From: Patricia Zimmermann (email suppressed)
Date: Fri Aug 17 2007 - 17:17:33 PDT
Subject: Call for Online Digital Media: ‘Ubuntu’ at FLEFF 2008
(01/11/2007; 31/03–06/04/2008)
Keywords: online digital media, online new media art and video, internet
art, net.art, environment, sustainability,
Place: Ithaca (New York), USA
Web address: <http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff>
Types: Call for digital art and video, opportunity, announcement
Radically reconfigured for the 21st century in 2006, the Finger Lakes
Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) is a multimedia festival that explores
the theme of sustainability and the environment within a large global
conversation that embraces a range of political, economic, social, and
aesthetic issues, including labour, war, health, disease, intellectual
property, software, remix culture, economics, archives, HIV/AIDS, women’s
rights, and human rights.
‘Ubuntu’, the online digital media exhibition for FLEFF 2008, takes its
name from Bantu-language African philosophies that foreground
interconnectedness and interdependence through expressions such as ‘a
person is a person through persons’ and ‘I am because we are’. The
exhibition applies this conception of intersubjectivity to explore
understandings of environmentalism—ways that it affects us collectively,
suggesting that online digital media can affect awareness and positive
change.
The curators of ‘Ubuntu’ are looking for submissions of online digital/new
media art and video that explore issues related to the four ‘content
streams’ of this year’s festival: camouflage, counterpoint, games, and
gastronomica. (See details below.) We are particularly interested in
collaborative work, interactive work, multiscreen, multinarrative, or
multichannel work, and work that underscore the aesthetics of the
political and the politicisation of the aesthetic. Submissions from
artists living and working in the global South are of particular interest.
Selected works will be exhibited and archived on the festival’s official
web site.
‘Ubuntu’ aims to deploy potentially progressive aspects of globalization,
such as digital technologies and internet communication, as a means to
prompt critical dialogues on the often repressive aspects of
globalization, including the rapidly accelerating disparity among
populations in terms of wealth, power, and access to basic human rights.
‘Ubuntu’ aims to demonstrate that environmentalism is not just about
nature, but about our collective existence.
1. CAMOUFLAGE
Sometimes mistakenly conceived as “blending in,” camouflage achieves its
objectives by disrupting visual fields and fragmenting their boundaries.
Ironically, through its disruptions, camouflage fosters mediation,
connectivity, integration, and engagement, blurring boundaries between
bodies, species, environments, and cultures. Military camouflage, now
digitally designed, is offered in dozens of styles, each tailored to the
needs of a specific regional conflict. In streets, galleries, and fashion
houses, camouflage is accessorized as accoutrement of critique and
resistance.
2. COUNTERPOINT
Different melodic lines heard simultaneously identify counterpoint.
Counterpoint matches horizontal lines into vertical harmonies, creating
dimension. Counterpoint germinates polyphony. Discords produce tension.
Dissonance resolves into consonance. Inventions, fugues, and canons
exemplify counterpoint with their rhythms, modulations, episodes. Contours
and climaxes shape counterpoint. Counterpoint also spells argument—pushing
against the dominant, the assumed, the accepted. A contrapuntal position
releases us to see, hear and invent fresh meanings and radical structures.
3. GAMES
Games are sports. Games are conceptual environments. Games spin dialectics
between competition and collectivity, interaction and immersion. The
ludology/narratology wars pit process against story. Games fuel fun and
flow. Games conjure liminal zones. Bounded by space and time, game players
torque rules and components. Through movement and climax, games create
imaginary and real places exempt from quotidian routines. Whether in
words, wars, boards, cards, courts, virtualities, fields, ecologies,
computers, or minds, games mobilize abstract strategies and risk.
4. GASTRONOMICA
Constituted by chemical compounds—sugars, proteins, carbohydrates, salts,
and fats—food is the essence of environmental tangibility and provides the
material foundations of life. Food spawns all things gastronomic, the
refinements and complexities of cuisine, with attendant implications for
taste, nutrition, family, community, and identity. Gastronomica connotes
multiple divisions of labour, sweeping political economies, ravaging
famines, heterogeneous ethnicities, hidden histories, complex systems of
production, vast regimes of regulation, daunting genetic manipulations,
mountains of cookbooks, and billions in advertising.
FLEFF 2008 will take place from 31 March to 06 April 2008 in Ithaca (New
York), USA; ‘Ubuntu’ will go live on the web on 31 March 2008. Visit
http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff/exhibitions.html#undisclosed for a description
of last year’s exhibit, ‘Undisclosed Recipients’, and
www.ithaca.edu/fleff/selected_works.html for links to curated work.
Please send submissions, with links and a brief bio, to *BOTH* Dale Hudson
(Amherst College) <email suppressed> *AND* Sharon Lin Tay (Middlesex
University) <email suppressed> no later than 01 November 2007. Only work
that can be exhibited online can be considered for this exhibit. Media
artists working in offline formats, should submit work to FLEFF under
other calls.
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For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.