the army of angry giants in the oil stain.

I apply the same aesthetic to my collection of sounds.  I’m particularly fascinated by the various subtleties in the whine and hum of escalators and revolving doors, and I have several hours of high fidelity capture of the stirrings of cattle in a moonlit stockyard.  (I just played back a recording I made in New York, on the subway to Harlem, coming into the 72nd Street Station.  It’s an almost perfect web of frequencies and frenzies—words and whir.)

Traffic interests me a lot…the lulls and rhythms…the counterpoint and flux.  I’m also curious about the rumblings of stomachs, garbage trucks backing up, female orgasms…wind in torn metal, distant chainsaws and people snoring on buses.  Everything becomes interesting when you bring the right openness of mind to it.  I become more aware (and in good moments hyperaware) of new dynamic relationships of image and sound, and their other extrasensual implications.

Now it’s true that as a multimedia artist, I may have some intention of using these images and sounds in some direct creative execution eventually, but as a writer, I use this practice in precisely the opposite way of accumulation and ownership.  I call upon my meandering findings as a means of clearing my mind—of releasing expectations and assumptions, and interrogating my current preconceived notions of what constitutes a discrete image or a sound, let alone their more symphonic and cinematic flow.

I do this in visual and aural/musical terms because it’s so very hard to gain such a forensic vantage point on language, which, as we often take for granted, is the essential fabric of every story (and perhaps every thought).

The Dadaists and Surrealists, Joyce, William Burroughs with his cut-ups—many writers have tried a range of formalist means to “experiment” with narrative—but while the results may be intriguing and even delighting on a small scale, they invariably disappoint or simply bewilder when adopted systematically over the larger scope of an entire novel.

So I don’t try to do that anymore.  I concentrate instead on revising my concept of concentration and letting small, often overlooked or apparently unperceived elements influence me as they will.

There’s an old saying, that wherever you are, “There’s a spider nearby.”  (In my house there could be several.)  What I’m principally concerned with as an artist is what gets unconsidered—what goes unseen or unheard.  Which is to say, I suppose, that my definition of art is that which expands your field of awareness and your definition of art.

In pragmatic, writerly terms, I use my interests in the visual arts and music to help make me more conscious of detail and interrelation.  I build the imagined worlds of my fiction (however fantastic or realistic) from motes of dust and stray hairs…shavings, splinters, droppings, drippings, figments, filaments.  I, of course, am concerned about conventional issues such as theme, style, the pace of story, character depth and the impact of idea.  But I find I’m increasingly fixated somewhat autistically on the quality and richness of detail that underpins a storyline.

To me, the real art in writing is what details you choose to highlight—which ones are the most important.  This is a high level instinctual-intellectual survival task that connects us all back very directly to our hunter/gatherer Paleolithic beginnings.  We’re all hunting for something, all the time.

I’ve found the oblique focus on what’s happening in the moment—what’s really happening—to be especially beneficial in setting a story in the historic past.  My latest novel Enigmatic Pilot is set in mid 19th century America, a period not so long ago really (and disturbingly similar to our own in many ways), yet inexplicably remote on the level of physical detail.

While I may take liberties with my interpretations and distortions of so-called “true” history, I think my world is credible because of its detail.  People will always query the narrative arc and sequencing of a story.  They will always measure their satisfaction with an author’s result against an inner temperament of desire (either for reinforcement of their expectations or surprise, in my experience).

No one ever queries my precision of imagining, because I keep a very open mind on what’s important.  When I mention a horseshoe nail, I want you to subconsciously at least be able to smell it in your hand.  To hear how it would sound falling on a hardwood floor or a cobblestone street…to, well below your level of awareness, be considering how it was made and what it’s actually used for.

Stephen King, one of the most successful writers of our time has emphasized “writing to entertain.”  And so the stories that both do and dramatically don’t entertain, pile up.

My paradigm is a little different.  Intertainment, not just entertainment (you can do that with one of your hands).  I want you to think about that spider that’s nearby.  In the corner of your eye right now, something bizarre beyond measure is happening.

My job isn’t to compete with those peculiar miracles, but to bring the spiders a little closer, to be more like them.

I’m now holding a tiny translucent green one in my hand.  It was under my desk.  Been here this whole time.  The really remarkable thing is that if I were a different size, this spider could be making an audible noise right now.

Projected onto a large canvas, it would be a thing of terrible wonder.  Lying in one of the lines of my hand, it looks like a lost letter of an alphabet we’d all do well to remember.

I adopt an interstitial approach to art to help me forget what I know and to remember what I don’t.