The artist’s auto-documentary is a protest song made for her childhood village in Northern Norway
Big Tech Blues is part personal essay, part documentary, following a small village in northern Norway’s attempts to fight the internet. When Elisabeth Brun’s primary school in Strengelvåg closed down, the building at first was left unoccupied. Plans for homes for the elderly, or a new school, didn’t materialize; a ‘Gateway’ transmission site for SpaceX’s Starlink programme did. Such a site, Brun notes, is one of thousands around the world which connect with orbiting satellites. Brun’s film interrupts slick, utopian Starlink promotional footage with patient, slow scenes of the village’s landscape, family footage from her own childhood, and interviews with its people as they protest the Gateway’s arrival in the area. Their concerns are myriad: the noise pollution generated by this signal hub; fears of radiation in the middle of their village; impacts on the rural coastline’s flora and fauna. Though Brun isn’t immune to irony: the film follows the community organising on Facebook to contest the plans, and their meeting with a representative for the project’s executor company – a stranger’s face on a grainy Zoom call, projected in a town hall. Brun’s camerawork is alternatingly objective and emotional: shots hover above the village’s snowy roads, then sit between arguing residents.
Several questions are at stake here. When did the internet promise to interrupt the tangible, offline world? It used to extend, now it seems to replace. Is that the logical extension of a tool that enables and furthers the accumulation of capital? Or is it a familiar dysfunction: that seamless consumption in one place relies on extraction in another? (One is reminded of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist, where conflicts around the development of a glamping site are portrayed with ominous serenity.) Brun’s film traces a microcosm of the corporatisation of our very means of communication – the open, muscular arms we’ve run into.
Screening dates:
Art Lovers Movie Club: Elisabeth Brun, Big Tech Blues, 2025
15 May–10 June 2026
© Courtesy the artist
Created in collaboration with Lofoten-based photographer and visual artist Eivind H. Natvig (D.O.P, Co-producer).
Music: Alexander Rishaug.
Elisabeth Brun (b. 1977, Northern Norway) is a filmmaker, artist and researcher working with moving image, installation, XR and archival practices. Her work explores how topographies, infrastructures and media shape perception, memory and environmental awareness, often focusing on the relations between place, technology and knowledge. Her films and installations have been shown internationally at venues such as Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Seattle Art Museum, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, MedienKunstTage NRW and Lofoten International Art Festival. She holds a PhD in Media Studies, and is the author of Place and the Moving Image (Routledge, 2025), which explores the eco-critical potential of essayistic and experimental film practices. She is also trained in site-specific and public art at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Brun is based in Oslo.
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