SFMF Winners!
Here are the awards for the first annual Small File Media Festival, which ran online from August 10 – 20, 2020.
The SFMF's programming committee included Festival co-organizers Sophia Biedka and Joey Malbon, artist Faune Ybarra, media scholar Radek Przedpełski, IT engineer Alejandro Rodriguez-Silva, and Festival founder Laura U. Marks.
Audience choice
- First Place – Hân Phạm, Once Upon a Time
- Second Place – tie: Trevor Byrne, Sticky Note Studies #1 & #2 (Orange and Pink) + François Quevillon, Exhaust
Youth choice – Phoebe Todd-Parrish, Searching:
Smallest file – Daniel Carter, Star Trek: Voyager Intro in 283kb
Aesthetic invention tie – Azadeh Emadi, Entangled Orb + Andy Catsirelis, Noise of the Stream
Best Cat Video – Pierre Leicher, Catfessions #1
Best Narrative – Colin Williscroft, O’Hara Lane
Best Documentary – Mike Hazard, Something from nothing (Dr. Evermor)
Best Porn – Dooley Murphy, Shameless Plug
Best Animation – Ben Mosher, Cloud Loaves
Best Obsolete technology – Ashley Blewer, Throttled
Best Post-apocalyptic – John Tinneny, The End
Best Cross-platform work—Nathan Wyatt Kiesman, New Beginnings
Curators’ Choice – Leanne Dunic, Melt
Best Actor – Weihan Zhou, Moththth
Most Sensuous – Paul Clay & Sarah Kantrowitz, I Missed You
Best new media idiocy – Hany Rashed, My Instagram
Best underdog – Daupo, And Success Will Be Your Name
Aesthetics Forum | Monday August 17, 2020.
Lovers of “obsolete” technologies, elegant programming, and pixels for themselves gather to debate the aesthetics of media under 5 megabytes. With Mena El Shazly, Azadeh Emadi, Laura Marks, and Radek Przdepełski.
Makers Forum | Thursday, August 13, 2020
Get the inside scoop on what makes the small files of the Small File Media Festival tick featuring: Beau Bridge, Lindsey Arturo, Sol Sarratea, Ilvs Strauss, Colin Williscroft, Drew Sisk, Aaron Tucker, Jason Livingston, Sarah Kantrowitz, Andy Catsirelisa and Han Pham!
Opening Ceremonies | Monday, August 10, 2020
Festival organizers and programmers welcome makers and audiences to the festival and explain what it’s about and how it works, featuring Dr. Laura U. Marks, Radek Przedpelsk, Sophie Biedka, Faune Ybarra, Sanjana Mahajan and Joey Malbon.
About the 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’s the cause of about 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions.* But these movies at under 5 megabytes each — about the size of a small PDF file — show that great cinema doesn’t 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 “obsolete” technologies! Websites! Executable files! Very short movies! And movies creatively compressed into small files. We’ve got narrative, documentary, and experimental movies. We’ve got cat videos! And we’ve got porn—because streaming porn is responsible for 0.3% of greenhouse gas emissions.
Contact us: info@smallfile.ca
smalfile.ca
The Small File Media Festival grows out of the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, on unceded Coast Salish territory of the –Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) nations. We are grateful for funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.