Newswise — The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) 2010 is seeking entries for “Map Open Space,” the first of four online, juried competitions offered by FLEFF during its yearlong rollout of blogs, screenings and other online, user-generated events. The curators for “Map Open Space” are looking for submissions of radical cartography, digital art, computer animation and other new media art that engage the themes of mapping and spatiality. Only projects that can be exhibited online can be considered for “Map Open Space.” Three competitions for media artists working in offline formats will be offered in future rollouts.
Entrants for “Map Open Spaces” are invited to send links to their submissions, along with a brief bio, to curators Dale Hudson and Sharon Lin Tay at [email protected] by Jan. 15, 2010. There is no submission fee. A jury’s prize and a curator’s prize—each for $200—will be awarded. The “Map Open Space” exhibit will go online at the FLEFF website, www.ithaca.edu/fleff, on March 1, 2010.
“Digital maps interpret information visually, graphically, spatially—in layers, pixels, and vectors,” said Hudson. “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.”
“Bhagat and Mogel define radical cartography as the practice of mapmaking that subverts conventional notions in order to actively promote social change,” added Lin Tay. “We seek mapping projects that unhinge familiar habits of thinking to chart new possibilities for historical and cultural clarity.”
Hudson and Lin Tay have co-curated new media art exhibits for FLEFF since 2006. Currently a visiting assistant professor at Texas State University–San Marcos, Hudson has published work on global cinemas and new media in “Afterimage,” “Cinema Journal,” and other professional publications. Lin Tay teaches film and digital theory at London’s Middlesex University. Her new book about women filmmakers and digital artists, entitled “Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices,” was published by Palgrave Macmillan.
The jurors for “Map Open Space” are Babak Fakhamzadeh (Iran/Netherlands), Ismail Farouk (South Africa) and Christina McPhee (United States).
Fakhamzadeh and Farouk won the 2007 Highway Africa new media award for “sowetouprisings.com.” McPhee, a filmmaker and digital artist, is currently exhibiting “Tesserae of Venus,” a science fiction multimedia series on carbon-saturated energy landscapes, at the Silverman Gallery in San Francisco.
For more information on “Map Open Space” and detailed biographies of the curators and jurors, visit www.ithaca.edu/fleff/mapopenspace.
Launched in 1997, the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival was an outreach project from the Center for the Environment at Cornell University. In 2005 the festival moved permanently to Ithaca College, where it is housed in the Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies as a program to link intellectual inquiry and debate to larger global issues.
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