Trafficked Bodies — exhibition for FLEFF 2011, Ithaca, New York :: Call for New Media Art (locative media, tactical media, electronic civil disobedience, experimental coding, radical cartography): Deadline: March 15, 2011.

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.

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.

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 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 digifleff.gaatw@gmail.com 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.