Filmform (est. 1950) is dedicated to preservation, promotion and worldwide distribution of experimental film and video art. Constantly expanding, the distribution catalogue spans from 1924 to the present, including works by Sweden’s most prominent artists and filmmakers, available to rent for public screenings and exhibitions as well as for educational purposes.
A collaborative 1998 work inspired by a then-current Pizza Hut commercial starring Mikhail Gorbachev. In an era when few videos were online, we could search for “cold war” and “pizza” and excerpt all the results in one 6-minute video. At the time we didn’t know anyone else making work with internet-based video appropriation and clearly found a superversive pleasure in a first encounter with heavy manipulation of the clips with motion graphics software. The production of the piece had a practical limit, we had two laptops and worked on separate segments until both internal hard drives were full. 1.2gb later we had a piece.
Benjamin Gerdes is an artist, writer, and organizer working in video, film, and related public formats, individually as well as collaboratively. He is interested in intersections of radical politics, knowledge production, and popular imagination. His work focuses on the affective and social consequences of economic and state regimes, investigating methods for art and cultural projects to contribute to social change. Gerdes’s projects emerge via multiple articulations from long-term research processes conducted in dialogue with activists, trade unionists, architects, urbanists, geographers, and archival researchers. Prior to coming to the Institute for Futures Studies, he was based at the Royal Institute in Stockholm, where he conducted research and led a professor group in fine art and moving image for 5 years.
