CALL FOR PROJECTS:
MISANTHROPOZINE #2 CAR TUNING FOR ARCHITECTS

Dear XOXO,
What’s up? Happy to reconnect. I am contacting you as an important voice in b◊◊◊◊ing contemporary ◊◊◊hi◊◊e◊◊ure practice. Would you be willing to contribute to the second MISANTHROPOZINE, a cool-critical journal, which will comprise 10 biannual releases?

MISANTHROPOZINE #2 TUNING

focusses on the world of tuning and relates its languages, media, artefacts and masterminds to those of architecture. How, if at all, does the wide spectrum of tuning culture relate to the built environment, its fashions and aesthetics? Tuning is understood as a modifying culture in which both performance and looks are altered. We believe that architecture derives its meaning from a similar and complex dance between performance and aesthetics, program and tectonics. By diving deep into the subcultural field of automotive extravaganza, we will discover strategies, slang, tricks and metaphors that exist in our domains also, but only reveal themselves by means of our extraterritorial detour. MISANTHROPOZINE welcomes your thoughts on tuning, and hopes to find new family members (soulmates and weird aunts alike) that want to help equalize car tuning and architecture — all for the great good of piercing the pictures of ourselves, out projects and our disciplines.

YOU ARE INVITED to cut and paste, nip and tuck the pixels and pains, to produce a global family of tuners, as our freshest paradigm-to-go is being polished and programmed to accelerate and crush the creeping hegemony of pure space as guarded by its vector-slaves. Tuning is not a crime—Verbrechen—and petrolheads preside over subcultural outlets not unlike the dwellers of professional visual cultures. If you are reading this you are probably a dweller of such cultures. You are center-stage, a deep diver, a casual contributor or plotting your escape! In almost any case, your cool-critical contribution to our journal is very welcome, in any form that sticks to a printed surface. If you need to write we will print the words, if you need to write more, we’ll print smaller - the same goes for pixels and megabytes.

TOPICS

MISANTHROPOZINE #2 drags us into the car-tuning-meets-architecture landscape, where we can harvest examples and stories from the past-present-future's unavoidable encounters between these two cultural outlets. We might warm up with taurine-infused drive-by-renderings of Simple Programs (houses for car collectors, Lingotto shopping experiences, drive-thru sightseeing, RV car-port taxonomy), a so-called Stage I tuning. At Stage II we will taste some more personal and insider flavours (you like Japanese or German? Boost or Autobacs? Sleepers or Ricers or Capsules?). Stage III finally makes us experience what cannot be put to words. UDX scraping, itasha tectonics, phonk samplers, Bosozoku Bricolage, the five elements of STANCE. Just like a good twin NOS-setup keeps Vin Diesel from too much talking, we need similar bore-out-blocking materials that will make them, you, us, shut up and dance.

EDITORIAL COLLECTIVE

MISANTHROPOZINE is intended as an academic journal that walks-and-talks. In a time when working±being means swimming or drowning at the surface - our images and screens - but also navigating between dream and doom, we look for new notions of open review, shared output, unshared authorship(*) and collective reflection. MISANTHROPOZINE wants to assemble your work in such a way that its arguments bubble at the surface. This surface is a visual landscape, and exploring it means helping ferment theories and ways that collide with the problem.

Reading MISANTHROPOZINE should be a cool-critical experience in its own right:
🍌 MISANTHROPOZINE is (n)either therapeutic, (n)or theoretical.
🍌 MISANTHROPOZINE is academic and anti.
🍌 MISANTHROPOZINE is a sticky drama performed by non-believing, surrendering proxies, transparent cherries on a puffy meta-pancake.
🍌 MISANTHROPOZINE might be wrong.

I ain’t got friends
I got family.

To make such a MISANTHROPOZINE, its contributors will be invited to approach (each others') projects more freely, not merely as solid blocks of statements or achievements, but as layers of data, triggers, arguments and methods to mingle, counter-propose, rub against each other, unnerve or heighten in less hyperbolic ways.

We long for the idea of TUNING as an unbounded looping of being inside and outside, wanting and rejecting, hot and cool, climax and anti-climax, clarity and confusion. We are embedded outsiders, separate limbs controlled by our merged brains and hearts, ànd wish to make our readers part of the party.

PRACTICAL:

If possible, we would like to receive an email about your intention for submission before as soon as possible - you can send your contact details and a project working title to pieterjan.ginckels@kuleuven.be. We welcome your contribution by 15 November 2022 latest. In the meantime, MISANTHROPOZINE's editorial team* will work on an overview of the work, and provide feedback by 30 November 2022. After that, until February 2023, we would like to engage in a more intense back-and-forth, open peer preview. The work shouldn't be done by mid November, as the peer preview aims to have an open conversation to realize, represent or remix the works-in-progress - more information will be unlocked upon request, or once you engage. THANK YOU

* = MISANTHROPOZINE material will be subjected to an All-Transparent Peer Preview by its contributors, which include the student group of this fall's CAR TUNING FOR ARCHITECTS class at the KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture. The class will set up shop in a recently vacated VW dealership showroom in Ghent (BE), which we will furnish and run as an Architects-Tuners-Club. The showroom is research floor, workshop and exhibition space all in one. Contributors are welcome to come hang out with us, attend screenings and browse the tuning magazine collection of our school's library outpost.