Call

for submissions:
Interface/Landscape

Subject:
Detail:
Keywords:

Call for submission for online exhibition at FLEFF 2016

Call for digital media, tactical media, locative media, AR apps, radical cartography,
computer games, videos, interactive documentary, new media art
Opportunity, prizes, competition, announcement, festival

The 19th annual Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) began its yearlong exploration of
Landscapes with concerts, workshops, master classes, performances, and films in March 2016.
FLEFF invites submissions for its online exhibition Interface/Landscape and prize of USD250.
Landscapes evoke romantic notions of nature and ecology but are more frequently today are
manufactured. Whether urban or suburban, manufactured landscapes are part of our environments
have been engineered both to convene publics and prevent protests.
Landscapes offer a sense of security in an unstable world of recurring financial crises, wide-scale
political corruption, and massive displacements of families due to wars over resources and influence.
Gated communities offer temporary refuge for privileged classes. Public parks and squares offer
temporary refuge for social movements. The least privileged and most vulnerable seldom appear on
the horizons of awareness.
Interfaces mark boundaries between computing components and points of exchange between
humans and machines. We access interfaces via hardware like touchscreens and software like apps.
Interfaces are so ubiquitous and increasingly so seamless that we often forget to notice them. With
the popularization of wearables, Web 3.0, and the Internet of Things, our relationships with
interfaces expand from laptops and mobile devices to computers inside objects as diverse as
refrigerators, automobiles, HVAC (heating, ventilation, air-conditioning) systems, clothing, and shoes.
Interfaces function like banal landscapes in our everyday lives, but they do more than frame our
access to data: they interpret it, thereby determining the kinds of knowledge that we produce. We
ignore them when they function perfectly, and we are aware of their power when they fail. Like
geopolitical borders, interfaces only produce meaning when in use.
Interface/Landscape seeks submissions that use digital media to investigate how interface and
landscape combine in critical and imaginative inquiry. Submissions must be accessible via digital
platform but can include other components, such as mobile apps for augmented reality, or
documentation of other iterations/components, such as live performance and gallery installations.
Please send submissions with 150-word synopsis, and 75-word artist bio to FLEFF Digital Curator
Dale Hudson (New York University Abu Dhabi, UAE) and FLEFF Assistant Digital Curator Claudia
Costa Pederson (Wichita State University, USA) at fleff.digital.curators@gmail.com no later than
15 August 2016. The exhibition will launch in September.
For additional information on FLEFF, visit: www.ithaca.edu/fleff/. To see last years online
exhibition, Iterations as Habitats, visit: www.ithaca.edu/fleff/iterations/. Projects from past
editions of FLEFF appear in Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and
Locative Places (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) by Dale Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmermann.

FLEFF: A DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENT