Call for submissions: Map Open Space at FLEFF 2010

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Subject: 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) 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.

Open Space assumes myriad forms. It migrates across diverse practices. 
It loosens multiple meanings. It roves across technologies, social 
relations, landscape design, politics, ecology, development, critical 
theory, and media formations. Open Space swaps rigid vertical 
hierarchies for more fluid horizontal modes. Open Space serves as a 
catalyst for collaboration, communication, and convergence. It spawns 
biodiversity, public usage, green neighbourhoods, cultural resources, 
and land protection beyond development. Open Space stirs up new ways to 
work, active participation, lived phenomena, surprise.

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).

The Map Open Space exhibit will go live on 01 March 2010. Visit the 
FLEFF web site at 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 (USA) and Sharon Lin (UK/Singapore) 
[email protected] 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, nor can we consider projects by Ithaca College students 
enrolled in the FLEFF Open Space Lab.

This call for submission is available at 
http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff/mapopenspace/.

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.
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