The Great Netfix by a Video Store After the End of the World, 5 June – 3 July 2024. Borough Road Gallery / Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, London South Bank University. Open weekdays 14-17 and by appointment. Opening: 5 June, 6 – 8pm. Finissage: 2 July, 6-8pm.
You are hereby warmly invited to join us for the opening of The Great Netfix on June 5th 6 PM. The event will feature an introduction to the project by Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter and Kristoffer Gansing. The Great Netfix is a movie re-distribution system by A Video Store After the End of the World that performs and reforms the asymmetric relations of cloud-based media ownership, consumption, labour and automation.
Featuring the amount of VHS tapes actually required to record all of the contents of a platform such as Netflix, this low-tech infrastructure uses a VHS Farm of networked recorders to “fix” streaming media, reverse-extracting them off the networks. This “unclouding” of cinematic heritage remediates the material limits of streaming media platforms, which are shown to depend on a model of automated scarcity and material confinement rather than freedom of choice and an abundance of content. The Great Netfix unfolds as a material speculation on a possible counter-model to the exploitative politics of current big-tech media infrastructures. As the recording progresses, a stack of VHS data packages is built up, which will be redistributed in a global VHS network. You too can become a worker in A Video Store After the End of the World, simply by visiting the exhibition and picking up one of the VHS data packages.
The Great Netfix is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation, The Swedish Research Council, K3 School of Arts & Communication (Malmo University) and is organised in collaboration with the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI) at LSBU, The Digital Culture Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London, and the research group Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics (CIIP) at Winchester School of Art.
Full program
Opening 5 June 6 – 8pm. (GMT+1/BST)
Opening Preview event with an introduction to the project by A Video Store After the End of the World (Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter & Kristoffer Gansing).
Finissage 2 July, 6pm.
Become part of the The Great Netfix VHS network! Distribution of the remaining data packages and launch of the VHS network.
All events at Borough Road Gallery, 103 Borough Road, London, United Kingdom, SE1 0AA.
More information at https://www.centreforthestudyof.net/
About A Video Store After the End of the World
A Video Store After the End of the World is a project by artist-researcher Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter and media curator-researcher Kristoffer Gansing, inaugurated as part of the first Trans★Feminist Digital Depletion Strike on the 8th of March 2023. This event brought together a transnational network of organisations, collectives and individuals in protest against cloud-based computing and its extractive logic. Hosted in a public park in Copenhagen, the initial video store collected more than 2000 home-recorded video tapes as a setting for a conversation on counter-cloud media infrastructures. By referring to the end of the world, the project does not suggest a coming apocalypse, but a hopeful living in or in spite of what Anna Tsing has called “capitalist ruins” that are already very much here. More information on the previous activities at https://vhs.data.coop/
Download poster.
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