Beta will host a series of screenings on Sunday 3rd November, featuring new work from the Small File Media Festival selected by Beta team members Jennifer O’Brien and Andy Chirali followed by screenings of work from Superflux and Rachel Maclean.
The Small File Media Festival
The Small File Media Festival returns for its fifth iteration of eco-conscious moving-image artistry. Characterised by their small digital footprint and huge environmental impact, these small-file ecomedia embrace the aesthetics of file compression and low resolution and lay the groundwork for a new experimental film movement in the digital age. Small File Media festival challenges 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. Watching small-file media together on a big screen brings the democratic potential of cinema into the digital age by showcasing artworks made with eco-friendly practices, affordable equipment, and minimal processing time. How small is a small-file movie? No more than 1.44 megabytes per minute, the storage size of a floppy disk. Small-file creators use ingenious techniques to make these tiny movies beautiful and effective.
Beta Festival will screen a curated selection of the films chosen by Jennifer O’Brien and Andy Chirali.
The Intersection - Superflux
Drawing inspiration from recent events, the Intersection reckons with our relationship to modern technology and tells stories of active hope from those who have fought to reimagine that tech in order to serve community and support nature. The story features a diverse series of protagonists individually recounting their past experiences with modern technology and exploring their place in the future they now live in.
The concept work investigated how to give narrative and visceral form to ideas of “ambient technology” interwoven not just in social and civic life but also how it perpetuated racial injustice, and how extractive capitalism exacerbated its effects.
The aim of the film is to engage us all in contributing to an imaginative future where, irrespective of our identities and experiences, we can successfully recognize shared challenges and work jointly to imagine responses that benefit everyone.
Superflux creates worlds, stories and guiding visions that provoke and inspire us to engage with the precarity of our rapidly changing world.
Founded by Anab Jain and Jon Ardern, the studio has gained critical acclaim for producing work that navigates the entangled wilderness of our technological, political and cultural landscape. Continually exploring the hinterlands of this new normal and surveying the complex forms emerging on the horizon of our near future.
Clients and exhibitors include Google, IKEA, and UNDP, La Biennale di Venezia, and MoMA NY.
For its fifteen years of contribution to speculative and futures design with a committed social mission, Superflux received the Design Studio of the Year Award in 2021.
You can follow Superflux on Instagram @superfluxstudio and Twitter @Superflux
DUCK - Rachel Maclean
DUCK is a classic spy thriller turned on its head. With an all-star cast including a deep-fake Sean Connery and a deep-fake Marilyn Monroe (all played by Maclean), DUCK deconstructs this well-loved genre into something that is at once a satisfying slice of pop-culture bingo and a look at our age of fake news, virtual realities and alternative facts. But you know what they say: if it looks like a duck…
Over the last 10 years Rachel Maclean has shown widely in the UK and internationally. She produces elaborate films and digital prints using costumes, exaggerate make-up, green screen visual effects and electronic soundtracks. Her artwork is both seductive and disturbing. It sucks the viewer into oversaturated candy coloured worlds and repels them with unsettling themes and narratives. Until recently she has been the only actor in her creations, exploring issues of identity, class, nationalism and gender, whilst referencing narrative structures from pop culture and fairy-tales. She has had solo shows at Kunsthalle zu Kiel Germany, Arsenal Contemporary New York, Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden Germany, National Gallery London, Zabludowicz Collection London, Talbot Rice Gallery Edinburgh, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, National Gallery of Australia Canberra Artpace San Antonio Texas, HOME Manchester and Tate Britain. Her work A Whole New World won the prestigious Margaret Tait Award in 2013, she has twice been shortlisted for the Jarman Award, and achieved widespread critical praise for Feed Me in British Art Show 8 in 2016. She has also worked on various TV commissions with the BBC and Channel 4, as her most recent film commission Make Me Up 2018. Maclean represented Scotland + Venice at the Venice Biennale 2017.
