Festivals and dispositifs of analog counter-culture

ABSTRACT This essay aims to provide an overview of the festivals dedicated to the analog films and performance practices of filmmakers and artist-run laboratories that posit themselves as media counter-culture and analog ‘resistance’. Such events offer the films’ material quality as a contrast to the planned obsolescence common in the IT industry. Currently, many filmmakers, artists and collectives create spaces, cooperatives, and independent labs to construct a media archaeology approach that is based on the experimental, hands-on re-enactment of traditional and obsolete practices. These film performance events thus exhibit the counter-cultural research performatively pursued by filmmakers, artists and collectives in an attempt to attract a perceptive audience capable of fully understanding this complex fruitive experience.