Yuri Yefanov, still from "Nehelious,” 2017, 10.5 minutes, 14MB, Ukraine (photo courtesy of the Small File Media Festival and the artists)
Digital communication consumes an inordinate amount of electricity, and streaming is the biggest polluter of all.
This year’s Small File Media Festival, on view October 18 and 19 at Vancouver’s Cinematheque is an artist-led response to what the festival calls “bandwidth imperialism and our compulsive addiction to data that is cleaner, sharper, and instantaneously accessible.”
Founded in 2020 by Dr. Laura Marks, a film and media professor with the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, the festival aims to prove we can produce and consume digital media that is ecologically sustainable.
This year’s participants have produced more than 60 digital productions in a bit rate of 1.44 megabytes per minute, well under the norm, by recording with obsolete equipment such as a mini DV, Game Boy or Fisher-Price camera or purposely degrading output by data moshing (removing key pixels) and excessive video compression.
The goal is to make content with as little energy as possible and, in doing so, change the way we perceive and process information. Like Francis Bacon’s Screaming Pope, in which the top half of the painting is only suggested, the lack of detail asks the brain to fill in the blanks.
Small file media is elemental. Manipulating those components we consider a key to understanding such as coherence, repetition, and pacing, produces a specific aesthetic or as the festival's managing director (and Galleries West contributor) Yani Kong says “in the absence of representation, [tiny movies] become sensation.”
Tewihigan Bluesky, still from “We Hate Stuff,” 2024, 2.5 minutes, 3.5MB, Canada (photo courtesy of the Small File Media Festival and the artists)
Liquid Snake Dance, for example, is a one-and-a-half-minute computer-generated animation in which coloured abstract shapes dance across the frame, their edges blurred by data moshing to resemble clouds. I saw the head of a Tyrannosaurus Rex before it melded into yet another amorphous form. You may see something else.
What My Heart Wanted, on the other hand, is a nine-minute lens-based narrative. Shot in 16mm, the camera lingers on two young women blissfully content to be in each others company while watching a movie. The narrator tells us in loving, hushed tones what she admires about her companion. There is no action and no camera movement (panning or zooming would consume more energy). The artist has conformed to the eco-friendly guidelines yet the emotional impact of the story hasn’t suffered, in fact it’s been enhanced because, devoid of visual distractions, the eye is focussed on the two subjects.
Audio in an important part of small file media. Fresh-cut grass is an American construct, “a manufactured smell, the lie that you see,” the narrator tells us in the four-minute video In the Weeds. A sea of green fills the frame. The soundtrack then pivots to American involvement in Gaza.
“Mowing the lawn, is the expression they use,” says the narrator. The camera remains fixed on greenery, a stronger statement, in my opinion, than cutting to newsreel footage. Using audio to complement the visuals is a popular device as audio carries a smaller data load than shooting scenes.
Julie Andreyev, still from "Rockstar Reduced," 2013-2024, six minutes, 8.4MB, Canada (photo courtesy of the Small File Media Festival and the artist)
The highlight of the festival is the 47-minute documentary App 666. “This is real cinema,” one of its subjects says, dismissive of Hollywood’s manufactured reality. App 666 is raw, both in its subject matter and its execution. On-camera interviews are strung together without colour correction, proper lighting or clean audio. The images are degraded.
Does it matter? The speakers are passionate about the future of independent cinema. At one point we lose one of them in the night sky. The screen goes black. A more pertinent question would be does going dark enhance the authenticity of the messenger and the message? App 666, like others in the Small File Media Festival prioritizes content over gloss.
The festival’s global partners, The Cairo Video Festival and Amsterdam’s digital laboratory, The Hmm, will be helping the festival adjudicate prizes. The festival will be available to the public online October 21. ■
The Small File Media Festival is on from October 18 to 19 at Cinematheque in Vancouver, with a fifth anniversary party and opening celebration October 17 at The Lido.
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