ArtReview's Art Lovers Movie Club presents Elisabeth Brun's film 'Big Tech Blues' (2025), an auto-documentary that follows a small village in northern Norway as it resists the installation of a SpaceX Starlink 'Gateway' transmission site. The film blends personal essay, documentary footage, and interviews with residents who protest the hub over concerns about noise pollution, radiation, and environmental impact on the rural coastline. Brun contrasts slick Starlink promotional material with slow, intimate scenes of the landscape and community organizing on Facebook, highlighting the irony of using digital tools to fight digital infrastructure.
The film matters because it captures a microcosm of the broader tension between corporate tech expansion and local communities, questioning whether the internet has shifted from extending the tangible world to replacing it. Brun's work raises urgent issues about the environmental and social costs of connectivity, the corporatization of communication, and the extraction that underpins seamless digital consumption. By screening this artist's video, ArtReview continues to platform critical, essayistic filmmaking that interrogates the intersection of place, technology, and power.