A Research Site Devoted to the Past and Future of Found Footage Film and Video
"The Literary and Artistic heritage of humanity should be used for partisan propaganda purposes." - Gil J. Wolman
“A lot of people who call themselves artists now are cultural critics who are using instruments other than just written language or spoken language to communicate their critical perspective.” -Leslie Thornton
CALL | Pleasure Dome | New Toronto Works Show 2010 | DUE: JAN 15 2010 ------------------------------
------------------------------------------ Pleasure Dome is seeking short experimental film/video works, expanded cinema performances and media art installations produced within the last year by Toronto-based artists for the annual New Toronto Works Show. Now in its sixteenth year, this members-curated programme features the cutting edge of experimental film and video produced in Toronto today. Please send preview tape/DVD or film (Super 8 or 16mm) or short outline of proposed performance or installation to:
Pleasure Dome 195 Rushton Rd. Toronto, ON M6G 3J2
or drop off to Vtape 401 Richmond St. West, #452 Toronto * note: Vtape is closed for holidays Dec 19- Jan 4 so no drop off between those dates
Trinity Square Video: Call for SubmissionsDeadline: November 15th, 2009 Trinity Square Video (TSV) has a long history of supporting and presenting video-based works that are mediated by images of protest and activism, providing a space to explore the range of meaning that can be generated from such imagery. Our upcoming programming will build from this history. In the fall of 2009, TSV will begin an extended investigation of the current state of political engagement in contemporary art by exhibiting works that question the motivations, objectivity and ethics found in and around political representations.TSV is eager to hear from artists and curators working with video and video installation who are rigorously invested in enriching and expanding the field of socially critical visual and media-based art. We are looking for dynamic video and video-based artworks that are engaged with varying forms of contemporary politics in unexpected or unconventional ways.We are seeking innovative artist's works that use video, its forms and its processes, to examine the modes of presentation found in activist gesture, social action or cultural critique. We intend to offer a wide range of video programs and installations: from those that feature direct activist gestures to those that call into question the relationship between aesthetic value and the promotion of social causes. TSV is an artist-run resource for the production, education and dissemination of video by artists and community organizations. Since 1971, TSV has made access to the means of communication its priority, providing a diverse community of video practitioners media-arts related development through workshops, seminars and classes, as well as offering a space for the creation and exhibition of video-based images. Through its public programming, TSV has advanced the understanding and appreciation of media works produced by various community-based groups and numerous internationally recognized artists, such as Michael Balser, John Greyson, Vera Frenkel, Richard Fung, Nancy Nicol, and Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak. In recent years, TSV has presented works by Sara Angelucci, Jeremy Blake, Deanna Bowen, Manon De Pauw, Isabelle Hayeur and Éric Raymond, Nelson Henricks, Gunilla Josephson, Jude Norris, 640 480 Collective, among many others. Submission Requirements:1. One DVD with a maximum of 10 minutes of previous and/or proposed work.* 2. Written proposal (1-page)3. Artist's Statement (1-page)4. Curriculum Vitae5. Self-addressed, stamped envelope for return of support material.***DVDs can be supplemented with up to 10 digital slides on CD-ROM (Mac compatible, .jpg images only, no folders, all images must be listed with slide number, artist's last name, title of work and year, eg. 01_smith_untitled_2009.jpg).**Support material will not be returned without a SASE.Submissions must be postmarked no later than November 15th. If this date falls on a weekend or statutory holiday, the deadline moves to the next business day.Submissions will not be accepted electronically. A floorplan of the TSV Gallery is available at www.trinitysquarevideo.com We encourage proposals from emerging to established artists and curators. We firmly support the equitable remuneration of artists. TSV pays all of it exhibiting artists in accordance with the CARFAC fees schedule. Our exhibitions are presented for 4 to 5 weeks. We will accept proposals by curators for single-night screenings. If you have any questions, please contact Jean-Paul Kelly, Programming Director at programming@trinitysquarevideo.com, or 416-593-1332. Please send submissions to: Jean-Paul KellyProgramming DirectorTrinity Square Video401 Richmond Street West, Suite 376Toronto, ON, CanadaM5V 3A8 TSV gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council
I'm back, fresh after completing and defending my thesis "The Work of Art in the Age of [Ctrl]-C: Digital Remixing and Contemporary Found Footage Film Practice." This 120 page tome was primarily devoted to drawing linkages between avant-garde found footage film aesthetics, the practices of the Soviet re-editors and the explosion of digital remixes on the Internet. During that period, this blog focused primarily on the American avant-garde and digital remixing on the net. That phase is now over and I will be continuing my research in some new directions.
First, I will be focusing more on contemporary video art, photography and other new media and practices of recycling, appropriation and adaptation. It will take some time to build the site to reflect these new directions, so I appreciate any advice, links, artists to watch and relevant news to post. I am moving into my Ph.D. at York University and am (at this juncture) looking at discourses and strategies of appropriation in contemporary art.
Second, I will focus less on simply posting videos and more on theories and philosophies of appropriation. I am also interested in manifestos, interviews, artists’ statements and reviews.
Third, I'm very interested in being a part of the larger network of individuals researching copyright issues, digital remixing and found footage film practice. I'm happy to link to other sites you either run or frequent and will take emails through my contact or in comments.
Because the blog is engineered to represent a chronological and continuous record of research as opposed to websites which are ordered by topic, I will also be updating recent gallery or museum openings around the US and Canada as I become aware of them. Anyone interested in publicizing events related to appropriation in art, film and video can email me.
Sorry I've been gone for so long. I'm finishing my thesis. Some great new work to send your way:
Below is Enrique Piñuel's "The Dancer's Cut":
Also, check out these gorgeous videos by Dinorah de Jesús Rodriguez here and some majorly ambitious work by DDLM, who describes his 4 hour (!) piece "SUCHILECTRO-C°°°°" as a journey through frivolomental irredemption. Wow. Just wow...
While I’ve been a fan of Lawrence Lessig’s passionate defense of remixing culture for years, I haven’t hailed him as its greatest spokesperson. As Lessig says in his book Free Culture after his failed defense of Eric Eldred which reached the Supreme Court: it will take more than legal arguments to defeat the repressive aspects of copyright law; judges must see the harm it can do to the spread of culture and ideas.
To understand just how valuable appropriation is to a progressive society, there is no better and more dynamic advocate than Nicolas Bourriaud. An art theorist who seemed to shape contemporary art discourse after his book Relational Aesthetics, Bourriaud went on to write a small and now out-of-print text which has greatly benefited my understanding of approproiation as a progressive cultural phenomena.
In Relational Aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud explored several artists’ propensity towards dealing with “the interhuman sphere: relationships between people, communities, individuals, groups, social networks, interactivity, and so on.” (7) Postproduction follows this trajectory towards the participation of individuals in shaping new meanings from extant materials—appropriation for the purposes of transformation. Though Bourriaud acknowledges that “citation, recycling and détournement were not born yesterday; what is clear is that today certain elements and principles are reemerging as themes and are suddenly at the forefront, to the point of constituting the “engine” of new artistic practices.” (9) Though this is likely the result of the ease in which materials may be copied, altered and disseminated, Bourriaud’s focus on the moving image is telling. In my own research, I observe this as the result of shifts in media popularity (Georges Braque using newspaper, Koons using mass produced objects based on the zeitgeist of the time) and the supremacy of moving images as a means to disseminate information and entertainment.
First, the term postproduction is used to describe “the scrambling of boundaries between consumption and production.” (19) Though I admire the gist of Bourriaud’s term and it correctly implies the “second look” which occurs with transformed works, it does not posses the singularity of meaning terms like “found footage” or “digital remixing” have. It would be my guess that Bourriaud wanted to include a term that carried the weight of cinematic production with it but also could easily be applied to art works. Like digital remixing and remix culture in general, Bourriaud asserts that postproduction is not simply a tendency in contemporary art, but rather a new and semi-permanent culture of making art. He argues that “artists’ intuitive relationships with art history is now going beyond what we call “the art of appropriation,” which naturally infers an ideology of ownership, and moving towards a culture of the use of forms, a culture of constant activity of signs based on a collective ideal: sharing.” (9) Bourriaud locates appropriation, not as a marginal art practice but as a central motif of contemporary art.
Though many of Bourriaud’s descriptions of appropriation are not groundbreaking in their originality, they constitute the first book entirely dedicated to the subject that I am aware of, and he masterfully explains the key concepts. I will briefly quote several of his descriptions of how appropriation functions in contemporary art:
“Notions of originality (being at the origin of) and even of creation (making something from nothing) are slowly blurred in this new cultural landscape marked by the twin figures of the DJ and the programmer, both of whom have the task of selecting cultural objects and inserting them into new contexts. (13)
“Artists today program forms more than they compose them; rather than transfigure a raw element (blank canvas, clay, etc.), they remix available forms and make use of data. (17)
“In a universe of products for sale, preexisting forms, signals already emitted, buildings already constructed, paths marked out by their predecessors, artists no longer consider the artistic field (and here one could add television, cinema, or literature) a museum containing works that must be cited or “surpassed” as the modernist ideology of originality would have it, but so many storehouses filed with tools that should be used, stockpiles of data to manipulate and present.” (17)
“The material they manipulate is no longer primary. It is no longer a manor of elaborating a form on the basis of a raw material but working with objects that are already in circulation on the cultural market, which is to say, objects already informed by other objects.” (13)
“To use an object is necessarily to interpret it. By using television, books, or records, the user of culture deploys a rhetoric of practices and “reuses” that has nothing to do with enunciation and therefore with language whose figures and codes may be cataloged.” (24)
“A DJs set is not unlike an exhibition of objects that Duchamp would have described as “assisted readymades;” more or less modified products whose sequence produces a specific duration.” (38)
Bourriaud’s continuous invocation of both DJs and programmers seems highly applicable to the dual influences of hip-hop and computer technologies which inform digital remixing. The idea of the DJ as a curator or archivist and the programmer as a person that utilizes platforms, images and processes in an ensemble to form a new product mirrors the practice of assemblagist or collagist. Additionally, Bourriaud correctly places historical bodies of work as places to begin from by replicating those materials and altering them. One cannot help but remember Situationist artist Asger Jörn’s project to “update” paintings by simply painting over reproductions to make them “modern.” This kind of artmaking questions a teleological end to the process of creating an artwork as once supposed and constructs a new paradigm. Bourriaud says, that “The artwork is no longer an endpoint but a simple moment in an infinite chain of contributions.” (20) This kind of art making in which works are constantly revised, revisited and altered mirrors the programming algorithms for the Wiki in which a page is constantly changed (for better or worse) under the auspices of improvement over time. Briefly, I will list some of Bourriaud’s comments on the idea of collective and continuous art making:
“To rewrite modernity is the historical task of this early Twenty-First Century; not to start at zero or find oneself encumbered by the storehouse of history, but to inventory and select, to use and download.” (93)
“What if artistic creation today could be compared to a collective sport, far from the classical mythology of the solitary effort? “It is the viewers who make the paintings,” Duchamp once said, an incomprehensible remark unless we connect it to his keen sense of an emerging culture of use, in which meaning is born of collaboration and negotiation between the artist and the one who comes to view the work.” (20)
“Appropriation is indeed the first stage of postproduction; the issue is no longer to fabricate an object, but to choose one among those that exist and to use or modify these according to a specific intention. Marcel Broodthaers said that “ Since Duchamp, the artist is the author of a definition” which is substituted for that of the objects he or she has chosen…If the process of appropriation has its roots in history, its narrative here will begin with the readymade, which represents its first conceptualized manifestation, considered in relation to the history of art. When Duchamp exhibits a manufactured object…as a work of the mind, he shifts the problematic of the “creative process” emphasizing the artist’s gaze brought to bare on an object instead of manual skill. He accesses that the act of choosing is enough to establish the artistic process, just as the act of fabricating, painting or sculpting does; to give a new idea to an object is already production. Duchamp thereby completes the definition of the term creation; to create is to insert an object into a new scenario, to consider it a character in a narrative. (25)
Here, Bourriaud hits upon one of the central themes of contemporary remixing; the curatorial and the selection process which informs many contemporary “postproduction” or found footage artworks. If we look at the major thrust of Christian Marclay’s found footage films, we observe that the emphasis is on the collection of materials rather than on their presentation. Additionally, the “artists gaze” here seems to mirror the idea of the “second look.” The artist’s “definition” of the artwork implies a kind of replacement of the original coding of the work or object which indicates the transformation made through the second look. Many contemporary modes of appropriation deal with constructing “archival interventions” in which features of the archive are reproduced to facilitate transformation in their groupings and combinations.
I've often thought that the next frontier in film mash-ups lay in feature length works. Below is a trailer for one such work by Gabriele Guerra. Remember, this is the trailer for a 53 minute movie!
More incredible digital remix/found footage work from Dinorah de Jesús Rodríguez:
Also, some very fun and mysterious interstellar found footage work from Man Zanas:
Also, I wanted to share the call for works from the 2009 "(In) Appropriation" festival. It looks amazing and I think they may read this blog. Wooooo!
CALL FOR ENTRIES:
Los Angeles Filmforum invites film and videomakers to take part in the 2009 FESTIVAL OF (IN)APPROPRIATION.
WHO: All film and videomakers WHAT: Call for entries for the Festival of (In)appropriation WHEN: Entries must be received by April 1, 2009. WHERE: Send submissions to Jaimie Baron, 10480 National Blvd. #308, Los Angeles, CA 90034 PRESENTED BY: Los Angeles Filmforum
Whether you call it collage, compilation, found footage, detournement, or recycled cinema, the incorporation of previously shot materials into new artworks is a practice that has generated novel juxtapositions of elements which have produced new meanings and ideas that may not have been intended by the original makers, that are, in other words “inappropriate.“ This act of appropriation may produce revelation that leads viewers to reconsider the relationship between past and present, here and there, intention and subversion. Fortunately for our purposes, the past decade has seen the emergence of a wealth of new sources for audiovisual materials that can be appropriated into new works. In addition to official state and commercial archives, vernacular archives, home movie collections, and digital archives have provided fascinating source material that may be repurposed in such a way as to give it new meanings and resonances.
Thus, Los Angeles Filmforum invites submissions for a Festival of (In)appropriation, open to all works that appropriate film or video footage and repurpose it in “inappropriate” ways. We will consider both films and videos, including works that are made up entirely of found footage and those that only use small segments of appropriated material. Particular consideration will be given to films that repurpose materials in an inventive way and to films that are under twenty minutes long. We will only accept work finished in 2006 or later.
The Festival of (In)appropriation will take place in June 2009. Curated by Jaimie Baron and Andrew Hall
Guidelines: • Submission deadline: April 1, 2009 • Please send all submissions in DVD format to: Jaimie Baron, 10480 National Blvd. #308, Los Angeles, CA 90034 • Submissions must be 20 minutes or less and must contain some form of “(in)appropriation.“ • Acceptable submission formats: DVD and VHS • Acceptable exhibition formats: mini-DV, DV-Cam, 16mm film, 35mm film, DVD (but discouraged, since DVD is not a reliable projection medium). • Please include: title, filmmaker, running time, a 30-word or less synopsis, and contact information (phone and email). • No submission fee, but please send only good films ☺
Los Angeles Filmforum is the city’s longest-running organization dedicated to weekly screenings of experimental film and video art, documentaries, and experimental animation.
For more information, please go to: http://lafilmforum.wordpress.com/
The dearth of posts as of late has had much to do with the fact that my TA Union at York University has gone on strike and I've been editing for the CUPE strike video committee. These excellent films made by activists and students can be seen at cupestrikevideo.wordpress.com
In the midst of this, renowned video artist John Greyson, whose incredible commitment to appropriation can be discerned from his film manifesto on cultural recycling "Uncut" (1997, has created a digital remix to support the strikers.
