Call for Work 2024 / Small File Media Festival
/Organization:
The Cinematheque
Deadline:
Jun. 15, 2024
Website:
http://www.smallfile.ca/submit
Call for Artists Description:
CALL FOR WORK:
Fifth Annual Small File Media Festival, October 18-19, 2024
“High Five! Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand”
Media artists and eco-activist friends, give us a HIGH FIVE! It’s the Small File Media Festival’s fifth anniversary! Since 2020, we’ve been raising awareness about the environmental impact of streaming media. We challenge media makers to intervene in the 4K dystopia of bandwidth imperialism by creating original small-file movies of any length, proving once again that small files are THE sustainable cinematic avant-garde.
Streaming comprises a significant chunk of the world’s digital carbon footprint. About 4% of global greenhouse gasses are due to ICT—the same as the airline industry—and rising fast! At least 1% of that is entirely from streaming. And yet! Consumers intoxicated by corporate media’s siren song continue to stream all kinds of media in high definition – video chat, video conferencing, high-resolution online games, Tik Toks, Instagram Reels, and energy-sucking AI utopias. Here’s the research.
The 2024 Small File Media Festival continues our partnership with the legendary The Cinematheque and our future-forward friends at VIVO Media Arts and Cairo Video Festival for a fabulous IRL festival this October! As always, the festival will also stream online at www.smallfile.ca. Help save the planet by shifting to Small-File aesthetics with craftily composed, elegantly performed, and artfully compressed movies, in any genre you dare reinvent.
How to Apply:
Submit at www.smallfile.ca/submit
If you’ve made it, you can submit it – as long as it’s no more than 1.44MB per minute. Do the math friends – if your work is only ten seconds long then that’s only 144KB! (Why 1.44MB? Because that’s the storage capacity of a floppy disk. Cute huh!) But feel free to limbo even lower.
You can make Small File Classics (video, movie) or a Small File MiniVerse (executables, websites, demoscene, GIFs, games, interactive media, you tell us!) This year we are encouraging longer works (minimum 2-3 minutes) but if you have something short, submit under MiniFlops!
To help celebrate your awesome EcoMedia, we will need the following details of your work to complete your submission:
Processing/Compression Time: total number of minutes elapsed during all rendering, datamoshing, and/or compression techniques, to acknowledge how much energy is consumed in the creation of your work!
Versioning: We encourage artists to make versions of their projects for different uses and platforms. Movies screened theatrically and as installations do not need to be as small as media streamed online. If you have work that you previously made for a large, local presentation, send us an Ecomedia version for streaming!
Submitting Multiple Files: We accept multiple submissions. We’ll ask you to indicate whether they are standalone works or to be reviewed as a series.
Selected Movies: Artists will receive the base CARFAC streaming rate for each piece accepted. Selected works will be awarded the coveted crystalist Small File Mini Bear trophy and screening awards from our partners!
Fees/Compensation:
Artists will receive the base CARFAC streaming rate for each piece accepted.
Contact Name: Joni Schinkel
Contact Email: info@smallfile.ca
Contact Phone: (403) 651-6991
