On the Small File Image: A Talk on Small File Media Art at the VAG

On the Small File Image: Infrastructural Intimacies, Crystals, and Decolonial Quantum Entanglements

A Talk on Small File Media by Dr. Radek Przedpelski (Trinity College, Dublin and Small File Media Society)

The talk will make a case for sustainable ecomedia as a way of mitigating the enormous footprint of ICT technologies and high-bandwidth video streaming in particular. Taking cue from Spinoza’s definition of the body as “the capacity by affecting and be affected,” the talk will subsequently explore how small-file videos can affect us, and how in turn they are affected by their beholders and their own productive constraints. Accompanied by examples of works from the current iteration of Small File Media Festival, the talk will unfold three affective powers of the small-file media—Infrastructural Intimacies, Crystals, and Decolonial Quantum Entanglements. Accordingly, the talk will look at ways small-file media can offer insight into, and intimacy with, their infrastructural support—pixels, algorithms, data, and social networks. The talk will also consider small-file videos as crystals—as a mode of looking at, looking through, and looking into; as a way of feeling and learning from cracks, crises and textural imperfections. And finally, ending on a note of hope, the talk will consider how the small-file image can help create new decolonial quantum entanglements across disparate scales and contexts, thematised by the Festival’s twinned programs—"The Blue Room” and “The Red Room”—to be screened on 17 and 18 October, respectively. In fact, the very idea of the festival bringing different communities together can be understood as a decolonial quantum entanglement.

Bio: Radek Przedpełski graduated from Trinity College Dublin with a PhD in Digital Art and Humanities, researching the problem of ahuman metamorphoses in Eastern European neo-avant-garde geo-media of the 1970s seen via Deleuze/Guattari as well as the seventeenth-century Turkic-influenced Polish “Oriental Baroque” and Bronze Age artists of the Great Steppe. Radek is also a co-translator into English of a book of Polish-Tatar rubaiyat. Radek holds a MA in English Philology from Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and a MA in Digital Media from Dublin Institute of Technology. Together with Steve Wilmer he organised at TCD an international conference on Deleuze and art (2016) and a symposium on Deleuzian aesthetics and multiplicity (2018). He is also a member of the scientific committee for the upcoming conference on Art in the Anthropocene at TCD. He is the editor, together with Steve Wilmer, of an edited volume on Deleuze, Guattari and the Art of Multiplicity forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. He teaches visual culture, art philosophy, digital media and cultural studies at TCD and National University of Ireland in Maynooth. Radek worked as a researcher for the Slavs and Tatars art collective, collaborating on their Naughty Nasals project. He is also a sound artist and freelance photographer.

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