Praise for Small Files!

“The Small File Media Festival opens up a new world of thinking and creating media art; one that is innovative, intelligent, beautiful, joyful, and environmentally friendly. Each artwork, although small in size, is highly experiential and imaginative as if containing other intertwined worlds within their minuscule sizes. Figures turn into pixels while pixels become alive on the screen, time-laps gives stillness, and glitches become narratives.  Small files offer a process, an exchange, between the artist and data. We are of electrons and so are the tiny files. At a time of growing awareness of our global and environmental interconnectedness (because of an impalpable harmful entity), the small file is leading us toward new forms and narratives that allow us to sense and nurture this interconnected matrix. “

-Dr. Azadeh Emadi, University of Glasgow

“The Small File Festival is a triumph of micro-media. Compressed in both time and data, the videos here paradoxically expand our view of the world with images that are both familiar and illogical. Seems like exactly the right sensibility for our current moment, when so much feels both monotonous and radically unstable.”

– Sarah Bay-Chang, Dean of the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design at York University

“The Small File Media Festival works in defense of the tiny image, to riff with Hito Steyerl’s earlier phrase. Size matters, and small is better, tiny is best, which is not merely to argue for a different aesthetics or narrative structures (that too) but also for an understanding that all media is media ecology – and as such, directly related to infrastructures with environmental costs.”
– Professor Jussi Parikka, media scholar, University of Southampton and Academy of Performing Arts, Prague”