Small File Media Festival 2022

Name: Small File Media Festival 2022
Location: SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts, Vancouver

August 9—14, 2022

SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts, Vancouver

Programs

Future Ancestors
Night Drive
STRIKE! UNRAVELLING DISSENT
Portals
Heart of Glass
Cruising / Meandering

Affiliated Events

Panels, screenings & more

The Small File Media Festival is back with our crazy third iteration, this year both online and in person!

Join us from 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. We’re going to immerse in tiny movies on the huge screen! We are overjoyed to host the first ever, high-energy Small File Music Showcase with high N-R-G electronic acts Devours, HiNi and the JPEG 2000 Karaoke Explosion on August 12. On August 14 at the festive closing ceremony we’ll hold the world’s first NSFT* auction! All proceeds will go to the artist, and the owner will receive an ultra-tiny certificate of authentication. With lo-fi augmented reality, friendly wi-fi robots, and the incomparably charming Small File Team in attendance, this year’s festivities model fun and planet-friendly appropriate technologies.

Friends around the world can partake in small-file fun as in previous years! You can preview NSFT art August 9-14, join the auction August 14, and enjoy the full festival online, August 16-21.

Why small files? Because streaming media is overheating the planet. Networks, data centers, and devices contribute a whopping 4% of greenhouse gas emissions. 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.

Up to now we have been low-key, we have been playing it nice. But the world is broken. This time we are demanding—stop fossil fuels dependence bringing war and destruction worldwide!** 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!

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. We received over 100 submissions from 18 countries in the categories NSFT art (gleefully lampoon media reliant on fume-belching blockchain); Portals (seed-crystals for rituals and coalitions); the Small-file song contest; and our mind-blowing Other category, in three file sizes! Molecules, infra-small loops and the like, under 1MB; Ripples, works up to 5 MB; and Trouble, bingeworthy series up to 22 MB. As ever, the Small File Team is lovingly curating the accepted works into satisfying thematic programs.

The Small File Media Festival team is Sophia Biedka, Kim Cleroux, Mena El Shazly, Joey Malbon, Laura Marks, Radek Przedpełski, and Faune Ybarra

OFFICIAL SELECTION

Future Ancestors

12 min.

Billions of years away from now, who or what will have been our ancestors? From billions of years ago, what are the remnants we hold? What will have been our radiant future fossil, an exclamation mark for Earth's double helix of resource exploitation, depletion and extinction and the resilience of ancestral spirits and of love?

This program is 71.0 MB.

Night Drive

13 min.

Drive a motorcycle through the woods at night. An arrow of failing speed. They never showed up but you just don't care. An owl hoots as you plunge into your own shadow, but in this pool, in the mirror of the asphalt, what do you see? Marvel at the smell of wet meadow at night. The red sky opens and so does a well of memories: those sticky threads you unravel are ghosts, are ghazals reaching out.

This program is 48.0 MB.

STRIKE! UNRAVELLING DISSENT

7 min.

Do not stand by and watch! Refuse exploitative work, protest the work of cliché, refuse the fixed organisation of time, refuse complacency, crochet your resistance. Denounce toxic patriarchy violently insinuating itself into every situation. The movies in this fierce program surely pack a punch!

This program is 21.0 MB.

Portals

10 min.

"From the perspective of the crystal, we assert that things produce their own time, that there is more than one time depending on the diversity and difference of nature's possibilities." (The Crystalist Manifesto, 1976). Through a wormhole darkly, a hatch opens. The films in this program are little crystalline germs around which new rituals and coalitions can form. They ponder the mystery of a crystal, its vertigo of opaque and transparent faces, its capacity to graft an infinite new reality, the yet-unseen, a roar of contingency, into the mundane.

This program is 59.0 MB.

Heart of Glass

26 min.

"Once I had a love and it was a gas / Soon turned out had a heart of glass." (Debbie Harry, Blondie, 1978). The cold touch of glass, acting under hypnosis like the cast of Werner Herzog's 1976 Heart of Glass, an unfeeling rock surface that goes on forever, unserenaded life-cycles of electronic devices, strange vagaries of flesh liberated from a determinate function, serialisations and permutations of an algorithm. These are non-human affects we don't understand, their workings a black box. Small-file media artists probe this glacial reality with a punk abandon.

This program is 60.0 MB.

Cruising / Meandering

30 min.

Space that is not one, a space that overflows, a space that you yourself are making when you go cruising aimlessly, lost to meandering thoughts, to the desire of a place outside the map. The movies in this category celebrate the freedom of losing your way and making it as you go.

This program is 55.0 MB.

AFFILIATED EVENTS

Opening Ceremonies
August 9, 2022
SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts
Small File Media Festival Ultra Dance Party
August 12, 2022
SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts
Closing Ceremonies
August 14, 2022

PARTNERS

The Small File Media Festival grows out of the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, on unceded territory of the –Sḵwxw̱ ú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səlío lwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) nations. We are grateful for support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.