Founded in 2009, the Festival of (In)appropriation is an international showcase for experimental, found-media film and video. Every year, our festival attracts artists working across an astonishing array of moving-image formats while probing the limits of collage, remix, détournement, and more. The raw material for their work derives from the abundant new sources of audiovisual media to have surfaced in recent decades, from official state and commercial archives to vernacular collections, home movie repositories, and digital databases. By recontextualizing and otherwise refashioning these pre-existing materials, such works generate novel juxtapositions and recombinations, producing ideas and meanings that were unintended or unimagined by the original makers. These remarkable works, in other words, are “inappropriate” in the profoundest sense of the term.
This program – drawn from numerous editions of the festival – brings together works that animate paper cutouts of artists renderings of women’s bodies,
re-edit luminous Super8 film, digitally alter an archival photograph into a meditation on time’s passage, insert contemporary images into footage of an old television show, rapidly alternate stereoscopic images from a medical textbook, unearth a dated commercial for refrigerator décor for purposes of critical montage, place a Hollywood actress within a nightmarish landscape, rotoscope home movie images to ghostly effect, and recombine snippets of 1950s radio plays for comedic and uncanny ends. This compilation of stand-out films from the first decade of the Festival of (In)appropriation strives to evince the remarkable range, sophistication, and critical impact of this vital aesthetic practice.

Jaimie Baron
Director of Festival of (In)Appropriation

Lying Women
Deborah Kelly / Australia / 4’ / 2016
Sand
Brice Bowman / Usa / 9’ / 2015
Derivation of the mean lifetime
Phoebe Tooke / Usa / 9’ / 2015
I For NDN
Clint Enns, Darryl Nepina / Canada / 2’ / 2011
8th October 2016
Péter Lichter / Hungary / 2’ / 2017
Speechless
Scott Stark / Usa / 13’ / 2008
Intermittent Delight
Akosua Adoma Owusu / Usa / 4’ / 2006
Night Hunter
Stacey Steers / Usa / 15’ / 2010
Ghost of Yesterday
Tony Gault / Usa / 5’ / 2012
Retrocognition
Eric Patrick / Usa / 18’ / 2012