Re-Vision: Sampling as a Cultural Strategy

Re-Vision is an exhibition that addresses the growing importance of methods of appropriation and recycling of existing visual data from the media. Current artistic production showcases the recycling of images as a creative process. 

The massive visual output of the media society serves as the point of departure for generating new readings from globally available mass media images and subjecting media images to critical examination. An aesthetic of repetition recycles film images used in other contexts for the artists' own production process. The recombination of data and visual information is presented as a cultural principle of reflecting media content to question the assumptions of perceptive habits and make possible a different view of widely known societal and cultural patterns.
 

The principle of 'found footage', the use of preexisting film material, proceeds from the viewer's visual experience. The very circumstance that the original footage is recognisable demonstrates the semantic shift intended by the artists in manipulating and transforming this material. Recycling images calls attention to the pictures themselves and refers to the cultural visual memory of a society in which everything is accessible at all times and sampling is not just a digital technology but has indeed become the dominant lifestyle of an era.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a media education programme, which will transpose the issues addressed to the practical plane with adolescents and young adults. The pro-gramme accompanying the exhibition will consist of film screenings to explore the issues dealt with by the exhibition in more depth and elucidate them.