What does this mean? You’ve all heard of the Mayan Calendar ending, right?
Well, we’ve been inspired by (or are cashing in on) the current crisis of 2012 as the latest in a long list of the-end-of the-world. (think of Biblical Apocalypse, Rapture, Nostradamus, Y2K, zombies, global warming, etc) But we’re not exactly interested in how the world ends. We want to know what happens after the end. We want to see the world reborn or regenerated through your eyes. We want to see how YOU imagine the world to be. Does it try something new? Or does it just start all over? Does it change? Or, more to the point, can it? To symbolize this theme, we’ve chosen the phoenix, a mythical beast that dies by fire and then is born again from the ash. A bird that can experience death over and over again and yet somehow remain immortal. But. A bird is not a world, you say, it is an individual. And there’s a reason for that, too. While we were inspired by the end of the world, we encourage you to interpret this theme as loosely as you want, and to look for your own inspiration. So what we DON’T WANT is Hollywood rehashings or remakes. Or remakes of remakes for that matter. We’ve already seen the movies Armageddon and 2012 and the Day after Tomorrow and the like.
What we’re really after is something (a story, a painting, a poem, a play) that begins from a point of total crisis and carries us through the aftermath to something new, defined by experience but revitalized (invigorated?) by a second chance.
That’s pretty abstract, right? So what could that possibly look like?
A crisis of faith, a crisis of government, a crisis of family or friends, a personal crisis.
More concretely, a story about a death in the family, a survivor of a natural disaster or crash, a first day of college, a first day in a new town, a how-to-survive zombies/virus/mad scientists’s doomsday device/permanent power outage piece. Or what happens after a huge electromagnetic wave hits the planet and every electronic device is destroyed and cannot be replicated (and still work).
The point is you can make it serious. Or funny. You can be a realist or an absurdist. We’ll take comic strips, mixed media pieces, science fiction/fantasy and just about anything else. But it should be the best that you can make it. And it should be yours.
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