Forty Days
Zola, Elisa, and Isa: MissVideo4u
Dear reader,
It’s been a month since my mom’s funeral. I always imagined grief as forty days of crying while dressed in black. But as usual, reality is much more trivial and messy: it’s the sadness I feel when I’m about to send my mom a photo of Uno playing tambú on our living room floor with his cap placed in front of him to collect coins. Or how easily I get upset.
Thank you all for sending so many replies to my last email. Your messages were heartwarming. I feel privileged to have attentive readers from all around the world. Please let me know if you happen to pass by Athens, Greece. I’d love to meet y’all.
With care,
Kristoffer
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Zola, Elisa, and Isa: MissVideo4u
Zola, Elisa, and Isa are behind the hard-to-believe-is-true video distribution initiative called MissVideo4u.
What is MV4u?
Aimed at fostering a borderless community of queer & women artists, MissVideo4u distributes videos by compiling artist submissions via USB and sharing them through snail mail as “video chainletters”. Reworking the “chainletter tape” for the platform age, MV4u builds on the legacy of feminist media tactics to create an offline infrastructure for video sharing & preservation without algorithmic curation or profit incentive.
Why did you start it?
This project began when Zola first stumbled upon the Joanie4Jackie archives at Bard College – where we all first met – and discovered the chainletter tape, a medium made obsolete in an era where you will own nothing and be happy. We see MV4u as a revival of the chainletter tape medium and a continuation of feminist resistance. The USB sneakernet can address the gaps in education that keep women’s film & video history in the dark while also generating a sense of stewardship and care. Beyond the chainletter, MV4u is sort of an excuse for us to do all kinds of work, from screening animations made by Palestinian children to fundraise their arts education to showcasing work made with & by incarcerated women and girls.
Who or what inspired you?
We’re inspired by the generations of women filmmakers who have been preserving, teaching, and making film and video art accessible outside traditional institutional circles. For instance, back in the 70s and 80s, Chilean filmmaker Alicia Vega led film workshops for impoverished children in Santiago; meanwhile, Ariel Dougherty, co-founder of Women Make Movies, was getting cameras into the hands of young women at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York. Despite the fact that these women were unaware of each other’s work, when you look at them side by side, you realize that this labor reaches far beyond an individual place or person, and we are hoping to carry that spirit forward.
Visit mv4u.club to learn more, submit, or watch.
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Field notes
1.
The HTML Review Issue 05, Spring 2026. Thank you to everyone who keeps making the single best web publication.
2.
Submit to the Internet Phone Book. We opened for submissions for Issue Two. You should know that it is a complete refresh, so you’ll have to resubmit your site if you’d like it to remain included. We are also looking for a few more sponsors.
3.
Why a laptop orchestra? I admire the care and effort that Kat Macdonald devotes to the London Community Laptop Orchestra. I also really admire the raw and intelligent tone of her blog.
4.
Call for Participation. PIFcamp (Due, Apr 5), IDFA DocLab (Due, April 14), Are.na Annual (Due, Apr 20), Antifreeze (Due, N/A), Error 417 Expectation Failed (Due, May 4), Public Access Memories (Due, May 17), and Internet Phone Book (Due, Summer).
5.
Poetic Web Calendar. Values based software (Mar 31, NYC), Email Debt Forgiveness Day (Mar 31, online), Lecture: Operator (Mar 31, online), Channel Surfing (Apr 5, online), The Web You Want (Apr 17, Amsterdam), Open Hardware Summit (May 23-24, Berlin), Parameter (May 29-30, Ljubljana), Luddite Camp (Aug 14-16, Pärnumaa), and INC Exit Fest (June 24-26, Amsterdam).
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Readers’ corner
In addition to being inspired by your vulnerability, I was also inspired in a very concrete way to go see Connection Established. It’s in a lovely little space that is dominated by purple “receipts,” generated based on a series of questions, with one part to keep and one part to fill out and pin on the wall.
On the other wall there were three main things: the Downpour zine maker, the Internet phone book (!), and a lovely book about LAN parties.
— Sarah
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Wayside flowers
Send questions, comments, products, sites, links, and more to kristoffer@naiveweekly.com.