The first issue of the Art/Law Journal encourages submissions to consider understandings of practice and process very broadly defined.  We are looking for submissions on questions relating to process and practice in the interweavings between art, law and political activism.

Both art and law are placed within a disciplining of practicing, each requiring ‘practitioners’ and the production of processual and practical intuition as part of their calling. What does it mean to be a practitioner?  The word itself instils something that is unfinished, and yet there is an authority and legitimacy that at once asserts we have a ‘practice’. Are practices and processes the same thing?

‘Process’, for example, might refer to procedure in the enactment of a legal event or interpretation or judgement, or it might refer to the creation, production or situating of a work or art; similarly to arrangements of linear or non-linear elements in an act or emergence of political resistance or criticism.  ‘Practice’ could equally refer to diverse aspects of the legal or juridical experience, the making and consuming of art in its various forms, or navigation through the rough seas of political resistance, revolution or negotiation of the more stable structures of political theory, science and tradition.

Some suggested ideas, along the lines of:

• the performance or theatricality of law
• material and digital processes of legal archiving: filing, printing, bundling, backups
• collecting, scavenging, accumulating in the practice of evidence gathering
• legal colours and graphic design
• legal advice as dramaturgy
• the paralegal: accompanist, amanuensis and fabricator
• the architecture and construction of contracts
• legal artisanship: rehearsal, repetition and skill
• how relational aesthetics informs a crime scene
• live/body art, personal injury and tort
• the psychogeography of land law
• advocacy as portraiture
• authority, legitimacy and practice
• due process, practice and customary aesthetics
• jurisdiction and form
• entropy, change and doing

Submissions may take the form of: text, photo essays, storyboard, comic, graffiti, film, audio recording, object, performance or other media. Where submissions are not in a 2D format suitable for print or online publication, please contact the editors to discuss your proposal.

Please send to info@artlawnetwork.org. Expressions of interest for this call to be sent by 31 October 2019.

Photo: Pickering, A. (2009, February 1). Figure 2. The homeostat: (a) Four interconnected homeostats. (b) Detail. Retrieved 18 July 2019, from ResearchGate website: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-homeostat-a-Four-interconnected-homeostats-b-Detail-of-the-top-of-a-homeostat_fig3_250893458

A homeostat was a machine created by cybernetics scientist Ross Ashby (1903-1972) that was able to “regain stability in response to perturbations in its environment”. For more, see https://blogs.bl.uk/science/2016/04/the-thinking-machine.html