Keep It Dirty, Volume 2
Editorial Staff: Eileen Joy + Samuel Ray Jacobson
Anticipated programming dates: January 2017 through July 2018
The undiscriminating multimedia framework utilized by the Keep It Dirty website has fostered a uniquely vibrant discourse, able to interrogate the consequential interactions of ourselves, our bodies and our belongings, with each other and with our shared environments on earth, as part of a conglomerated and posthumanist and/or antihumanist ecology. It is, therefore, by expanding upon the collaborative potential, unleashed by this framework as well as its unique and additionally free-associative and literalist approach for critique and for content production, that Keep It Dirty has now endeavored to expand its editorial purview, from being an exclusively virtual publication, to include a second, “real life” volume, to be executed in parallel with its existing online platform.
Like previous iterations and the ongoing, online volume, Keep It Dirty, Volume 2 will follow an affiliative model for content production, soliciting prospective submissions from established collaborators as well as the general public, while also remaining open to unanticipated possibilities as they may present themselves. The project will feature (“publish”) twelve works (“issues”), installed independently, during separate non-consecutive week- to month-long periods, beginning summer 2016 and continuing for at least one year. A mix of direct solicitations and publicly submitted content is desired, though it is likely for each issue is to result from a preexisting relationship between the editorial staff of Keep It Dirty, the editorial staff of punctum books and the creative communities within which their constitutive individuals are situated.
Technically, the editorial framework for the volume is limited to its sanctioning power regarding the execution of a select body of work. Within this framework, “publication” as a paradigm has been expanded to include any undertaking, material or abstract, whose manifest and consumable presence has been facilitated by some editorial activity. Beyond poststructural experimentation and in addition to Keep It Dirty’s new solidarities of people, media and material, (orchestrated by a shared interest in soil, water, filth and cleanliness, as conceptual venues for new content or critique), Volume 2 also seeks the elicitation of novel paradigms for the consideration of place, community, commodities and their phenomenological inscriptions both by and upon the built and natural landscapes experienced by project stakeholders and the open, hopefully expansive body of potential volume-programming participant-observers (to be, if not a public, then at least some semblance thereof). Concomitantly, as it amplifies Keep It Dirty’s to-date virtual framework for a vibrant multimedia discourse and basic, iterative publishing style, by expanding its purview, Keep It Dirty, Volume 2 also incites new engagement with such animating tropes as transit, procession and locality, as generative modalities for the production of new literatures, commentary, discourses or experiences.
The activities of Volume 2 are to be executed within or in some relation to a purpose-built structure, to be located in the semi-rural, high desert environs of Joshua Tree, California, about 150 miles east of Los Angeles. After the consideration of several sites, a 1.25 acre plot located at 62585 Golden Street was purchased in November 2015. The design and construction of a structure on that site is presently being orchestrated by HAHA, a Los Angeles R+D consultancy; completion is anticipated by June 2016. Though it is intended for the works of Volume 2 to be located within the site on Golden Street, alternative venues can and/or may need to be considered, for reasons conceptual as well as logistical (while the site is easily accessible, certain issues may require more space than is available or a location of different character; if necessary, editorial staff will work with issue editors/authors to secure the location most appropriate to their needs).
About Keep It Dirty
Founded in October 2014 in response to the California Drought and originally published without incentive or affiliation by Eileen Joy and Samuel Ray Jacobson, Keep It Dirty has evolved into a curated, multi-part, multimedia publication project, focused on posthumanist critique and executed through online publication as well as real-life events and initiatives. Contributors include established and emerging scholars across visual, literary, media and communications studies, as well as practitioners in architecture, entertainment and the fine arts.