FLEFF
Call for New Media Art: Map Open Space
Map Open Space Curators' Bios
Dale Hudson is an assistant professor at Texas State University–San Marcos. His work on global cinemas and new media appears in Afterimage, Cinema Journal, Journal of Film and Video, Screen, and Studies in Documentary Film. He has worked as a co-curator of new media art for FLEFF since 2006. Sharon Lin Tay is an academic, theorist, and curator. She teaches film and digital theory at Middlesex University in London, England, and has co-curated the new media art exhibition for FLEFF for the last three years. Her new book about women filmmakers and digital artists, entitled Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices (2009), is published by Palgrave Macmillan.
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) 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. Check the menu on the left for information on how to submit.
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 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).