Archival gambits in recent art – What can an image do?

Abstract

In recent decades new technologies have increased access to and the manipulation of audio-visual material, to the point that today, reusing found footage has for many become a daily practice. Although the word ‘archive’ still continues to evoke notions of preservation, order, and authority, images circulate through increasingly pervasive mediascapes, being ripped, cut, retouched, pasted, and repurposed along the way. If the rise of neoliberal hegemony in the 1980s turned everyone into a consumer, in the early 1990s, with the introduction of the JPEG and other formats of what Hito Steyerl has called ‘poor images’, everyone became a produce.