Whether you call it collage, compilation, found footage, détournement, or recycled cinema, the incorporation of already existing media into new artworks is a practice that generates novel juxtapositions and new meanings and ideas, often in ways entirely unrelated to the intentions of the original makers. Such new works are, in other words, “inappropriate.” This act of (in)appropriation may even produce revelations about the relationship between past and present, here and there, intention and subversion, artist and critic, not to mention the "producer" and "consumer" of visual culture itself. Fortunately for our purposes, the past decade has witnessed the emergence of a wealth of new audiovisual elements available for appropriation into new works. In addition to official state and commercial archives, resources like vernacular collections, home movie repositories, and digital archives now also provide fascinating material to repurpose in ways that lend it new meaning and resonance.

Founded in 2009 and curated by Jaimie Baron, Lauren Berliner, and Greg Cohen, the Festival of (In)appropriation is a yearly showcase of contemporary, short (20 minutes or less), audiovisual works that appropriate existing film, video, or other media and repurpose it in “inappropriate” and inventive ways. This year’s programme features an astonishing variety and complexity of moving-image appropriation art, including a riotous YouTube reaction video mash-up, an exquisite found-footage ready-made, a queer-Asian-American homage to Hollis Frampton, several sublime works of cut-out animation, and a pseudo-documentary (or is it?) about the lost work of an early-Soviet scientist dedicated to the exploration of “human mental projection.”

Lying Women
Deborah Kelly
2016 | 3’56 min | Colour | Digital

“The stop motion animation Lying Women attends both to printed art’s material qualities and its ideological freight. As a high school student in 70s Melbourne, my primary exposure to art history was through the pages of books. I studied the western canon at a triple remove: as a girl, as an antipodean girl, as an antipodean girl who had never seen the paintings except as printed papers’ cheap approximations of European glory. Lying Women imagines canonical reclining nudes’ escape from centuries of servitude to a worldview in which decorative passivity is their whole purpose. The work proposes a great gathering of queer female energy, a revolution, a collective will to autonomy.” – Deborah Kelly

Semiotics of Sab
Tina Takemoto
2016 | 5’35 min | B/W | Digital

“An oblique portrait of gay Japanese American actor Sab Shimono, whose work on stage and screen spans more than five decades. The grammatology of his career attests to conflicting lexicons of race, representation, and selfhood.” – Tina Takemoto

Halimuhfack
Christopher Harris
2016 | 4 min | Colour | Digital

“A performer lip-synchs to archival audio featuring the voice of author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston as she describes her method of documenting African American folk songs in Florida. By design, nothing in this film is authentic except the source audio. The flickering images were produced with a hand-cranked Bolex so that the lip-synch is deliberately erratic and the rear projected, grainy, looped images of Masai tribesmen and women recycled from an educational film become increasingly abstract as the audio transforms into an incantation.” – Christopher Harris

Take Me to Pemberley
Daniela Zahlner
2015 | 2 min | Colour | Digital

“Mr. Darcy: The synonym for the romantic hero since 1813, as he first appeared in Jane Austen‘s novel Pride and Prejudice. The book had several movie adaptations (especially prominent [were those from] 1940, 1995 and 2005), which not only inscribe Darcy’s character in popular culture, but also illustrate our capitalist notions of love and desire, as well as a wish for escapism into a pre-industrialized, pre-virtualized world. I, too, fell for Mr. Darcy. Thanks to my webcam and Photo Booth, I can finally have my go [at] winning him over.” – Daniela Zahlner

Every Feature Film on my Hard Drive, 3 Pixels Tall and Sped Up 7000%
Ryan Murray
2013 | 3’29 min | Colour | Digital

"Every Feature Film On My Hard Drive, 3 Pixels Tall and Sped Up 7000% is comprised of 240 Hollywood movies running simultaneously, squeezed into a single frame and a 3.5 minute runtime. This work highlights the mass amount of media that we have at our fingertips and creates an abstraction of the color and duration of cinema." – Ryan Murray

Actual Case History
Tony Gault
2015 | 9 min | Colour | Digital

“Rotoscope animation reshapes a found film into an examination of “the vague, indefinite fears which keep growing in our minds.”” – Tony Gault

Official Teaser #2 Reaction!!!
Kevin McCarthy
2016 | 6’30 min | Colour | Digital

“When the second teaser for The Force Awakens comes out, a Star Wars agnostic tries in vain to embrace the zeitgeist, joining superfans to create his own lukewarm trailer reaction video mashup.” – Kevin McCarthy

Sneeze
Yunjin Woo
2015 | 5’11 min | Colour | Digital

“Sneeze explores the stigmatized symptom of common cold – the involuntary expulsion of air and bodily fluid – as an allegory of social ruptures that might mediate infectious resistance. Mixing the Cold War era’s educational film footage promoting personal hygiene as a “war against germs” with images of explosive creation, this film aesthetically subverts the uniquely modern fantasy of separation and isolation of the “healthy” from the “ill”.” – Yunjin Woo

A Place I’ve Never Been
Adrian Flury
2015 | 4’40 min | Colour | Digital

“By sourcing multiple digital images of the same place from different archives, this experiment in film makes use of frame by frame montage to discover hidden forms, patterns and references, thereby giving new meaning to the prevailing redundancy of these pictures.” –Adrian Flury

[sic] series
Roger Beebe
2014 | 4’25 min | Colour | Digital

“Three perfect fragments, presented exactly as found.” – Roger Beebe

Somebody Was Trying to Kill Somebody Else
Benjamin Verhoeven
2014 | 6’11 min | Colour | Digital

“Part of an ongoing project called Scanning Cinema [that consists] of scanning moving images by using a flatbed scanner and a monitor and putting them back into an animated film. The inversions [produced by this] method (the physical action of scanning) [generate] a new language like a disturbed echo from the photographic reviving of moving images. […] The fragments … used [here] are a re-montage of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, [while] the original soundtrack of Herbie Hancock has undergone the same process as the images. The movie consists of 10,000 scans put together in a stop-motion film.” – Benjamin Verhoeven

Cut Out
Guli Silberstein
2014 | 4’19 min | Colour | Digital

“A radiant, energetic girl is shouting and punching the empty space in front of her. She is roughly cut out from her surroundings by a computer algorithm struggling to contain her. Her enemies are rubbed off the frame, sound is removed and music added, emphasizing her anguish and anger. Is she real? Is she a dream? Gradually, more fragments of the scene are revealed, and the context is made clearer. The video-processing highlights the documented scene as image, both of a fight for freedom, and a media event.” – Guli Silberstein

Ektoplasmic Vision
Ricardo Salvador
2016 | 9’40 min | B/W & Colour | Digital

In 1965, the compendium of an earthly life devoted to scientific research was found in Kresty prison of Leningrad, encrypted in twelve vinyl records printed with stroboscopic images and hypnotic sounds, labeled with the name “HK320.” Ektoplasmic Vision tells the story of Dr. Joseph H. Stanislaw, a mad scientist of dubious provenance, who claimed to be a Nephilim (half human half demon). During his earthly passage (1888-1944), Dr. Stanislaw investigated the human mental projection, and designed his own devices to print and reproduce on “Ektoplasmic film” the images created by the spheres of mind. Ektoplasmic Vision is the documentary promotion along with the official trailer for Hermetica Komhata HK320, a retro Sci-fi film, 90 minutes long, recently produced by Hermetica Films.” – Ricardo Salvador

The Neutral Zone
LJ Frezza
2015 | 6’40 min | Colour | Digital

“A survey of the utopias featured in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994). Some of the structures that constrain and produce our understanding of possible futures.” – LJ Frezza

Doppelgänger
Tasman Richardson
2016 | 14’25 min | B/W & Colour | Digital

“Imperfect reflections, simulations, and recordings, sampled from cinema, VHS, and finally total signal failure. Originally performed live as a dual, parallel projection (mirrored). All sounds are from the source clips. harmonies and rhythms are achieved with complex combinations of temporal warping and editing of the video source.” – Tasman Richardson