View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Tigersprung Reels Film Festival (@tigersprungreelsfest)

Authors: 3rd Year Students from the Bachelor of Applied Arts in Screen Arts & Technology, facilitated by Ann-Marie Tully, Lecturer Video Technology, Durban University of Technology 

Write-Up: 

The ARK theme is Romancing the Stone: Lithic Ecologies & Hard Places in South African Visual Culture [Breaking Rock]. While video is not a medium associated with stone, there is some motivation for a correlation of these media owing to recent arguments that similar to the lithic boom of technology witnessed in the archaeological records some 8000 years ago, we have entered a ‘New Stone Age’ in terms of digital technology. This is a notion owing to the continued reliance of digital processors on silica – a common earth element, and a component of other silicates like flint, a form of quartz, used by Palaeolithic humans for making tools. 

The Department of Video Technology aligns with this ‘New Stone Age’ in a new [lithic] media film festival taking place exclusively in the online digital context of Instagram Reels, a fully copyright covered online platform for short form video content. 

The festival title takes its title and concept from Walter Benjamin’s (1940) use of the German word ‘Tigersprung’ [tiger’s leap] in his discussion of fashion’s tendency to ‘leap’ back into the content of the past for reinvention in the present. Film is a medium subject to this recurrence of the past, visible in an abundance of narrative sequels and genres. This festival takes a ‘tiger’s leap’ into the past-future of online streaming and content production & will form part of the Digifest – Romancing the Stone program.