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CALL for ENTRIES: Mercy/Biennial podcast - "parasites"

Mercy is inviting writers to submit flash-fiction/poetics/polemic short sound pieces on the theme of THE PARASITE. The resulting works will be will be distributed throughout our weekly Liverpool Biennial podcasts, like a parasitic workforce, regularly interrupting the flow of information with kipple.

a sample of the sound-setting for your written works can be listened to here

""It was only a noise, but it was also a message, a bit of information producing panic : an interruption, a corruption, a rupture of information. Was the noise really a message? Wasn't it, rather, static, a parasite? A parasite who has the last word, who produces disorder and who generates a different order." M. Serres, The Parasite

The Mercy Podcast will this year be hosted by dulcet-toned writer and curator Vanessa Barlett, who takes over after Nick Holloway's amazingly successful and idiocycratic 2010 series. These weekly 20 minute broadcasts will be reach hundreds of people's earholes every Friday, featuring ideas, interviews and ephemera on around the biggest contemporary art festival in Europe - including guest-host slots from Scanner, Daniel Rourke, Holly Pester, Ross Sutherland and Tamarin Norwood.

The Liverpool Biennial theme for 2012 is The Unexpected Guest, an idea that we will be reflecting in each of our podcasts and in our Electronic Voice Phenomena event weekend. The notion of parasite has become crucial to our thinking. More details about Mercy's wider Biennial programme and parasite can be found here.

BRIEF
We are inviting relevant and interesting writers to provide us with very short peices
explicitly or obliquly referencing the PARASITE.

parasite |ˈparəˌsīt| noun

an organism that lives in or on another organism (its host) and benefits by deriving nutrients at the host's expense. · derogatory a person who habitually relies on or exploits others and gives nothing in return.

ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: via Latin from Greek parasitos '(person) eating at another's table,' from para- 'alongside' + sitos 'food.'


These flash texts, fiction, fact, poetic or pragmatic will be read aloud and turned into short sound pieces with audio created by Sid Volter.  We encourage submissions that stretch the limits of the linguistic nature of this brief, as well as those that seek original and unexpected entries into the notion of the parasite.

Our theoretical inspiration is taken largely from Michel Serres book The Parasite, in which, in its french original, the word parasite has three meanings: a biological parasite (that lives on another organism), a social parasite (who invites themselves for dinner), and static (or noise, interference).

You can read it The Parasite online here. You do not have to use this text to inform your contribution, if you don't want to, but the extra inference of noise might come in useful.

HOW TO APPLY
Please send your words along with any directions for reading to our podcast host Vanessa Bartlett at info(at)vanessabartlett.com and include a one line bio that we will place somewhere in the podcast where your text features. We may not be able to accommodate every submission that we receive, but you will recieve a reply either way.