As packed as the global calendar for digital events can be, there are certain spots where you just say, “damn, I wish I had been there” — and the Mapping Festival in Geneva, Switzerland fits on that list for us. The good news: there’s still time to mark your calendar for May in Switzerland, and on top of it the call for works has been generously extended through February 9, so you still have a shot at being one of the visualist superstars at the show.

And yes, there will be mapping of the projection kind, too.

Sponsors/organizers include the ubiquitous VJ app:
Modul8 | cdmo tag

Sponsors/co-organizers this year include the excellent and highly underrated touch-enabled Usine modular music environment:
Create Digital Music » Modular Sound by Touch: Usine
… and

toby*spark wrote for CDM about the awesomeness (and, apparently, “nakedness”):

The first two Mapping Festivals quickly became legendary. An audio line-up worthy of a music festival, a cream of visualists married to a playground of seemingly a thousand projectors… Complete with dormitories above and sofa-strewn cinema to the side, the party didn’t stop.
Now in its fourth edition, Mapping has changed into a two/three week showcase split between the original venue ‘le zoo, pour les animeaux nocturnes’ and Geneva’s modern arts centre hosting gallery installations and an audio-visual stage.

Create Digital Motion » AVSocial>Node08>Mapping>Vision’r, With Resolume 3 and FreeFrameGL Preview

Organizer Boris Edelstein writes about the 2009 edition of the fest:

The Mapping festival is an international AV festival based in Geneva, Switzerland.

The festival begun around VJ culture and electronic music, then it evolved to live images in contemporary art, audiovisual performances, interactive installations, workshops and lectures.

For the 5th edition, the festival will take place in art spaces, club, cinema and open air in selected places in the city and will last 10 days.

For more background:

Pictures of the last edition : [note: plenty of that NSFW nakedness in here]
http://www.ork.ch/mapping/mapping08/index.html

You can also read a blog from Ilan Katin about the 2007 edition :
http://www.mappingfestival.com/blog/

05, 06, 07, 08 website editions :
http://www.mappingfestival.com/mapping2005/
http://www.mappingfestival.com/mapping2006/index4.html
http://www.mappingfestival.com/mapping2007/
http://www.mappingfestival.com/mapping2008/

Submit:

The organizers are looking for VJ sets, audiovisual performances, installations, projections (indoor and outdoor), and the usual lecture-workshop-presentation-demo stuff. Postmark deadline is February 9. Details on applying (and the 2009 festival):

Mapping Festival VJING & AUDIOVISUEL 8- 17 MAI 2009 – GENEVE SUISSE (recently updated, if you haven’t been by lately)