In recent years, high-definition video has democratised as a medium. Online platforms have lowered the cost of uploading and distributing films to zero. Social media are dominated by streaming video. Today, anyone with a smartphone has a movie camera at their disposal. It is now completely natural to think, sketch, and communicate in video. HD is the new A4.

Tutors and students at the Sandberg Instituut’s Design Department have, since the Department’s inception in the 1990s, been at the forefront of this development. The department’s new and radical approaches to the moving image began to eat away at the edges of film and cinema. Many experimental graphic designers – including Shadow Channel tutors Rob Schröder and Daniel van der Velden – started to present their ideas via moving image installations, online videos, and, eventually, feature films.

To channel the momentum of an emerging movement of makers who embrace new approaches to filmmaking, in 2017 we launched the two-year Temporary Programme, Shadow Channel.

Shadow Channel is a utopian platform commissioning, streaming, and distributing counter-narratives created by underrepresented voices, in response to platform capitalism, post-truth politics and the rise of neo-fascism. Students of Shadow Channel operate as a renegade production studio, running a deep stream narrating the real, playing short-and-long-form documentaries, music videos, and live feeds in the shadows of the internet. Responding in real time to real-world issues, revealing and reflecting on the dominance of film and design, and the dread, desire and dizziness of freedom controlling the human condition.

During the two-year programme the channel streams from the deep web, and from within cinemas, galleries, clubs, and festivals across the Netherlands. Students of Shadow Channel curate, promote, and produce public events that attempt to expand the discourse around art and activism, and push the possibility, potential and poignancy of what art can do. As author Ursula K. Le Guin rallies us, ‘resistance and change often begin in art’. There is an alternative. Another world is possible. Demand the future.