The project Stretch, Compress, Distort addresses the concepts of appropriation and remixing as creative strategies, based on a reflection on the circulation of the image and the collapse of the boundaries between time, space and authorship in the post-digital era. It explores the recombination and recontextualization of pre-existing cultural content, focusing on video surveillance images available online.
Two complementary components explore the conceptual framework and creative practice around the topic. A printed publication brings together critical texts on the subject, contextualizing the process of developing the website, which in turn appropriates and reconfigures the very observation tools it investigates. The images used are publicly accessible, as live broadcasts from surveillance cameras in locations across Southeast Asia. Taken out of their original context, they are subjected to the Slit Scan process, creating distorted temporal collages where past and present coexist.
Rather than highlighting a particular region or urban experience, the project seeks to emphasize the ease of access to surveillance systems in different parts of the world, revealing the paradox between remote visibility and localized anonymity.
Project by Leonor Rego Costa | Project II | Master in Communication Design | Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon, 2024-25.
References
(1) Lessig, L. (2008).Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. Penguin Press.
(2) Pichler, M. (2009).Statements on Appropriation.
(4) Debord, G., & Wolman, G. J. (n.d.).A User's Guide to Detournement.
(5) Jaschko, S. (2013).Space‑time correlations focused in film objects and interactive video.
(6) Levin, G. (2014).An Informal Catalogue of Slit-Scan Video Artworks and Research.
To remix is a process: it is an activity, to be deployed as a verb and not a noun.
In remixing, one acts upon existing cultural materials pilfered from the vast landfills of the already mixed and mediated landscape.(...) This jumbling,
sampling,
splicing,
recombinant activity is based on ideals of impurity. (1)
Appropriation art takes a (usually) recognizable object, text or image and recontextualizes it. In the new context, the associations that the reader/viewer has with the appropriated object are subverted, and he or she is forced to reexamine his/her relationship to it. Therefore appropriated art is often political, satirical and/or
ironic. (1)
Certain images, objects, sounds, texts, or thoughts,
would lie within the area of what is appropriation,
if they are somewhat more explicit,
sometimes strategic,
sometimes indulging in
borrowing, stealing, appropriating, inheriting, assimilating... being influenced, inspired, dependent, indebted, haunted, possessed, quoting, rewriting, reworking, refashioning... a re-vision, re-evaluation, variation, version, interpretation, imitation, proximation, supplement, increment, improvisation, prequel... pastiche, paraphrase, parody, forgery, homage, mimicry, travesty, shan-zhai, echo, allusion, intertextuality and karaoke. (2)