call for submissions - Maid In Cyberspace Festival

[festival]

APOLOGIES FOR CROSS POSTING -- PLEASE DISTRIBUTE
____________________________________________________________

Maid in Cyberspace Festival 06
Active Agent / Radicale libre
Call for Submissions - Critical Essays

The Maid In Cyberspace Festival - held annually in Montreal, Canada - is
seeking submissions for its publication. The 6th edition of the festival
will take place between February 4 - 8, 2003 and is an international
cyberfeminist event featuring contemporary Web art works, installations,
performances and conferences. Essay submissions should be between 4-5
pages in length (1000 - 1250 words) and inkeeping with the theme of the
event (please see below).

Deadline : January 3rd, 2003
For further information or to submit texts, please contact Karen Wong at
festival at studioxx.org.
www.studioxx.org

Theme

In the politico-geographical arena, heavily charged with oppressive
discourses, how does one raise courageous and bold voices, voices which
dare and act in the drifts of cyberspace? How does one practice
resistances, not according to parameters imposed by others, but by those
originating from the ingenuity of individuals and networks, based upon a
necessary and critical solidarity, and a desire to counter domineering
dogmas and regimes? In continuity with its critical investigations on
women and their appropriation of technologies, Studio XX focuses on
subversive acts by 'intelligent agents' and cultural hackers who push
for original languages in order to redefine the stakes in question.

 >From such acts come questions on notions and protocols of access, the
numerous strategies that women use to invest virtual spaces and to
impose their own realities. The possibilities evoked in the proposed
examinations include programming languages, hacking, frontiers,
privilege, open source, accessibility and transgression.

There is also question of alternative customs and uses, nonetheless
valuable and born out of the economic divide which widens increasingly;
localised strategies which mix into the composition of immediate,
polymorphic and planetary phenomenas. Living flux and new alliances,
mobile in the magma of active data, behind which we discover these
operators, resolutely insolent, active agents, radical and free&