| This thesis explores the phenomena of moving image appropriation by online communities of activists and amateur editors, called digital remixing, and attempts to connect this movement to the experimental found footage film and video art movements. Through an analysis of the political, rhetorical and aesthetic strategies enacted by digital remixers, this thesis maps the trajectory of moving image appropriation from Soviet re-editors just after the Russian revolution, to the avant-garde found footage filmmaking movement in North America, to the appropriation of mainstream films by video artists, and finally to digital remixing itself. Looking even more broadly at appropriation art in the 1980s, this thesis deconstructs some of the semiotic principles involved in the pilfering and transformation of extant cultural materials for use in radical ways by artists and activists alike. Finally, this thesis describes machinima, a new form of appropriation nascent to digital media. |
