Remediating the Archive: Found Footage, Literature, and Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (NeMLA)
Baltimore
Organization: NeMLA
Event: NeMLA
“There is no political power without control of the archive, if not memory” (Derrida, Archive Fever, 4).
There is beauty, a sense of warmth, perhaps, to stumbling upon old footage - a feeling that what we have been doing all along in the creative process is remediation and manipulation of the oldest and most timeless forms of art. As Benjamin puts forth in his Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction, the presence of the original is a prerequisite to the concept of authenticity. The 21st century turn to the archive, whether said archive be personal or political, - Tutto parla di te, Vogliamo anche le rose (Alina Marazzi), 48, Natureza Morta (Susana de Sousa Dias), Els dies que vindran (Carlos Marques-Marcet), Tondal’s vision (Stephen Broomer) - pushes us to return to questions posed in the mid 20th century by philosophers such as Derrida regarding the archive, ownership, authenticity, and remediation. In what ways do we remediate archival and found footage? What does access, and even ownership, of the archive provide us?
This panel invites papers that explore remediation and manipulation of existing film in contemporary art. This may include, and is not limited to:
-cultural management of national archives
-archive usage in contemporary film
-mixed media and animation of the archive
-utilization of the archive as a method of historical memory
-sustainability, ecocriticism, and the future of art
-archival turn of contemporary art
Lauren Mushro