Panel 2

New Footage Found

Birgit Kohler
Stefan Ripplinger
Christa Blümlinger

The rise of digital image and media technologies not only means that there are disproportionately more moving and non-moving images occupying the public and private spaces of contemporary art production and reception. It simultaneously means that these images also increasingly circulate beyond the boundaries of the various types of media. Between their sheer repetition as citation (appropriation art) and their more or less conceptually-strategically marked use in (film) image/sound collages, they unfold a rich arsenal of artistic techniques in appropriating outside materials.

The panel attempted to imagine the category of “found footage films” in light of these new practices of appropriation and (re)working of moving and non-moving images. The wide variety of forms in which archival art can be seen today makes it clear that, in dealing with pre-existing images, a broad spectrum of mnemonic paradigms controls the area between the individual work of memory and the collective writing of history.

Isidore Isou’s film Traité de bave et d'éternité (1951) has been served as the starting point for the panel discussion.

Moderator:
Birgit Kohler (Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V., Berlin)
Panelists:
Christa Blümlinger (film scholar, Universität Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis)
Stefan Ripplinger (independent author, Berlin)