Call for submissions:
Viral Dissonance
Subject: Call
for submission for online exhibition at FLEFF 2014
Detail: Call
for new media art, tactical media, radical cartography, computer games,
locative media, interactive video
Keywords: Opportunity,
prizes, competition, announcement, festival
The 17th annual Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) will
begin its yearlong exploration of “Dissonance” with concerts, workshops, master
classes, performances, and films.
FLEFF invites submissions of new media art, tactical media,
radical cartography, computer games, and locative media for the online
exhibition “Viral Dissonance” and prize of USD250.
“Going viral” is often equated
with viral videos. It is
associated with internet memes: ideas replicate themselves and spread, jumping
between social networks. Viruses
themselves often frighten for their unpredictable movements. They travel quickly against dominant flows
and often defy attempts at isolation and containment. Epidemics viruses like SARS, H1N1, and MERS emerge at the
intersections between human and nonhuman, casting chickens, pigs, camels, and
bats as “natural” transmitters.
They also emerge at the intersections of science and superstition. Computer viruses spread through
self-replicating malware programs, disabling proper functionality—or even
shutting it down through “worms” like Code Red, Nimda, and ILOVEYOU.
During the past few years,
grassroots forms of dissonance have erupted everyday from Egypt and Syria to Spain,
Greece, the United States, and Brazil.
People have gathered in the streets and in squares to demand to be heard
and to be seen. They refuse to be
silenced or erased. News media have
occasionally offered them time and space to make their voices heard and faces
visible. People have also
mobilized digital technologies like SMS and social networking, working around
and within the control of state and corporate control. They have spoken against data mining of
citizens and against the financialization and militarization of everyday life
for millions, but they have also spoken against corporate cooption of
dissonance as Twitter or Facebook revolutions.
Dissonance emerges as clash,
tension, disharmony, and disequilibrium to make visible and audible an
ever-expanding multiplicity of clashes, tensions, disharmonies, and
disequilibriums have become so integral to everyday life that they can easily
pass unmarked and seem unremarkable.
Dissonance thrives on contradictions, moving restlessly towards
irresolution. It calls out
imbalance. Neither noise, nor
cacophony, dissonance pairs together the incompatible with results that
surprise, offend, invite, disturb, and excite, spurring action and creativity. Dissonance sparks and ignites.
Viral Dissonance seeks
projects that run online or on mobile devices, ones that provoke and educate to
expand dissonance virally as knowledge producing and agentive. Please send submissions with a brief
bio (75 words) in an email to FLEFF Digital Curator Dale Hudson of New York
University Abu Dhabi (UAE/USA) at fleff.digital.curators@gmail.com
no later than 15 January 2014.
Claudia Costa Pederson of Ithaca College (USA) serves as FLEFF Assistant Curator for New
Media on this project, which will be juried by Eduardo Cachucho (Belgium/South Africa) and Babak Fakhamzadeh
(Uganda/Netherlands). The
exhibition is scheduled to go live in March 2014. For additional information about FLEFF, including past
exhibitions Digital Checkpoints, Trafficked Identities, and last year’s Distributed Microtopias, please visit
http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff/.
FLEFF: A
DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENT