Small File Media Festival
August 10 鈥� 20, 2020 | Online
$1 membership & by donation
Live-streaming events
Opening festivities: August 10, 2:00 PM PDT
Awards ceremony: August 20, 2:00 PM PDT
Small-file production roundtables: August 13 & 18, 2:00 PM PDT
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What do cat videos, facial recognition and porn all have in common? You can find them at the first annual Small File Media Festival!
The First Annual Small File Media Festival celebrates low-bandwidth movies that stream with no damage to the planet! Streaming video has an alarmingly high carbon footprint: it鈥檚 the cause of about .* But these movies at under 5 megabytes each 鈥� about the size of a small PDF file 鈥� show that great cinema doesn鈥檛 have to mean great big files.
We received over 100 submissions from around the world. Artists found many ways to work with the small-file constraint. Animation! GIFs! Low frame rates! Datamoshing! Still images with sound! Movies made with 鈥渙bsolete鈥� technologies! Websites! Executable files! Very short movies! And movies creatively compressed into small files. We鈥檝e got narrative, documentary, and experimental movies. We鈥檝e got cat videos! And we鈥檝e got porn鈥攂ecause streaming porn is responsible for 0.3% of greenhouse gas emissions.
Our programming committee, which includes Festival co-organizers Sophia Biedka and Joey Malbon, artist Faune Ybarra, media scholar Radek Przedpe艂ski, IT engineer Alejandro Rodriguez-Silva, and Festival founder Laura U. Marks, is curating all these tiny movies into aesthetically satisfying thematic programs.
Programs will be available on our Vimeo platform August 10 鈥� 20, 2020, by paying a $1 membership and optional donation. Donations will support the Second Annual Small File Media Festival. All artists receive a rental fee.
Come join us and celebrate the beauty of the small file!
Contact us: info@smallfile.ca
Guidelines
- File size restricted to 5 megabytes of fun!
- Size to aim for: 1 megabyte per minute Length: 1-5 minutes
- Must record/submit processing/encoding time
- Looping media welcomed
Categories
- Aesthetic Invention
- Supersmall files (how low can you go!)
- Narrative
- Documentary
- Porn
- Sports
- Cat videos
- Animation
- GIFs
- 鈥極bsolete鈥� technologies
- Pre and post-apocalyptic media
- Cross-platform works (one version for live screening, another for streaming. Please include one minute excerpt of the live work)
Anything Imaginable!
The Small File Media Festival grows out of the School for the Contemporary Arts at 丁香园AV, Vancouver, Canada, on unceded Coast Salish territory of the 鈥揝岣祑x瘫w煤7mesh (Squamish), St贸:l艒 and S蓹l虛铆lw蓹ta蕯/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and x史m蓹胃k史蓹y虛蓹m (Musqueam) nations. We are grateful for funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.