SMALL FILE DIY WEB
A WORKSHOP WITH DEANNA PETERS / MUTABLE SUBJECT
FRIDAY, JANUARY 27, 2023 | 2:30 PM | FREE
DJAVAD MOWAFAGHIAN WORLD ART CENTRE (2ND FLOOR)
SFU GOLDCORP CENTRE FOR THE ARTS, 149 WEST HASTINGS STREET, VANCOUVER
Please join us for a free workshop on DIY “50KB” web design with SCA alumnus Deanna Peters / Mutable Subject.
In this hands-on, bring-your-own-laptop workshop, multidisciplinary artist, dancer, and web designer Deanna Peters will show you useful, accessible strategies to hack and reduce your website, while still staying creative, design-forward, highly responsive, and especially less environmentally burdensome.
No prior web design experience is necessary, but even experienced designers will discover great tips and tricks. And remember: bring your own computer!
Presented by the Small File Media Festival.
BIOGRAPHY
Deanna Peters / Mutable Subject is an independent artist working in and around dance for the past 20 years. Deanna choreographs, performs and produces live shows for the stage, club, online and DIY spaces. Also a web designer, DP codes online exhibition spaces and interactive artworks. Mutable Subject’s work subverts distinctions between so-called “high” and “low” art. It’s all dance: mutablesubject.ca.
Small File Photo Festival
THE PHOTOGRAPHERS GALLERY LONDON
6:00pm, Sat 28 Jan 2023
A mini festival encouraging and celebrating small size photography!!
After three inspiring years of celebrating the Small File Media Festival, The Photographers’ Gallery digital programme brings the Small File Photo Festival! 🎉🗜❤️
The first image on the web appeared 30 years ago. It was approximately 12 kilobytes. Today, the average size of an image on the internet is 2100 kilobytes (2.1 MB), while 80% of web traffic consists of visual material. Networks, data centres, and all the devices connecting to them add up to a whopping 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. A recent research study conducted with UK adults shows that unwanted pictures alone, lingering in the cloud, release about 355,000 tonnes of CO2 every year — the equivalent to 112,500 flights from London to Perth, Australia and back.
Camera manufacturers, IT companies and streaming platforms endlessly push for higher resolutions to market their latest products. Meanwhile smaller images offer wider accessibility and circulation, as well as an exciting and diverse range of aesthetic possibilities to explore.
We are demanding—unleash creative r/evolution! We are demanding—destroy the large-file clichés of thinking that prevent us from imaging a world otherwise!- Small File Media Festival
The Small File Photo Festival advocates for alternatives to high tech photorealistic aesthetics traditionally linked to notions of truth and objectivity. It aims to encourage experimentation with more efficient digital image formats and their specific visual qualities. This is in connection to the research of Marloes de Valk, PhD researcher in a collaborative programme by The Photographers’ Gallery and the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, on the environmental impact of the networked image.
Why small files? Because streaming media is killing the planet.
NETWORKS, DATA CENTERS, AND DEVICES CONTRIBUTE A WHOPPING 4% OF GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS.
Small files to the rescue!
Founded in 2020, the Small File Media Festival (SFMF) is a media-arts festival that raises awareness about the environmental impact of streaming media, which is calculated to contribute 1% of greenhouse gas emissions and rising fast. Streaming comprises a significant proportion of the carbon footprint of information and communication technologies (ICT), which is calculated to contribute about 4% of global greenhouse gases, about the same as the airline industry. ICT is composed of the data centers, networks, and devices that store, transmit, and display all our social media, videos, photos, and other large files, cryptocurrency, artificial-intelligence applications, etc. All these uses require huge amounts of electricity, and about 79% of global electricity comes from fossil fuels: hence the large carbon footprint.
Our associated research team confirmed these figures in a 2020 SSHRC-funded survey of the ICT engineering literature, which generated a 65-page survey document and numerous academic articles, news articles, interviews, and continuing research.) About a third of that is the infrastructural share that supports streaming media. The whole category is busting out of control as people worldwide, intoxicated by corporate media’s siren songs, stream all kinds of media in high definition, video chat, video conference, and play high-resolution online games, not to mention invest in crypto and get hooked on artificial intelligence apps.
SFMF offers a solution to the rising carbon footprint of streaming through the creation and dissemination of Small-File Ecomedia, low-bandwidth movies of an average of megabyte per minute—a tiny fraction of high-definition video, which is between 60 and 350 megabytes per minute which allows them to be streamed with no damage to the planet. Audiences enjoy small-file movies during our annual online festival and in addition, since 2022, live in the theatre.
International media artists both distinguished and emerging responded to this year’s small-file call for movies that are PUNK/CHIC—forceful and elegant, streamlined, and stealthy, uncompromising in vision, edgy in message. This year we screened over 80 submissions from 18 countries and each artist will receive a CARFAC screening fee for their work.
The 2022 festival ran August 9-14 at the SFU School for the Contemporary Arts in Vancouver, BC, on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Watuth nations, for five days of screenings, workshops and musical performances celebrating earth-cooling, PUNK/CHIC small-file eco media.
Small File Media Festival 
