Smaller, Again

"Smaller, Again” is an exploration of the beauty of decay. A portrait of the artist’s childhood home, compressed into pixelated frames, parallels the fragmentation of memory over time. Three acts document a day spent exploring the silver leaves and shimmering waters of Sudbury, Ontario's Laurentian Conservation Area and surrounding neighbourhoods. Sampled sounds and images coalesce like organisms or moments combining to form new phenomena. Recordings of backyard chimes, family conversations, and moving water form cyclical rhythms echoing decomposition and regeneration in memory and ecosystems.

      The film’s distortion of greenspace through small file sizes critiques the environmental harms caused by high-bandwidth video streaming. With the carbon footprint of information and communication technologies recently surpassing that of the airline industry (Ritchie 2020), small file aesthetics promote reduced streaming resolution as a method of decreasing environmental impact. The compressed images of the Laurentian Conservation Area convey the risk of ecological loss caused by a failure to acknowledge the impact of current digital media practices.

Through the reduction of video files, familiar scenes distort into uncanny forms, allowing an alternative world to emerge through the reinterpretation of moving pixels. Can this mode of disintegration lead to new perspectives when applied to societal framings of our place within ecological networks or to our personal framings of our individual identities? “Smaller, Again” is a call to embrace the beauty of regression—whether through the use of low-resolution technologies or through reinterpretation of one’s relationship to ecological identities over time.