Surviving Collapse Gracefully with Small Files

Our planet is choking on the greenhouse-gas farts produced by data centers, devices, and networks, all because people in the wealthy world have learned the bad habits of streaming high-resolution video, playing high-resolution games, and asking AI apps to think for them. Please don’t believe the hype that these technologies, in their manufacture and use, run on renewable energy: it’s mostly gas, oil, and ‘beautiful clean coal’.

If we want to keep our dear Earth from going up in flames, it’s time to step away from the growth-based economy and embrace collapse informatics: sociotechnical design for radically decreased consumption. The wealthy parts of the world must model sustainable infrastructures on those of poorer countries. In terms of networked media, some Arabic-speaking countries are among the world’s worst environmental criminals, due to the combination of fossil-fuel dependency and bloated infrastructure, while others have the potential to be models of modest sustainability.

Let me introduce small-file movies, movies that stream at low bitrate. Ideal for regions where infrastructure is light and electricity intermittent, they are the only sustainable form of streaming video. As this programme shows, small-file media artists are the sustainable avant-garde, using ingenious methods to meet the Small File Media Festival’s radical bitrate criterion of 1.44 megabytes per minute. Some small-file artists choose to retain image quality, often by filming with a lo-fi camera or deploying rich-looking animation techniques, as Neda Sangtarash does here. Others, like Amal Shafek and Ghada Sayegh, exploit the aesthetics of video compression.

I project that the collapse infrastructures of the near future will still be able to stream at somewhat higher bitrates, say 5 megabytes per minute. For that high-res experience, we can go to the movies or share DVDs! But these small-file films teach that there are many things to love in a streaming movie besides resolution. I invite you to relax your ocular muscles and lean in.

– Laura U. Marks

Snow in Dallas! A creak of snow underfoot; a catch of breath in the sudden cold – and I can’t quite see, for the crystals caught in my eyelashes. Pixel blocks gather around the Shafek’s body like a soft pastel blanket, as the artist takes advantage of compression aesthetics to protect her image.

Sangtarash’s superb hand-drawn animation erupts like lava in a merrily queasy metamorphic flow, made lightly boxy by compression. Bougainvillea captures the logic of dreams and of children’s logic – for what does an adult mean when she asks a quiet child: ‘Did a mouse eat your tongue?’

With melancholic devotion Sayegh revisits the road by the port of Beirut, a city that recalls herself to ‘you who seem to have pretended to forget / that the end of the world has already taken place’. Compression distributes feeling across the visual field; a silvery layer of datamoshing fills the skies with memory-like artifacts.