Urban Screens Melbourne 08

Urban Screens Melbourne 08 is the third, ground-breaking international conference and multimedia exhibition in a series of worldwide events around the redefinition of a growing digital infrastructure of moving images in public space. It will mark the official launch of the International Urban Screens Association and will take place 3.-8. October at Federation Square, Melbourne. Federation Square is a unique cultural and community oriented multimedia precinct, centred around a significant 38m2 public LED screen complemented with other digital elements.

The Urban Screens 08 exhibition is looking for Artists, Filmmakers, Multimedia and Interaction Designers and Urban Poets, to submit film and videos or multimedia, interactive or participatory screen based projects. A large diverse urban screens infrastructure is available at Federation Square.

Criteria

We are mainly looking for potentially adaptable projects that interrogate screen media as a medium|content and tackle the festival?s key themes of issues of either community building and reflecting on today's communities or sustainability in relation to water. These two complex themes aim to provoke discussion and spark questions such as:

What is a community in times of the high-speed, global flows of the new media scape? Are we a step closer to the idea of a global community, a global public sphere? What are the places where a community can meet today? The event will explore the various possibilities to engage with Urban Screens for community building. But also how we can utilize the screens to support the promotion of social and environmental sustainability.

The theme of water is bridging and connecting both of these concepts. Water is an essential element for a liveable public space. Wells, fountains and riversides are all social meeting places that create an engaging urban environment for all ages, as well as influencing the urban microclimate. Fresh water is essential for human wellbeing but has threatened to become a scare resource. How can we explore the diversity of water, an element, essential to the existence of life on earth?

For a detailed description of the curatorial framework click here.
For a detailed description of Fed Squares infrastructure click here.

The projects should preferably employ one or more of the listed existing infrastructure of urban screens of Fed Square and should consider and adapt to the special circumstances of outdoor public spaces, transforming urban spaces to foster dialogue and community engagement. We are looking for:

A) Film and video such as

- Video art, text art, animation, animated slideshows, or fictional advertisements and community information (under 3 min.)
- Silent works especially for the joint broadcasting or daily screenings in-between (under 3 min.)
- Short experimental films, documentary and journalistic content (under 15 min.)
- Small curated programs of the mentioned type of works

B) Interactive, performance based or participatory projects such as

- Interactive software applications for urban screens
- Participatory community projects using creative digital practices
- Live media art merging performance and new media
- Community displays for education and exchange
- Virtual/real world hybrid projects using streaming content
- Real-time generated content
- Screen related sound experiments
- Digital storytelling projects
- Mobile games using urban space as social and educative playground
- Connecting mobile culture of locative media with urban screens

Application and Detailed Call