Friends in Canada, I plead with you to contact your political leaders
I work on media art and philosophy with an intercultural focus, and on small-footprint media. I program experimental media for venues around the world. As Grant Strate University Professor, I teach in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, on unceded Coast Salish territory of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō, Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) nations.
The 2023 Small File Media Festival was a wild success! Thanks to all the artists, audiences, and speakers, live and online, who brought their small-file love. https://smallfile.ca/
My book The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos will be published in March 2024 by Duke University Press. See some of its early iterations here
Talks
“Small Files to Heal Cinema’s Environmental Sickness,” talk at Film Criticism Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, November 10-12. Though I do not like the Saudi government, I am attending to support the great organizers.
“Streaming Carbon Footprint,” conversation with David Rokeby sponsored by Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER), BMO Lab, University of Toronto . November 7, 5 pm. Directions *note new date and place
“Healthy Living for Monads: Do We Need a Multiverse?”, talk at Traill College, Trent University, Peterborough, ON. October 31, 7 pm.
“Healthy Living for Monads: Do We Need a Multiverse?”, talk at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. September 26
“Cosmic Soul-Assemblages and Small-File Films,” talk in e-flux lecture series "Film beyond Film," e-flux Screening Room, Brooklyn. September 28
Talk on streaming video carbon footprint at Cynopsis Big TV Conference, New York. September 27
“Healthy Living for Monads: Do We Need a Multiverse?”, talk at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. September 26
“Small-File Elegance for a Smaller Carbon Footprint,” keynote talk, 34th Annual Society for Animation Studies conference, Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ. June 12-15.
"Small Files for a Small World," masterclass in Adi Kuntsman’s Digital Politics online school. June 5.
“The Small File Media Festival,” talk in the roundtable “Sustainable Feminism? Queer-feminist film and media studies as sustainable practice,” Screenwise: Debates of Contemporary Queer Feminist Film and Media (Studies), Vienna. June 2. By videoconference.
“Small-file media, compression aesthetics, nonorganic life,” talk in the roundtable “Abstraction and the Aesthetics of Movement,” SCMS annual conference, Denver. April 13.
"Bill Viola: Immanence and Unfolding,” talk in the symposium “Bill Viola and Mysticism,” Monterrey Museum of Contemporary Art. April 1. By videoconference.
“The Small File Media Festival,” at the Small File Photo Festival, Photographers Gallery, London. January 28, 2023. By videoconference.
"Soul-assemblage media," Kracauer Lectures in Film and Media Theory, Institut für Theater-, Film und Medienwissenschaft, Goethe Universität, Frankfurt. January 10, 2023.
The Substantial Motion Research Network
Inspired by process philosopher Sadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī, Azadeh Emadi and I founded SMRN in 2018 for scholars and practitioners interested in cross-cultural exploration of digital media, art and philosophy.
See documentation of our massive June 2022 event A Light Footprint in the Cosmos here
The Small File Media Festival
The Fourth Annual Small File Media Festival is coming! October 20-21 at Vancouver's legendary Cinemathèque, and streaming at low bandwidth worldwide the following week. Featuring 65 gorgeous movies of no more than 1.44 MB/minute—the storage size of a floppy disk! See past programs, creative small-file tips, and more here
Tackling the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media
New publications!
Dr. Anne Foerster: The Restorative Brain
My neuroscientist mother's research on spontaneous regeneration in the central nervous system!
lmarks [ ] sfu [ ] ca
