Blog written by Sharon Lin Tay, cocurator of Map Open Space for FLEFF 2010 and Visiting Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

In a previous post, Dale talks about the interface between "new" and "old"media paradigms. I would like to flag up one example of such remediation: our juror Christina McPhee's La Conchita mon amour <http://www.christinamcphee.net/la_conchita.html>.

In particular, I'd like us to think about the extent to which digital and Internet technologies can enable the move beyond certain limitations that affect conventional documentary practices and open up some ideas about the image and representation in documentary film within the context of digital convergence.

McPhee's La Conchita mon amour taps into the states of panic and paranoia that characterize political events post-9/11, albeit in a different way. La Conchita mon amour references in its title the trauma of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima that could not be fully articulated in Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras’s Hiroshima, mon amour (1960).

Studying the struggles of life in the beach community of La Conchita in California that was inundated by debris flow after a devastating mudslide, the panic that La Conchita mon armor highlights refers to the heightened awareness and fear that living with the aftermath of the mudslide, and continuing fears of its recurrence, brings.

Caused by increased winter rain that comes as an effect of global warming, this digital video project documents the interface between human response and geological data, when governmental assistance for victims of cyclical recursion of disaster is not forthcoming.

As McPhee notes in the statement accompanying the project, the aftermath of this environmental disaster is one from which La Conchita residents cannot escape and are forced to live through, both literally and financially, given that their properties are rendered worthless by the mudslide; it therefore becomes impossible for the residents to re-mortgage their damaged homes and/or move away from the area.

In recent days, we also think about natural disasters that afflict, for instance, Haiti and Chile, and the people there who have no means of escape.
As a performative act of witnessing, La Conchita updates the cinematic manifestations of political modernism, as articulated through the documentaries of film-makers such as Resnais, Duras, Agnès Varda and Chris Marker, thereby bringing a formal discourse of the expository documentary into the Internet age at the same time that it transcends the expository mode in specific ways.

In her search for meaning after the destruction of the landscape, McPhee records the rituals that the community performs to grieve for those who died in the mudslide as well as to survive without aid from the state.

As a digital project, La Conchita imbues documentary realism with subjective evocation to such an extent that the project effectively displaces the importance of the documentary image’s indexicality. Instead of contemplating the impossibility of representing trauma in, for instance Night and Fog (Resnais, 1955) or Hiroshima mon armor, La Conchita attempts the evocation of trauma via the algorithmic processes of selection and combination.

The viewer’s experience of La Conchita is contingent and interactive, and not unlike the notion of mining for geological information. Still photographs, composited images and video clips of the landscape, environment and vernacular shrines allow the viewer to piece together the relationship between geological instability and psychological trauma. In this case, the evidentiary is not dependent on the indexical relationship between signifier and signified. Instead, the viewer arrives at ‘evidence’ of the trauma suffered by the La Conchita residents by looking at the mudslide in terms of its geological impact on the psychological subject.

La Conchita interrogates the relationship between the visible and the evidentiary, and shows the limits of representation in instances of panic and trauma. The instability and contingency of meaning that La Conchita conveys differs from the notions of unspeakable trauma or the sublime in which many modernist expository documentaries are often invested. Instead, McPhee gestures towards a non-representational strategy, given the limits of representation, via the database aesthetics of her performative documentary that pivots on the algorithmic processes that is key in the production of a plurality of meanings.
 

Blog written by Dale Hudson, co-curator with Sharon Lin Tay of “Map Open Space” exhibit at FLEFF 2010.

The forthcoming FLEFF exhibition Map Open Space asks artists, activists, and academics to consider the digital environments on networked communication in relation to radical cartography and data visualization. In short, the exhibit continues the work of the previous exhibitions that Sharon Lin Tay and I have curated for FLEFF since 2007.

Map Open Space does, however, take a more specific focus on work that engages with the unsettled and ongoing debates and conversations about anything that falls under FLEFF’s rubric for the environment — public health, war, labor rights, women’s rights, human rights — according to the technical and imaginative possibilities of web-based projects. We were less interested in work that could be streamed online, for example, than we were interested in work that could only operate, run, or happen online.

We are very fortunate to have South African urban geographer Ismail Farouk and Dutch-born Iranian programmer Babak Fakhamzadeh serve on the Map Open Space jury, along with California-based Christina McPhee. Part of our ubuntu.kuqala exhibit for FLEFF 2008, Farouk and Fakhamzadeh’s soweto uprising.com  demonstrates that something as familiar as web-application mashups using GoogleMaps can be used to visualize, archive, and interact with history, becoming an exercise in radical historiography.

Most people are probably so familiar with GoogleMap mashups that they don’t even think about the types of knowledge produced by them. They are often used for entertainment, such as documenting parades for Chinese New Year and snowmen in Europe and North America after the recent blizzards caused by global warming, as well as tracking the global whereabouts of tabloid celebrities.  (That’s right, you can use them to avoid being anywhere near the likes of Paris Hilton, Tareq and Michaele Salahi, and Sarah Palin!) More commonly, they appear in the results to Google Web searches, marking the locations of basic consumer services like banks, cafés, and dry cleaners, to specialized services like halal groceries and martial arts dojos. 

GoogleMap mashups are ubiquitous and do everything from tracking climate change and traffic jams, visualizing uneven distributions of resources like fresh water and access to education, as well as human rights violations and advocacy campaigns, such as torture awareness campaigns, in acts of “maptivism.” There are lists of the “best” ones of sites like Mashable  and even blogs dedicated to tracking them, such as Google Maps Mania

What distinguishes soweto uprising.com is that it opens up unsettled debated in history from the perspective of high-school students who took to the streets of the Johannesburg township of Soweto during the protests against the oppressive Apartheid system in South African on 16 June 1976. The project seeks to become a community-driven digital archive through which members of the “lost generation” of young South Africans who sacrificed their education to stand against Apartheid can reclaim and transmit history.

What makes the project urgently important is that this history is in the process of being memorialized by the post-Apartheid government under the African National Congress (ANC) in heritage sites for international tourism, as well as football fans flocking to South Africa for the FIFA World Cup. This official version of history diminishes or marginalizes the role of women and of organizations, such as Black Consciousness Movement and Positive Action Campaign. Soweto uprising.com, then, seeks to open a space for other threads to a moment in history that we think we understand, but we probably have lots more to learn before we even begin to understand.

The project includes routes of the participants along with custom icons that link to additional information about sites, events, and martyrs; contemporary photographs of key sites along the student routes, such as schools and police stations; user-contributed testimony or remembrance; and blog queues into Google keyword searches to track what people around the world are writing about sites in Soweto.

The project was initially conceived four years ago in conjunction with the Hector Pieterson Research Project, Soweto’s first historical museum, named after one of the first victims of police violence against the student protesters.  A substantial obstacle for soweto uprising . com, of course, is the realities of the global digital divides. Many of the participants in the Soweto uprising do not have Internet access or Internet literacy, and others are understandably suspicious of documenting their histories.

We feel that soweto uprising . com is an inspiring example of the possibilities for politically engaged GoogleMap mashups that help us to visualize and archive history, as well as to open up thinking about our ongoing interactions with history. If you know of others, please share them with us.

Call for New Media Art:
Map Open Space,
a juried competition and exhibition for FLEFF 2010

The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) launches a yearlong exploration of nomadic routes and provisional maps in Open Space. We invite submissions of radical cartography and other new media art that engage the themes of mapping and spatiality in a juried competition and online exhibition, Map Open Space. Two prizes of $US200 will be awarded: a jury’s prize and a curators’ prize.

Open Space assumes myriad forms. It migrates across diverse practices. It loosens multiple meanings. It roves across technologies, social relations, landscape design, politics, ecology, development, critical theory, and media formations. Open Space swaps rigid vertical hierarchies for more fluid horizontal modes. Open Space serves as a catalyst for collaboration, communication, and convergence. It spawns biodiversity, public usage, green neighbourhoods, cultural resources, and land protection beyond development. Open Space stirs up new ways to work, active participation, lived phenomena, surprise.

Digital environments offer ways to imagine, invent, and inhabit Open Space. We’re looking for artists and collectives who deploy digital technologies within new media ecologies to mobilize, manipulate, and map Open Space. Acts of radical historiography, for example, can amplify power structures that have silenced a multiple, competing histories. They can visualize power relations made invisible through historically uneven and unequal access to resources. Map Open Space seeks mapping projects that provoke and educate through disruption and intervention, that supplement knowledge rather than combat it, and that invite participation.

Digital maps interpret information visually, graphically, spatially—in layers, pixels, and vectors. Digital mapping infuses information with malleability, manipulability, and mobility. In An Atlas of Radical Cartography, Alexis Bhagat and Lize Mogel explain that the mere inversion of the standard North-oriented world map can serve to ‘unhinge our beliefs about the world, and to provoke new perceptions of the networks, lineages, associations and representations of places, people and power’. They define radical cartography as ‘the practice of mapmaking that subverts conventional notions in order to actively promote social change’. We seek mapping projects that unhinge familiar habits of thinking to chart new possibilities for historical and cultural clarity.

Focusing on the interstices, Map Open Space explores ways that new media can complicate and dislodge the either/or thinking that creates divisions and hierarchies. Instead, the Map Open Space exhibition works towards exploring the both/and thinking that characterises contiguities and convergences. We are especially interested in projects that engage with FLEFF’s ongoing commitment to situating sustainability and environmentalism within global conversations that embrace political, economic, social, and aesthetic issues, including labour, war, health, disease, intellectual property, software, economics, immigration, archives, women’s rights, and human rights.

The jurors for Map Open Space are Babak Fakhamzadeh (Iran/Netherlands) Ismail Farouk (South Africa) and Christina McPhee (United States).

The Map Open Space exhibit will go live on 01 March 2010. Visit the FLEFF web site at www.ithaca.edu/fleff for details, links to previous new media art exhibitions, and blogs, including the Map Open Space 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 and Sharon Lin Tay digifleff@gmx.com no later than 15 January 2010.

Only projects that can be exhibited online can be considered for this exhibit. Media artists working in offline formats, should visit the FLEFF web site for other calls under the Open Space Project, including Make Open Space, Define Open Space, and Compose Open Space. Unfortunately, we cannot consider projects previously curated in FLEFF exhibits, nor can we consider projects by Ithaca College students enrolled in the FLEFF Open Space Lab.

Jurors’ Biographies

After obtaining an M. Sc in maths, Babak Fakhamzadeh started with an office job at a major blue chip company but soon realised he'd do better on his own. Fakhamzadeh is a traveling web guru with a penchant for doing good and a love for visual and experimental art. Together with Ismail Farouk, he won the prestigious Highway Africa new media award in 2007 for sowetouprisings.com.

Ismail Farouk has a background in Fine Art and Human Geography. His work explores creative responses to racial, social, political and economic injustice. Farouk is currently employed as a research officer at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, where he is responsible for the running of the Central Citylab and the urban culture portfolio.

Christina McPhee creates topologic site studies of environmental risk in layered, abstract visual and media suites. Her photomontage, drawing, time-based arts and writing concern speculative landscapes between biological and technologically emergent states, making connections between human traumatic memory, disturbed terrains, and bare life. A much exhibited filmmaker and digital artist, her latest project, ‘Tesserae of Venus’, is a science fiction multimedia series on carbon-saturated energy landscapes that will run at Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, from October to December 2009. Currently, she is visiting lecturer in the graduate program of Digital Arts and New Media (DANM), University of California–Santa Cruz.