The Small File Media Festival was founded in 2020 to raise awareness of the high carbon footprint of streaming media. The festival proposes alternative solutions for media practice, as well as modes of thinking otherwise in media theory, which converged in an online festival of sustainable experimental media organized annually.

The Small File Media Festival features Small-File Ecomedia, movies compressed at a rate of 1/mb per minute each, showing that great cinema doesn’t have to mean great big files. This lo-fi intervention draws from both do it yourself (DiY) movements and computer-based artistic practices. Practitioners can utilize free, cross-platform apps including Handbrake, Any Video Converter and AVIDMUX to compress moving-image content to a fraction of its original size. Some artists use these aesthetic tools to manipulate the granular materiality of digital media objects. 

Small files…

• Cannot exceed one megabyte per minute of duration.
• include Films, video, media art, HTML submissions, NFTs and executable files (sky limit)
• Are an INTERVENTION of big, carbon spewing HD streaming media.
• Like to be created with obsolete devices 
• are NOT just an object but a practice based upon making and knowledge sharing