"Call for Aritsts: New Media / Digital Art - ‘Undisclosed Recipients’ at FLEFF 2007"
2006-09-25 until 2006-11-01
Ithaca College - Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF)
Ithaca, NY, USA United States of America

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, music, intellectual property, fine art, software, remix culture, economics, archives, AIDS, women’s rights and human rights. The festival will take place from 26 March to 2 April 2007 in Ithaca (New York), USA, and on the internet.

The curators of ‘Undisclosed Recipients’, the online digital art exhibition for FLEFF 2007, are looking for submissions of online new media/digital art that explore issues related to the four ‘content streams’ of this year’s festival: maps and memes, metropoli, soundscapes, and panic attacks. (See details below.) We are particularly interested in works 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. The exhibition 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. ‘Undisclosed Recipients’ aims to bring new media/digital art that is artistically innovative, socially engaged, and politically urgent to a larger audience of ‘undisclosed recipients’.

1. Maps and memes
Mapping marks the intersections and exchanges between the real and the virtual, the material and the abstract, the environment and the conceptual, the colonial and the emancipatory, the lost and the locatable, the lived and the imagined. Maps and mapping stage power relations, control and surveillance but they also can create trajectories for resistance, subversion, detours, reorientations. Memes are contagious ideas that travel through social networks and spaces—often without a map.

2. Metropoli
Fostered by the violent enclosure of the commons and the ruthless manipulation of nature, the early modern European city personified capitalist ascendency, imperial ambition, and utopian fantasy. The 21st-century metropolis, however, is a shifting outpost in the global imaginary: sprawling, fractured, unmappable, unsustainable, hypercapitalized, terrorized, transfrontiered, post-suburban, subtopian, ex-urban, new urban, eco-urban, anarcho-urban, cyber-urban, megalopic.

3. Panic attacks
Panic skirts the borders of its own indeterminacy, undermining faith in the legitimate fear of calamity. Panic implies overreaction, irrationality, intense misperception, loss of self, mental and physical suffocation. As a social process, panic polices the territories of morality, propriety, sexuality, racial and gender difference. Oddly, people court panic, at amusement parks and horror flicks, on cliff sides, in gambling casinos, and via the intake of psychotropic substances. Panic, after all, reminds us that we’re still alive and still want to be.

4. Soundscaping
The environment often fuses with the empirical: the visible and the measurable. But sound also constitutes its own environment, an endlessly mutating, mobile, and ephemeral experience inscribing our bodies through rhythm, pitch, tonality, dynamics. Soundscaping reconsiders sound as a sensual, interactive process beyond sight. It immerses us in material, natural, and social environments. Soundscaping transforms the aural landscape, reorganizing our relationships to sound.

See www.ithaca.edu/fleff/content_streams.php for expanded descriptions of this year’s content streams. The FLEFF web site also includes links to works included in ‘EcoPoetics’, the net art exhibition for FLEFF 2006.

Please send submissions, with links and a brief bio, to *BOTH* Dale Hudson - dhudson@amherst.edu *AND* Sharon Lin Tay - s.tay@mdx.ac.uk , no later than 01 November 2006. Only work that can be exhibited online can be considered for this exhibit. Artists working in offline formats, whether analogue or digital, should submit work to FLEFF under other calls.

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