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.