Index and Film i Samtidskonsten present a joint series of four evenings of experimental films at Index' gallery. The programs have been developed as an extension of the most recent issue of the cultural magazine OEI #69-70: On film, published in autumn 2015, with 496 pages about significant practices of the Swedish experimental film scene. The events are organized as part of the decentral festival Kortfilmsdagen on December 21, supported by the Swedish Film Institute.

Curated by Martin Grennberger and Daniel A. Swarthnas, the program shows a selection of important Swedish experimental films, contextualized by works of international film practitioners. Several of the films are being shown for the first time in Sweden.

Carte blanche to Kim Knowles (Black Box, Edinburgh International Film Festival)

In a post-screening discussion at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2013, veteran experimental filmmaker Michael Snow referred to the contemporary technological moment in terms of ‘mediums eating mediums’. The current state of analogue obsolescence might indeed be conceived in the context of consumption – one medium rendered obsolete by another, and framed by the wider drive towards (capitalist) progress and commodity culture. But thinking about the relationship between different mediums does not necessarily mean replacement (a negative formulation) but coexistence. In this sense, exploring the field of hybrid practice allows us to reflect on notions of medium-specificity, looking at ways in which different media may enter into a dialogue with each other. It offers a way out of the either/or polarisation that often surrounds the debate about analogue and digital technologies, and shows how the merging or alternating of mediums and formats widens the cinematic palette. This programme brings together films that approach the theme of hybridisation or coexistence in different ways, often explicitly staging the question of obsolescence in creative terms, and foregrounding cinema as a constantly shifting mode of perception.