To conclude its 2019 festival, the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival presents “Networked Disruptions,” an online exhibition of digital media exploring the power of networks, such as global trade and the internet, and the positive and negative effects of their disruption. The exhibition can be accessed on the FLEFF website.
“‘Networked Disruptions’ asks us to stop thinking only of the power cuts and Wi-Fi dead zones that occasionally affect our lives, and to instead think about ways that we can disrupt larger networks of corporate power and resource extraction that we enable through our daily habits as they destroy our shared environment,” said New York University Abu Dhabi associate professor Dale Hudson, who curated the exhibition along with Wichita State University assistant professor Claudia Costa Pederson.
Featured artists include Ithaca College alumnus Jeff Silva ’96, Ramona Bădescu, Isabelle Carbonell, Zachary Norman, Zlatko Ćosić, Michael Amato, Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz, Mez Breeze, Ben Grosser, Garrett Lynch and Jody Zellen.
The exhibition’s projects make use of a wide array of media, such as digital photographs, micro-short videos, feature-length films, digital animations, interactive documentaries, 360-degree videos, virtual reality games, web-application plug-ins, cryptographics, and automated hacks of online polling systems. The variety of projects conveys the innovative ways that artists have used old and new technologies to create politically and environmentally engaged art.
Three projects have been selected for the exhibition’s jury prizes:
- “The River Runs Red” by Isabelle Carbonelle, an interactive documentary that examines the consequences of extractive economies and inadequate modes for disposing of toxic waste in iron-ore mines in Bento Rodrigues, Brazil.
- “Endangered Data” by Zachary Norman, which uses the cryptographic method of steganography to hide data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center within the pixels of visual images in response to the recent removal of scientific evidence of global warming from the Environmental Protection Agency website.
- “UN-POLLUTE” by Zlatko Ćosić, a short video that asks audiences to consider the limitations of efforts to control the damage that humans inflict upon the planet.
Launched in 1997 as an outreach project from Cornell University’s Center for the Environment, the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival was moved permanently to Ithaca College in 2005. It is housed in the Office of the Provost as a program to link intellectual inquiry and debate to larger global issues.