From: Patricia R. Zimmermann (email suppressed)
Date: Sun Oct 25 2009 - 20:47:22 PDT
Call for New Media Art:
Map Open Space,
a juried competition and exhibition for FLEFF 2010
(15.jan.2010; 01.mar.2010)
Types: Call for new media art, radical cartography,
opportunity, prizes, competition, announcement,
festival
The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF)
http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff launches a yearlong
exploration of nomadic routes and provisional maps
in Open Space. We invite submissions of radical
cartography and other new media art that engage the
themes of mapping and spatiality in a juried
competition and online exhibition, Map Open Space.
Two prizes of $US200 will be awarded: a jury’s
prize and a curators’ prize.
Digital environments offer ways to imagine, invent,
and inhabit Open Space. We’re looking for artists
and collectives who deploy digital technologies
within new media ecologies to mobilize, manipulate,
and map Open Space. Acts of radical historiography,
for example, can amplify power structures that have
silenced a multiple, competing histories. They can
visualize power relations made invisible through
historically uneven and unequal access to resources.
Map Open Space seeks mapping projects that provoke
and educate through disruption and intervention,
that supplement knowledge rather than combat it, and
that invite participation.
Digital maps interpret information visually,
graphically, spatially—in layers, pixels, and
vectors. Digital mapping infuses information with
malleability, manipulability, and mobility. In An
Atlas of Radical Cartography, Alexis Bhagat and Lize
Mogel explain that the mere inversion of the
standard North-oriented world map can serve to
‘unhinge our beliefs about the world, and to
provoke new perceptions of the networks, lineages,
associations and representations of places, people
and power’. They define radical cartography as
‘the practice of mapmaking that subverts
conventional notions in order to actively promote
social change’. We seek mapping projects that
unhinge familiar habits of thinking to chart new
possibilities for historical and cultural clarity.
Focusing on the interstices, Map Open Space explores
ways that new media can complicate and dislodge the
either/or thinking that creates divisions and
hierarchies. Instead, the Map Open Space exhibition
works towards exploring the both/and thinking that
characterises contiguities and convergences. We are
especially interested in projects that engage with
FLEFF’s ongoing commitment to situating
sustainability and environmentalism within global
conversations that embrace political, economic,
social, and aesthetic issues, including labour, war,
health, disease, intellectual property, software,
economics, immigration, archives, women’s rights,
and human rights.
The jurors for Map Open Space are Babak Fakhamzadeh
(Iran/Netherlands) Ismail Farouk (South Africa) and
Christina McPhee (United States).
The Map Open Space exhibit will go live on 01 March
2010. Visit the FLEFF web site at
http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff for details, links to
previous new media art exhibitions, and blogs,
including the Map Open Space curators’ blog
Digital Spaces: Speculations on Digital Art and
Viral Spaces. Please also read about other events
associated with FLEFF and its global network of
partners in the Open Cinema Project.
Please send links to submissions with a brief bio in
an email to curators Dale Hudson and Sharon Lin Tay
email suppressed no later than 15 January 2010.
*Only projects that can be exhibited online can be
considered for this exhibit.
* Media artists working in offline formats, should
visit the FLEFF web site for other calls under the
Open Space Project, including Make Open Space,
Define Open Space, and Compose Open Space.
*Unfortunately, we cannot consider projects
previously curated in FLEFF exhibits,
*Unfortunately, we cannot consider projects by
Ithaca College students enrolled in the FLEFF Open
Space Lab.
Jurors’ Biographies
After obtaining an M. Sc in maths, Babak Fakhamzadeh
started with an office job at a major blue chip
company but soon realised he'd do better on his own.
Fakhamzadeh is a traveling web guru with a penchant
for doing good and a love for visual and
experimental art. Together with Ismail Farouk, he
won the prestigious Highway Africa new media award
in 2007 for sowetouprisings.com.
Ismail Farouk has a background in Fine Art and Human
Geography. His work explores creative responses to
racial, social, political and economic injustice.
Farouk is currently employed as a research officer
at the African Centre for Cities at the University
of Cape Town, where he is responsible for the
running of the Central Citylab and the urban culture
portfolio.
Christina McPhee creates topologic site studies of
environmental risk in layered, abstract visual and
media suites. Her photomontage, drawing, time-based
arts and writing concern speculative landscapes
between biological and technologically emergent
states, making connections between human traumatic
memory, disturbed terrains, and bare life. A much
exhibited filmmaker and digital artist, her latest
project, ‘Tesserae of Venus’, is a science
fiction multimedia series on carbon-saturated energy
landscapes that will run at Silverman Gallery, San
Francisco, from October to December 2009. Currently,
she is visiting lecturer in the graduate program of
Digital Arts and New Media (DANM), University of
California–Santa Cruz.