Horror Vacui
Issue #05

How is horror vacui, the fear of emptiness or travelling forever in emptiness, shaping contemporary culture? Are the Internet, globalization, the unlimited blitz of advertising and visual saturation products of an uncontrollable, gargantuan consumption of space driven by the need to obliterate, erase or camouflage the horror vacui? How far is it possible not to have our eyelids pinned back by the visual bombardment of images and sound bites in the space of the everyday, in order to focus on this horror?

This issue of Drain invites reflection not only on the politics of carbon monoxide and the cellular phone, urban sprawl, the insatiable desire for producing, buying and accumulating objects that drain environmental resources: clean air, soil, water, green spaces into their own processes, but seeks an examination of how these processes are represented. Are the petrification and crystallization of the cityscape, the obsessive doodling, frenetic graffiti, the digitization and the covering up or scarring of space, or the canvas, the overwriting of any surface, plane or street, with marks, data, words, mechanistic and robotic repetitive actions, critiques of the horror vacui or victims of it? And is manic speech in film, non-stop music, techno-babble, the squeezing out of the pause in Rap, the 24/7 cycle of media news, reflexes, or paroxysms of the horror vacui, or do they dare us to look at the faceless stranglehold of our fear of nothingness?

Deadline for Submissions: February 2007

Launch: April 2007