Prelinger on the art of appropriation

Rick Prelinger on the Art of Appropriation, November 4, 2010.  Rick Prelinger’s talk examined how massive cultural freeganism is colliding with the urgency of the archival impulse, and proposes several largely unpursued directions in which people might work with preexisting materials.  Prelinger is founder of Prelinger Archives, whose collection of 51,000 advertising, educational, industrial and amateur films was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002 after 20 years operation. Prelinger has partnered with the Internet Archive to make 2,000 films from Prelinger Archives available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. He sits on the National Film Preservation Board as representative of the Association of Moving Image Archivists and is board president of the Internet Archive. He is co-founder of the Prelinger Library. His feature-length film Panorama Ephemera, depicting the conflicted landscapes of 20th-century America, opened in summer 2004. With spouse Megan Prelinger he is co-founder of the Prelinger Library, an appropriation-friendly reference library located in San Francisco. Click here for a link to both full audio and video recordings of this event. The excerpt here was edited by Allison Harris.