RPM Festival is an experimental media festival based in Boston, MA. RPM celebrates cutting edge experimental art that expands our experience and understanding of what the moving image can be. Now in its 11th year, RPM 2024 featured 24 screening programs and several performances, exhibitions and workshops.

Across the annual festival and monthly solo artist screening series, each year RPM screens hundreds of short media pieces by artists and artist groups who represent more than 32 countries. The monthly solo artist screening series is not only dedicated to the pioneers in the field but also features many established and venerated artists. RPM is dedicated to media arts; short-form poetic, personal, experimental film; long-form essay documentary; and audiovisual performance.

RPM's early history:

RPM was born in 2013, and was jointly held at Colgate University, in Hamilton, NY and at Experimental Intermedia, NYC. Dajuin Yao and Wenhua Shi co-curated the first RPM exhibition, titled Sound Art China, which featured 30 sound artists, including Wang Changcun, Yan Jun, Samson Young and Xu Cheng (Torturing Nurse). RPM 2013 artists-in-residence also presented live sound art performances during the opening week of the inaugural exhibition, and included improvisations, inter-media performances, and circuit bending; additionally, artists conducted demonstrations on sound art workshops throughout the course of the exhibition. At the end of 2013, RPM was installed in Shanghai as a part of West Bund 2013 – Biennale of Architecture and Contemporary Art. Notably, the exhibition and performances also invited international sound artists, from Alva Noto, Merzbow, and Marco Donnarumma, to Jaap Blonk & Edwin van der Heide and DJ Qbert. In the following year, RPM: Sound Art China traveled to Hong Kong (Hong Kong City University, HK) and continued to expand its media art landscape.

Each year RPM will screen around 200 short media pieces by artists and artist groups who represent more than 32 countries and many solo retrospective programs throughout the year.

RPM isn't limited to the Boston area and has a history of traveling to other places and countries. Recently, our highlight programs were screened in Los Angeles (CA), Pittsburg (PA), and both Syracuse and Hamilton (NY) in the U.S., and internationally in London (UK), Berlin (Germany), and across China (Beijing, Macao, Hong Kong, and Shanghai).

Our monthly solo-artist screenings at the Brattle occur year-round. We also hold an annual 3-4 day festival in the Fall that takes place in multiple locations — in addition to the Brattle, we have held festival screenings and events at the Goethe-Institut Boston, Harvard's CAM Lab, UMass-Boston, Boston City Hall, and the MFA Boston.

We hand-select and invite filmmakers for the monthly solo artist screenings, whereas for the annual festival we receive 600-800 submissions for the festival each year, which is highly selective (less than 10% of submitted entries will be screened during the festival). Currently seven members of the RPM Selection Committee review all submissions and curate the thematic based programs.

This past year we also began a collaboration with CineLab to establish the RPM Festival Awards, which awards artists the ability and resources to make new work through cash prizes and covering film processing expenses. Additionally, RPM leads a screening network that allows artists to travel to present their work, and we've facilitated this most recently for artists to present their work on the East coast (Rhode Island and New York) as well as to the Rocky Mountains (Boulder and Denver, CO).

The solo artist screenings feature well-known artists in the field that come to us through recommendations from other artists and/or from our selection committee members. We want to honor the work by legendary filmmakers as well as celebrate and spotlight the cutting-edge, contemporary work being made; the solo-artist retrospective programming combines these efforts and enables a context-rich exploration of an artist's new and older work alongside one another. The resulting post-screening Q&A and conversations with those filmmakers has proven to be rich and meaningful.

Past RPM featured monthly solo artist screenings include, Peggy Ahwesh, Stephanie Barber, Bill Brown, Mary Helena Clark, Ariana Gerstein, Vincent Grenier, Sabine Gruffat, Barbara Hammer, Philip Hoffman, Jodie Mack, Luther Price, Kathryn Ramey, Kelly Sears, Michael Snow, Stacey Steers, and Sun Xun.