Call: SPAM New Media Festival 2025

SPAM New Media Festival 2025
September 12th-14th, 2025 (Seattle, WA, US)
Open Call for Creative Work Submissions

SPAM New Media Festival invites artists and practitioners working with digital, experimental and emerging artforms to submit work for the 2025 Festival. They seek proposals for creative work to be presented at the Georgetown Steam Plant in Seattle.

Potential submissions include, but are not limited to, interactive and immersive works and installations, video and projection mapping, audio and music installations and live performances, artist talks, workshops, demonstrations, and screenings. While they ask that applicants take the venue’s unique qualities into account, submissions do not need to respond specifically to the site in theme or concept.

They see the festival as a vessel/container for holding and germinating artist projects in different stages of recognition and development, and welcome contributions which entangle with, emerge from, or leak into these different nodes of engagement with digital art and culture. They are asking for artist contributions which will help them to expand their critical dialogue with new media art, digital culture and technology-driven work.

Timeline
Submission Deadline: May 16, 2025 5pm PT
Announcement: late May/early June 2025.

Information
Virtual map of the venue: https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=GjGiXgM8oCa
More info: https://spamnewmediafestival.com/Call-Out

Artist Compensation
SPAM New Media Festival functions as a grassroot community of art workers and depends on the in-kind donation of venues and other resources from their supporters. They are, therefore, unable to cover travel or transport expenses for participating artists. While compensating artists is an important value of the festival, they are still working hard to fundraise for the 2025 festival, so do not yet know the scale of compensation they can offer artists this year.

Concept Map
They are asking for artist contributions which will help them to expand their critical dialogue with new media art, digital culture and technology-driven work from a map of the following starting points:

• Afrofuturism
• Animism, symbiosis and Black Herbalism
• Art and Neuroscience
• Bad Fortune, Ghosts and Illness
• Camouflage and Transmission
• Catastrophe and Infection
• Citizen Science
• Colonizing Positions of Space Exploration
• Commerce
• Cross Disciplinary Performance
• Cultural Commercialization
• CyberFeminism
• Data and Textiles
• Decay
• Disembodiment and Objectification
• Disillusionment
• DIY Protest Tools
• Drone
• Electromagnetic Fields
• Embodied Digital Amnesia
• Embodied Knowledge and Research Lead Practice
• Energy Visualization
• Entropy
• Feminist Sci-Fi
• Gaming as a documentary space
• Gaming Environments as Self Portraiture
• Grief
• Hegemonic Technologies
• Heritage
• How can you be in but not of the current of digital culture which grips humanity and which affects the world, wholly?
• How can you operate in but not of institutions?
• How does Black and queer imagination use technology to envision and create sustainable futures that honor Black life?
• Interactivity and Immersion
• Invisible Infrastructures
• Love, Re-imagining and Secure Networks
• Marginality
• Media Archeology
• Metamorphosis
• Metaperceptual Art
• Misogynist Fantasies in New Media
• Non-human Memory
• Ontology and Black Life
• Oneself and the Other
• Performance and Technology
• Performance and Virtual Space
• Perception and Technology
• Photogrammetry and identity
• Photogrammetry and the virtual archive
• Queer Monstrosity
• Queering Tech
• Radio and Resistance
• Rebellious Tech
• Repurposing of obsolete electronic devices
• Resilience and Reappropriation
• Rhythm and Chaos
• Robotics
• Salvage
• Slow Archive and Web Crawling
• Sonic Installation
• Sound Performance
• Spectral Animation
• Speculative Clocks
• Speculative Fictions and Ideas on Futurism
• Surveillance
• Technology and Dance
• Technology and Genocide
• Technology and Magical Realism
• Technology and Memory
• Technology and Nature
• Technology and Nostalgia
• Technology and Post-colonial Practice
• Technology and Social Defiance
• Technologies of Healing and Liberation
• Transcendence
• Unlearning
• Video Games and Civic Remembrance
• Wearable Tech
• What does it mean to be a body in a digital age?
• What does it mean to be a digital body?
• Worlding
• Src Material is a proud supporter of SPAM New Media Festival

Requirements

Proposals should include:

• Artist Statement (up to 300 words).
• Explanation of creative work, to be used for the selection process only (500-800 words).
• Images which will help festival organizers to best understand and visualize your proposed creative work.
• Technical requirements, including installation or any other needs specific to your work.
• Relevant links to documentation of previous and/or proposed work.

Application Instructions

Proposal (2-4 pages, PDF)
CV and/or portfolio (no page limit)

Email to: spamnewmediafestival@gmail.com
Subject line: 2025 Festival Submission

They ask that both are in PDF format and named accordingly. Links to online portfolios may be provided within an uploaded PDF.