Ithaca College

As part of its yearlong rollout of blogs, screenings and online user-generated events, Ithaca College’s Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) is seeking entries for the first of three juried social media contests centered on “Open Spaces,” FLEFF’s 2009–10 program stream.

The contest — Define Open Space — will be judged by three prominent international experts who will award $500 to the top project in each contest, with additional awards of $100 for two honorable mentions in each category. Two additional contests — Make Open Space and Compose Open Space — will be rolled out in late May and June, respectively.

The submission deadline for Define Open Space is July 17. Submission is free, but entrants are required to register their submissions online. The registration form, along with detailed submission instructions, is available at www.ithaca.edu/fleff10/define.

“In choosing Open Space as the program stream for FLEFF 2009–10, we wanted to offer an online exploration of all the definitions, topographies, cartographies, places, ideas, concepts, and actions that help us understand that concept,” said Patricia Zimmermann, codirector of FLEFF. “These three user-generated contests offer rich opportunities to combine art, music and writing with social media to expand the ways we see, hear and describe open space.”

In submitting to Define Open Space, contestants are invited to submit one image and one sentence to the collaborative Open Space Dictionary. Judges are novelist Sorayya Khan (USA), writer and activist Tim McCaskell (Canada), and poet Kole Ade-Odutola (Nigeria)

Author of the novels “Noor” and the forthcoming “Five Queen’s Road,” Khan has published in such literary journals as “The Kenyon Review,” “North American Review” and “Asian American Pacific Journal.”

McCaskell is the author of “Race to Equity: Disrupting Educational Inequality Workshop,” an exploration of the experiments, successes and mistakes in the Toronto Board of Education’s quest to provide truly equitable education for a diverse student body.

A member of the Association of Nigerian Authors and a founding member of the Coalition of Nigerian Artists, Ade-Odutola has published several volumes of poetry and has coordinated the film forum for the Goethe Institute in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city.

FLEFF 2009–10 began last September and will continue through August. To keep current with the blogs, announcements and user-generated events, visit www.ithaca.edu/fleff.

Major funding for FLEFF Open Spaces 2009–10 has been provided by Ithaca College’s Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies and the Park Foundation.

Launched in 1997, the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival was an outreach project from the Center for the Environment at Cornell University. In 2005 the festival moved permanently to Ithaca College, where it is housed in the Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies as a program to link intellectual inquiry and debate to larger global issues.