plazo: 15 de enero 2010
donde: Ithaca College. USA

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) digifleff@gmx.com 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/.

Vía | SCREEN-L