Some of my friends here at OSU have launched a fantastic new venue for ideas called Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion. Caitlin & I contributed a short video project for their pilot issue, which you can check out here.

They are now seeking submissions for their first issue:

We're proud to announce Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion, a digital magazine and web forum dedicated to exploring rhetoric in everyday life. As the name suggests, Harlot is not another academic journal, nor is it a pop culture magazine. It's a combination of both and neither, and its goal is to provoke real conversations in the public sphere about how communication shapes our world -- from topics on reality television to public monuments to religion to pop music, and so on.

As a digital community, Harlot promotes collective invention and discussion through multimedia and traditional texts, creative pieces, artistic works, blogs, and wiki pages. We welcome submissions in a range of genres and media formats and imagine a variety of possibilities:

* art inspired by gaming culture
* a mock interview with a political candidate
* a short film on green architecture
* a collaborative review of a popular documentary
* an experimental poem about social-networking sites
* a parody of a popular advertisement
* whatever else will spark thought and conversation

We invite adventurous critics, artists, and thinkers to take part in promiscuous investigations into the social, cultural, and political powers of rhetoric ... for play with a purpose. Check out our site at www.HarlotoftheArts.org to learn more. For publication in Harlot's debut issue in Fall 2008, submissions must be sent in by July 1st, 2008.

The Harlot team
harlot[dot]osu[at]gmail[dot]com