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Call for New Media Art: Trafficked Bodies
Subject: Call for New Media Art: Trafficked Bodies exhibition for
FLEFF 2011 (deadline: 15.03.2011)
Types: Call for new media art, locative media, tactical media,
electronic civil disobedience, experimental coding, radical
cartography, opportunity, announcement, festival, prizes, competition
In collaboration with the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women
(GAATW) based in Bangkok, Thailand, the Finger Lakes Environmental
Film Festival (FLEFF) is looking for submissions of digital art for
the exhibition Trafficked Bodies in conjunction with the festival
theme of Checkpoints for 2011.
The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) provides a
vibrant space for debates and dialogues of environmentalism according
to twenty-first–century global perspectives that embrace the complex
nexus of political, economic, social, and aesthetic dimensions, such
as public health, genetically modified seeds, endemic disease,
indentured labour, militarized international borders, civil war,
biological war, neoliberal economic policies, intellectual property,
free trade zones, bioengineered foods, informal economies, rare
minerals, women’s rights, and human rights.
The Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW) is an alliance of
more than 90 non-governmental organisations from across the world that
deal with migrant rights, human rights, anti-trafficking, women’s
rights, and labour issues. GAATW promotes and defends the human
rights of all migrants and their families against the threat of an
increasingly globalised labour market and calls for safety standards
for migrant workers in the process of migration and in the formal and
informal work sectors - garment and food processing, agriculture and
farming, domestic work, sex work - where slavery-like conditions and
practices exist.
Teaming up for the first time, FLEFF and GAATW are interested in
discovering the ways in which digital art would explore, visualise,
engage, intervene in, map the complexities of, and/or allow viewers to
embody and experience migration, human trafficking, and labour issues,
where people’s identities and experiences can be fragmented,
dissected, and pigeon-holed by authorities and policy makers.
A person can simultaneously be a refugee, a worker, a trafficked
person, a family breadwinner, a community leader, and an undocumented
migrant. Yet policies created to help one identity may end up
endangering another identity, such as when repatriation policies for
trafficked persons endanger refugees trying to escape conflict and
abuse. How may art practices address the fragmentation and limitation
of people’s identities in anti-trafficking and migration policies?
Anti-trafficking campaigns often rely on victimisation narratives that
leave structural barriers, such as racial discrimination and
restrictive migration policies, unchallenged. How may activist
campaigns against human trafficking avoid glamourising the
victimization of trafficked persons and instead use digital media as a
platform to promote the recognition of trafficked persons’ rights,
strengths and power? How may campaigns call attention to gross
exploitation while highlighting victims’ resilience and agency? How
may the bodies that are smuggled past, or that covertly pass,
political checkpoints be represented in ways that educate about the
intersection of geopolitical complexities with labour, whether sexual,
manual, domestic, forced, or voluntary?
We invite submissions of new media art, database documentaries,
locative and tactical media with a distributed network component,
digital video designed for online exhibition platforms, experimental
coding, data-visualization applications, experimental archiving, and
other web-based media that engage the theme of “Checkpoints” for FLEFF
2011’s online exhibition, Trafficked Bodies. One prize of 250USD will
be awarded. It is envisioned that the winning entry could be used for
GAATW’s campaign purposes.
The Trafficked Bodies exhibit will go live in April 2011 in
conjunction with the festival in Ithaca (New York), USA. Visit the
FLEFF web site at www.ithaca.edu/fleff for details, links to previous
new media art exhibitions and blogs, including the 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 (UAE/USA) and Sharon Lin (UK/Singapore) at [log in to unmask]
no later than 15 March 2011.
Only projects that can be exhibited online can be considered for this
exhibit. Media artists working in off-line formats, should visit the
FLEFF web site for other calls. Unfortunately, we cannot consider
projects previously curated in FLEFF exhibits, nor can we consider
projects by Ithaca College students, faculty, or staff.
CURATORS’ BIOS
Dale Hudson (UAE/USA) teaches film and new media studies at New York
University Abu Dhabi. His work on global cinema and new media appears
in Afterimage, Cinema Journal, Journal of Film and Video, Screen,
Studies in Documentary Film, and elsewhere. He is preparing a book
manuscript entitled Blood, Bodies, and Borders.
Sharon Lin Tay (UK/Singapore) teaches film and digital theory at
Middlesex University in London. She is on sabbatical in 2010 and is
currently a Visiting Associate Professor at Nanyang Technical
University in Singapore. Her new book about women filmmakers and
digital artists, entitled Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film
Practices (2009), is published by Palgrave Macmillan.
Hudson and Tay have co-curated four previous exhibitions at FLEFF:
Undisclosed Recipients (2007), ubuntu.kuqala (2008), sticky-content
(2009), and Map Open Space (2010). They are also co-curating the
Digital Checkpoints exhibition for FLEFF 2011.
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Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the
University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu
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