So excited to co-edit this new series with Maisie Florence Post!
SPAM Plaza is reopening submissions for Digital Dreamland.
Ever had déjà vu, not knowing if something happened IRL, online or in your dreams? As screentime and sleep time increasingly clock similar hours of the day, we’re turning our attention to the acute relationship between dreams and the internet.
We invite critical work inspired by, but not limited to, any of the following topics:
☁︎ sleep procrastination and social media
☁︎ cloud hoarding
☁︎ the return of the (digital) repressed
☁︎ the memetic unconscious
☁︎ distraction as dream economy
☁︎ ghosting (and the metaphysics of digital presence)
☁︎ sleep texting
☁︎ hyperreal environments & nonspaces as dreamscapes
☁︎ online dream journaling communities
☁︎ targeted ads as unconscious desires
☁︎ chaos edits as dream realism
☁︎ artificial intelligence and dreaming
☁︎ interactive & lucid dreaming
☁︎ digitally-induced parasomnias
☁︎ dream imaginaries and political im/possibility
☁︎ neural net neurosis
☁︎ image spam and cyber garbage as psychic discharge
☁︎ oceanic feeling online
☁︎ dreams in augmented and virtual realities
☁︎ video game realities and dream framing
☁︎ online shopping and astral projection
☁︎ cognitive timelapse and digital intimacies
☁︎ corecore and collaging the cultural unconscious
☁︎ dream scanning as the next cyber frontier
☁︎ avatars, dreams and shadow selves
☁︎ (rip) twitter dream sharing
☁︎ movie and/or fictional representations of dreams and the internet
☁︎ typographic parapraxis (poetics of the typo as freudian slip)
☁︎ affective ecologies of the comment section
☁︎ recalibrating platforms/digital detournement
☁︎ dead internet theory as dreamscape
☁︎ online dream interpretation communities
☁︎ folk hauntology and web 1.0, 2.0 or 3.0
☁︎ somnambulist clickholes
☁︎ liminal spaces and spaciality of dreams
☁︎ surrealist aesthetics
☁︎ online collective memories
☁︎ posting as automatic writing
☁︎ psychosomatics of the meta-nightmare
☁︎ dreaming in digital interfaces
☁︎ dream prophecies and crypto
☁︎ virality as bottleneck alter-consciousness
☁︎ glitch feminism
☁︎ screen-induced hallucinations (shared hallucinations)
☁︎ I lost a piece of my psyche in geocities
☁︎ hyperconnectivity and dream symbolism
☁︎ we are (always already) living in a simulation
☁︎ rest vs attention online
☁︎ internet temporalities/(a)synchronicities
☁︎ social dreams as cyber commoning
For more inspiration, read the inaugural editorial for this series written by Maisie Florence Post. We always love to see work which engages these themes specifically in relation to poetry, but are open to work that touches on any aspect of texts, media and internet culture.
Submission guidelines:
We will be open for submissions between 15th January and 12th March 2025.
All submissions should be sent to spamzine.editors@gmail.com with subject line SUBMISSION: DIGITAL DREAMLAND.
Please add a brief note to your email explaining how your work fits into our theme.
We aim to respond to all submissions within four weeks and some people will hear back before the submission window closes as we will be publishing pieces on a rolling basis throughout 2025.
This is an open call for critical work. While we appreciate the line between creative and critical can be fluid, we are looking for work that fits overall a more critical angle.
Unfortunately neither the editors or contributors of this series will receive remuneration. Copyright remains with the author.
We don’t have capacity to give feedback on unsuccessful submissions and the editors’ decision remains final.
Please send submissions that are previously unpublished.
You can submit up to TWO pieces in any of the following categories:
- Flash essays – 400-1000 words
- Full essays – 1000-2500 words
- Theory fictions – up to 2000 words
- Verse essays – up to 100 lines (we have very limited formatting options however, so please get in touch if you’re not sure your work will be suitable)
- Visual essays (photography, memes, illustrations etc – max limit of 15 images)
- Audio or video essays (with text transcript provided – you must already have the link hosted elsewhere rather than send it as a file – we need to be able to embed it via a link)
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You can read the SPAM Plaza archive for free to get a feel for the stuff we like to publish.
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