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Festival: Mandate
Maid in Cyberspace is an annual international media arts festival exploring
the various facets of digital technology and the World Wide Web as a
medium for the creation and exhibition of artistic works by women. The
festival occupies the singular position of being one of the only Canadian
events entirely dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of independent
Web and network based media artworks, its particularity also being emphasized
by its cyber-feminist approach, concerns and engagements. Maid in Cyberspace
has world-wide notoriety - its Web site received more than 800,000 hits
during the month of February 2002, of which more than 350, 000 were
registered within the week of the event itself. It represents a highly
anticipated and frequented moment for all those who are interested in
contemporary new media creation.
As such the festival investigates the particularities associated with
and embedded within contemporary Web-based practices that must consider
problematics such as dynamic programming, generative interfaces, computational
linguistics, hypermedia and net ecology. Moreover, these general theoretical
and esthetic concerns find themselves appropriated, critiqued and deconstructed
by feminist agendas intermingled with cultural and socio-political realities,
the festival becoming a platform and privileged moment to expose and
create a critical space for women's contribution to, contamination and
construction of cyberspace itself.
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