Dear editors,
Would it be possible to include this call for work on the Screen-L listserv?
Please let us know if you have any questions.
Thanks,
Dale and Sharon
**
Call for New Media Art and Online Digital Video: ³sticky-content² at FLEFF
2009 (01/11/2009; 30/0305/04/2008)
The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) is a weeklong festival
of film, video, music, new media, gaming, installations, workshops, forums,
and discussions that explores the theme of sustainability and the
environment within a larger global conversation that embraces a range of
political, economic, social, and aesthetic issues, including labour, war,
health, disease, intellectual property, software, remix culture, economics,
immigration, archives, HIV/AIDS, women¹s rights, and human rights.
The online digital media exhibition for FLEFF 2009, sticky-content, takes as
its title a popular Internet term for content that gets users to return to
web sites or networks, spend time on these sites or networks‹and perhaps
leave something behind. While stickiness derives from economic theory and
incorporated into commercially driven marketing practices, the online
exhibition for FLEFF 2009 seeks to redirect and reroute stickiness into the
politicized realms of tactical media, open-source and P2P models,
experimental coding, user-generated content, interactive and generative
interfaces, and reverse engineering. The exhibition calls attention to
web-based media that remix and rewire our understanding of
environmentalism‹media that foregrounds ways that environmentalism affects
subjectivities and promotes positive social change.
The curators of sticky-content are looking for submissions of online digital
media that explore issues related to the four content streams of this year¹s
festival: spice, syncopation, toxins, and trade. (See detailed descriptions
of content streams below.) Submissions working within the digital divides
of the global North and South, of the wired and wireless worlds, are of
particular interest. Selected works will be exhibited and archived on the
festival¹s official web site. We are particularly interested in tactical
media, indigenous media, locative media, migratory archives, web-application
and video mashups, online computer games, activist video; work that is open
source, user generated, and interactive; work designed for mobile screens;
work that makes environmentalism‹broadly defined‹not only sustainable, but
sticky!
sticky-content aims to deploy potentially progressive aspects of
globalisation, such as digital technologies, networked systems, and wireless
communication, as a means to prompt critical discussion on the often
repressive aspects of globalisation, including the rapidly accelerating
disparity among populations in terms of wealth, power, and access to basic
human rights. sticky-content aims to demonstrate that environmentalism is
not just about nature, but about our collective experience.
FLEFF 2009 will take place from 30 March to 05 April 2009 in Ithaca (New
York), USA; sticky-content will go live on the Web on 30 March 2008.
Visit www.ithaca.edu/fleff/exhibitons/ubuntu/ for the curators¹ essay and
descriptions of selected works last year¹s exhibit ubuntu.kuqala, as well as
the 2007 exhibit, Undisclosed Recipients,
www.ithaca.edu/fleff07/selected_works.html and
www.ithaca.edu/fleff07/exhibitions.html#undisclosed under previous
festivals.
Please send links to submissions for specific content streams with a brief
bio in an email to *BOTH* Dale Hudson (Amherst College) <[log in to unmask]
<mailto:[log in to unmask]> > *AND* Sharon Lin Tay (Middlesex University)
<[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> > no later than 01 November 2008.
Only work that can be exhibited online can be considered for this exhibit.
Media artists working in offline formats, should contact the festival
co-directors, Thomas Shevory <[log in to unmask]> and Patricia R. Zimmermann
<[log in to unmask]>.
Submissions by employees and students of Ithaca College, Middlesex
University (London), and the Five Colleges (Amherst College, Hampshire
College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of
Massachusetts Amherst) cannot be considered.
FLEFF 2009 content streams:
Syncopation: Syncopation avoids regular rhythm. Syncopation accents the
weak rather than the strong beat. It changes metrical patterns. It
disrupts the listener¹s expectations. It drives forward. It deviates from
the succession of regular beats. It accents the unstressed, the off-beat,
the back beat, the downbeat, the rest, the missed beat, the unexpected. It
disrupts the regular flow. It displaces metrical patterns. Syncopation
defines ragtime and jazz, blues and rock Œn roll. But it also erupts in
Bach, Bartok, Bernstein and Stravinsky Syncopation splices bodies to beats
in dance music. Nearly every musical form outside the European classical
tradition pulses with syncopation: rai, bhangra, zydeco, tango, tejano, hip
hop, reggae, rhumba, bluegrass, cumbia, arabesque, high life, salsa,
gamelan, raga. Repetitive rhythmic patterns can produce boredom:
syncopation livens everything up.
Spice: Spice transforms simple ingredients into complex flavours. Spices
travel from east to west and west to east. Chilli migrated from Mexico to
India to the Middle East. A luxury, a route to paradise, a medicine, a
status symbol, a preservative, a seasoning, and an aphrodiasiac, spices were
valued and rare. Pepper is the most ubiquitous; saffron, vanilla and
cardamon, the most expensive. Spices have included herbs, garlic, sugar,
chocolate, coffee and tea. The spice trade propelled mercantilism,
exploration, piracy, and navigation. It also unleashed colonialism,
conquest, crusades and commodity trade. The earliest globalisation, the
spice trade built entrepots like Venice, Mecca, Malacca, Singapore, Lisbon,
Amsterdam, Istanbul. Spices trigger biopiracy and spark fusion cuisines.
Sambal, zaatar, curry, duqqa, masala, nam prik: the blending of spices
constitutes the essence of cooking.
Trade: Fuelled by the desire for necessity and luxury, trade begins as
barter, a simple exchange. But trade evolves, perhaps inevitably, into
complex structures of accumulation and loss. Trade greases the wheels of
interaction and historical change, while fostering exploitation and
conflict. Trade generates bubbles of speculation and collapse, the cycle of
boom and bust. Trade¹s excesses inspire vast systems of discipline and
regulation. These regimes are in turn undermined by the imperatives that
make them necessary. Trade leaks into subterranean networks: the skin
trade, the slave trade, the drug trade, trade in blood and body parts,
genetic codes and illicit carbon. Trade is eBay and craigslist, the fair
trade coffee shop and the Shanghai Stock Exchange, corner kids and Wall
Street. Trade is marked by mutability and pervasiveness.
Toxins: From the Greek, toxin, an archers¹ bow. Toxins hit their targets.
Toxic effects can be invisible, subtle, widespread and deadly. Toxins
attack populations, species, regions, and classes. They create risk pools
that drown the vulnerable: the young, the sick, the old, the poor. Toxins
implicate modernity itself with the spread of cities, industries, markets,
chemicals, racism, inequality, and environmental decline. As they migrate,
toxins trace the geographies of political power, appearing in multiple and
insidious forms: PCBs, dioxins, plutonium, DDT, mercury, heroin, nicotine,
asbestos. But few if any can escape the reach of toxins. They accumulate
and spread across porous boundaries: Gulf of Mexico dead zones,
post-Katrina neighbourhoods, Chinese textile mills, Southern California
tomato fields, Manhattan apartments, Chernobyl, Bhopal; the cells, synapses,
and genetic nuclei of us all.
----
Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the
University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu
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