Lawrence Lek and Diego Marcon in
The Second Life of Moving Images

In 1936, the surrealist Joseph Cornell decided to revive the film East of Borneo (1931) by favouring the appearances of his actress, to whom he paid tribute by giving her name Rose Hobart to this collage of slow-motion sequences associated with exotic music and an eclipse shot. This fan film before its time opens a new chapter in modern art, that of found footage, which consists of reusing pre-existing scenes, in the tradition of the ready-made, the industrial object exhibited as a work of art. This practice was to develop in the 1950s through the principle of situationist diversion, which gave this re-employment a political significance, that of announcing the reversal of the living conditions suffered. Led by Guy Debord, the revolutionary movement of the Situationist International took up elements specific to mass culture in order to subvert them and expose their contradictions. But if his attempt to go beyond capitalist society failed, the fact remains that the deconstruction of media representations (television and cinematographic) has had an undeniable posterity and that his criticism has profoundly influenced the use of moving images already produced.

With the advent of the Internet and the proliferation of social networks, found footage has experienced an unprecedented expansion. The democratization of access to images, facilitated by platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo or online archives, allows a growing number of artists to appropriate this technique. Remixing, mashup, and other forms of audiovisual reuse are becoming common practices, not only in art but also in popular culture. Today, this "post-production" is omnipresent, as the immense bank of images available allows us to explore various themes, drawing on our collective memory, which is always fragmentary. Thus, The Second Life of Moving Images offers a non-exhaustive panorama of this phenomenon of artistic appropriation that reminds us that each creator is also a spectator in our societies where the incessant circulation of images, and the economy of attention associated with it, have become a major anthropological fact of this twenty-first century.