Polar Film Lab and Tromsø Kunstforening welcomes you to an experimental film festival and a symposium about the ecological impact of image-making.
Full programme will be published later this week - stay tuned!
Check out www.polarfilmlab.com or www.tromsokunstforening.no for more details.
8–11th May
All events are free and in English
There will be coffee, tea and snacks available.
During the symposium there will be lunch for everyone.
As the digital world replaced our analogue one, in our offices, communities and homes, we celebrated the simplification and ‘greening’ of our lives. The removal of the polluting ‘stuff’ we surround ourselves with - the unnecessary files and their cabinets, antiquated books with their paper and ink, and, in the context of image making, the messy tactility of the analogue film: its cumbersome mechanics, its silver emulsion, plastic base and the toxic chemistry involved in developing the image. The future was now and it felt clean, fast and as light as air! We could all consume as much as we wanted.
Decades on, we recognise that we are in a time of undeniable, intersecting environmental crises, hovering on the brink of multiple irreversible tipping points. We are now becoming more aware of the material foundations to this ‘light’ technology, and the politics around its production, ownership and use. Demand for both industrial and consumer technologies keeps rising, where digital images are a massive part—used in every aspect of our lives, produced by every one of us.
In 2024, it is estimated that there were 1.9 trillion images taken, and in the last decade, more images than were taken in the entirety of the 19th and 20th centuries, thanks to the advent of the smartphone.
As the Arctic melts, we are on the cusp of a new gold-rush, as massive geopolitical and industrial forces seek to benefit from opportunities for resource extraction and the opening up of lucrative trade routes. This includes drilling for new fossil fuels to meet our high-tech, high-energy lifestyles, rupturing ecologies in the building of data centres and the laying of fibre optic cables, and the mining of tech minerals and metals, including copper, lithium, graphite and silver.
The analogue artists’ film collective, Polar Film Lab, presents The Silver Record festival, in collaboration with Tromsø Kunstforening. Over 4 days of screenings of moving-image artworks, experimental film, performances, workshops and a symposium, we will reflect on our place within this image-making technology ecology, our role in presenting and advocating for the environment, the resultant geopolitics of it and what the future may hold, for image-making. The artworks, research and conversations act as a record of our changing Arctic and our changing relationship to the image.
This project has been generously funded by Kultur- og likestillingsdepartementet, Nordisk Kulturfond, Norsk Kulturråd, Samfunnsløftet, Troms Fylke & Tromsø Kommune
Also check out other Entertainment events in Tromsø, Festivals in Tromsø, Workshops in Tromsø.
