A Mixed History: Colliding Realities and the Hybrid Aesthetic

Abstract

With reference to historiography, the paper will ask how found footage can be manipulated to create alternate histories that challenge orthodox, ‘grand’ narratives within a hybrid aesthetic that foregrounds the diversity of its components, producing deliberate stylistic and ontological discontinuities. The practice echoes the ubiquity and malleability of video material in contemporary communications and media and examines the reliability and authenticity of the video image as a historical document. The work interrogates appropriation strategies that decontextualize and recontextualise found footage as a method of ideological interruption, releasing the mutable, multiple meanings that accumulate and shift in the confluence of competing discourses.