Tentacular is calling for submissions for issue 9 by October 3rd, particularly on the theme of ‘technology’. Like all our themes, this is to inspire, not exclude, and we welcome all good work.
Today, we’re perhaps more than ever aware of ourselves as permanently mediated by interfaces: glued to the screen or consciously escaping it. But we were always embedded somewhere. Writing itself is a technology. Fire and medicine and agriculture. Punctuation too, the printing press, the typewriter. Marshall McLuhan said that ‘the medium is the message’, to express how our tools shape us more than the specific content of those tools; and then, ‘the medium is the massage’, to express the pleasuring, overwhelming effects of new technologies on our senses.
For its 9th issue, the much upgraded and expanded Tentacular team is looking for interesting media, messages and massages:
work that’s inspired by computer games or AI or social media etc - this can be about a topic or a game you play, you don’t have to be a coder or anything
tentacular work that’s made possible on and through the web
work which addresses any specific technological form; or which interrogates the technology-inflected character of our lives (past, present, or future)
how technology changes any art form
technology that’s already past its sell-by date – how do we still inhabit it, and what about the nostalgic seductions of the retro?
tell us about the effect of the arrival of new technologies (belated or otherwise) in a life or a place
technology and ecology – how do our technologies mediate our evolving relation to our planet and its nonhuman organisms and spaces?
technology, biotechnology and the body – poems that celebrate breakthroughs in pain relief and in supporting the body, and/or ask challenging questions: are we all cyborgs now? do our potential modifications offer new freedoms or unfreedoms? and are we to be superseded?
futuristic dreams; speculative poems and visual pieces; rages against the machine
anything else you’ve already written that, in a technological breakthrough of your own, you can lever (with some Heath Robinson contraption) into the theme
or anything not related to the theme that is just good
Find out how to submit.
