OBJECT VACATION OPEN CALL
OBJECT VACATION
Open Call: Texts for Interdisciplinary Publication
Billboards, Belief, Semiotics, and Manufactured Paradise
Paradise has always been an image problem. From gold-ground mosaics that flatten time into shimmer, to Renaissance gardens that diagram blessed order, to cloudy Baroque ceilings that split open the roof, art has repeatedly treated heaven as a visual regime, a set of cues that trained the eye toward longing.
Nearly a century into the capitalist project, paradise appears again, not as fresco but as advertisement. Heaven slipped off the church ceiling and onto the interstate, lit from within, laminated, twenty feet tall. Then it slipped again into our phones, compressed, personalized, and infinitely refreshed.
A billboard is not merely a picture; it is an instruction, an address aimed at a moving body. You read it at speed: thirsty, cramped, overstimulated, half-bored, half-alert. The car becomes an apparatus of looking. The windshield is both frame and window. On the interstate, meaning arrives compressed and peripheral like pop-up ads. Language becomes imperative, predictive, condensed:
LAST EXIT / NOW OPEN / YOU DESERVE / JESUS SAVES / GAS FOOD RESTROOMS
as if the world is readable only in commands. Wayfinding becomes worldview.
If semiotics asks how signs make meaning, the roadside makes that question physical. Barthes’s myth lives in the everyday image that naturalizes desire. Debord’s spectacle lives here too, not abstractly, but as a corridor of promises encountered at seventy-five miles an hour, each one offering a new self with purchase. Virilio’s speed is not just a theme; it is a condition of perception. And the hyperreal is not only digital. It is also the themed exit, the souvenir shrine, the “authentic” experience engineered by circulation.
Berger suggests, to capture an image is to possess its subjects, while Hooks insists, these mass images of desire are how the Other is consumed, making critical engagement with media pertinent.Travel advertisements crystalize America’s homogeneous identity by othering real places as flat, tropical destinations of desire. America then becomes a fun house keeper of reality. We see Jesus in toast and it ends up in the news. Waffle House functions as a holy weather psychic, and roadside attractions offer solace from the endless highway. Do you have a pitch for an essay on a weird ad that haunted you? An airbrushed dolphin T-shirt you scanned? A collection of bumper stickers, or photographs of license plates that read as poems? A rest stop that felt like an installation?
This call is not only about kitsch. It is also about the built systems that produce the conditions of seeing: highways, interchanges, zoning, rest stops, fashion, dead malls, bypasses, bridges, medians, signage codes, and light pollution, along with asphalt itself as material ideology. Paradise as infrastructure. Belief as wayfinding. Desire as a routing protocol.
With this open call, Object Vacation invites writers and artists to approach desire as both an image system and a civic system, visually, textually, architecturally, and materially. We want work that moves between scholarship and poetry; close reading and design thinking; critique and tenderness; theory and the object that holds it.
We welcome
• Essays and criticism on billboards, advertising, belief, spectacle, semiotics, and “paradise” as a visual regime, highways as ideology; mapping and wayfinding; planning histories; signage standards; road ecology; logistics; mobility; surveillance; borders; the car-body experience
• Guides, maps, and instructions as form: annotated routes, fake travel brochures, car air fresheners, field guides, typologies, atlases, legend keys, and diagrammatic writing
• Visual and sculptural work: photography, scan, collage, screenshot essays, typologies, models, documentation, diagrams, annotated ephemera
• Poetry, free text, and hybrids
• Pitches that begin with one ad, one sign, one object, or one interchange, then spiral outward into cultural analysis, memoir, media archaeology, or design history
If you have any questions, message us on instagram @objectvacation
Fees: We are a small, independent team working to make Object Vacation a reality. The $25 submission fee helps us cover the costs of publication production. Fee waiver available in application.
