[spectre] Call for submissions: Viral Dissonance at FLEFF 2014

[Nicholas Knouf]

Please share and apologies for cross-posting.
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Call for submissions: Viral Dissonance at FLEFF 2014

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 at 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