Citational Media foregrounds the potential of a body of counter-archival practices that have emerged in contemporary visual media outside the traditional space of the cinema.
Each chapter focuses on examples of visual or performance culture that appropriate, re-use and so progressively ‘archive’ other media or footage, as they critique dominant ideologies in an age of new technologies and ongoing global turbulence. The resulting case studies, drawn from the late twentieth century to the present day, range from critical re-uses of television footage that undercut the medium’s original meanings, to popular videos screened on social media platforms, that performatively cite smart technologies and their software interfaces. Such citational media practices, while ambivalent in their meanings, have the potential to recast narratives and archives that have governed — and if left unquestioned, risk further constricting and exploiting — contemporary life.
Annie Ring is Associate Professor of German and Film and Lucy Bollington is Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Film. Both are based in the School of European Languages, Culture and Society and the Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry, University College London.
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1-22
Introduction - Citational Media as Counter-Archives Annie Ring, Lucy Bollington doi:10.59860/vc.c8d2a8e
This book puts forward the novel concept of ‘citational media’ as a means of approaching the entanglements of past and present, nostalgia and techno-progress, that are evident in so much of contemporary visual culture. We define citational media inclusively as encompassing the many visual and digital artworks, performances, and screen media works that reference, appropriate, or reframe archival material in critical representations of their historical moment. We are particularly interested in tracing this citational practice across screen works exhibited outside the space of the cinema auditorium, and produced around the world. Analysing key examples of such media, the authors writing in this volume claim that citational practices in recent visual cultures highlight the historical and present-day issues that are most urgent for thinking through current developments in culture, global politics, media, and technology. Further, we claim that the reflective and political examples of citation analysed here can be viewed collectively as belonging to a ‘counter-archival’ visual culture, in which artists around the world are challenging existing ways of archiving and narrating the past and present, and so developing new images for the political, aesthetic, and mediatic realities of the future.
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23-44
Archives of the Future Past: Harun Farocki’s Critique of Television in The Trouble with Images (1973) Laura Lux doi:10.59860/vc.c058855
Although Harun Farocki has become a renowned filmmaker in documentary and essayistic film practices, reflecting on the ‘in-betweens’ of images through film, there is still little known on the prevalence of his ideas around2 montage and the moving image in his critique of television in the early 1970s. What follows aims to revisit this often-forgotten step in Farocki’s evolution as a filmmaker while outlining his critical thoughts on television and analysing the citational counterstrategies in film which he developed to undermine its techniques of obfuscation, amnesia, and systematisation.
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45-62
Between Citational Genealogy and the Counter-Archival Uncanny: Adam Curtis and the Democratisation of the Archive Emily Baker doi:10.59860/vc.c167c9c
Can’t Get You Out of My Head, a six-part documentary film series made by Adam Curtis, was released on the BBC iPlayer in February 2021. Media scholars such as James Bennett have taken the launch of the iPlayer as their first example of the disruption to the ‘structure of television’s scheduled flow’ in this new era of digital and thus personalised viewing. Curtis declared himself aware of the extra freedom this immediate release to iPlayer would give him; yet apart from being longer, in many ways the series’s form and content adheres to his signature style, inaugurated with the release of Pandora’s Box (1992, BAFTA winner for Best Factual Series in 1993) and refined over the course of a number of series and stand-alone documentaries. Baker argues that Curtis’s series can benefit from being understood as a genealogical study of the present, aware of its own discursive will-to-power, and at the same time, maintaining openness to multiple possible readings. Understanding it in this way should subdue critiques that label Curtis’s work as ‘incoherent and conspiracy-fuelled’. While the BBC documentary-making tradition is clearly folded into his work, Curtis’s citational use of the BBC, and other, archives produces a clear counter-archive to the hegemonic discourses of power that the BBC was often complicit in producing, reflecting and/or underpinning.
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63-82
Excavation and Entstellung: (Media-) Archaeological Activity and Postcolonial Memory Work in William Kentridge’s Wozzeck and The Head & the Load Lawrence Alexander doi:10.59860/vc.c27707f
William Kentridge’s artistic philosophy and modus operandi rigorously defend uncertainty, ambiguity, and contradiction. Alexander approachs the Freudian model of Entstellung (meaning ‘distortion’, but also ‘dis-placement’) not merely as an object of psychoanalytic interpretation, but also as a prevailing condition of contemporary moving image economies and the related practices of aesthetics and politics that Kentridge seeks to engage. These concerns provide a pretext for thinking about media-archaeological practice in general and Kentridge’s confrontation with historical and archival violence in particular. Alexander considers this media-archaeological sensibility as one that illuminates the violent distortions that continue to haunt Western narratives of history and representation, and historical representation, since their inauguration in Plato’s cave. This analysis reads Kentridge’s performative practice as one that mobilises the experiences of spatial and temporal fragmentation — displacements and distortions — that are characteristic of contemporary cultures of moving image circulation.
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83-108
Critique, Repair and Care: Rebuilding the Black and Decolonial Archive with Theaster Gates and Kader Attia Jenny Chamarette doi:10.59860/vc.c3864c6
How might Black and decolonial archives be refound, repaired, or rebuilt, in light of their notable omission from the stories that museums and archives have told? This question is of course not solely mine to ask. The question itself suggests that omission implies absence, lack, or deficiency — not only that there is insufficient evidence to be admissible into the archive, but that this leads to ontological insufficiency. The omission of Black life from the archive is closely allied to racist and racialising epistemological claims about lack, absence, or deficiency as defining features of Black and postcolonial life. Archives are, as Ariella Aïsha Azoulay identifies, not simply a collection of documents or their institutional housing, but also a regime that systematises imperial violence, which ‘shapes a world, not just distorts the ways it is perceived (its representations)’. For centuries European colonial practices, knowledge systems, and racial science have fed narratives driving white Anglo-European misperceptions of racialised lack as a negative quality inherent to Blackness. It follows, then, that the conceptual conflation of omission and lack has been the focus of Black studies for some time. This is the ‘zone of non-being’ described by Franz Fanon, or what Zakiyyah Iman Jackson has described as ‘the process of imagining black people as an empty vessel, a nonbeing, a nothing, an ontological zero’. Taking a lead from scholars of postcolonial/decolonial, critical race and Black studies, Jenny Chamarette’s question might be better rephrased as: how to reveal the richness, radical complexity, and abundance of Black, decolonial, and pre-colonial historical life when the epistemological structures of archives and museums have prioritised narratives and knowledges of whiteness? And how might this happen in the context of moving-image media in museum spaces?
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109-132
Counter-Archiving Coloniality in the Americas: Rita Indiana and others’ After School (2020) R. Sánchez-Rivera, Natasha Tanna doi:10.59860/vc.c47d26d
Rita Indiana and others’ thirteen-minute performance video After School was filmed in a former school in Puerto Rico on 27 August 2020, at a moment of widespread and heightened attention to racial inequality. The Covid-19 pandemic had disproportionately affected people of colour in the USA (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2021) and the Black Lives Matter movement had gained global momentum in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. When the Covid-19 pandemic struck, Puerto Rico was still in a long process of recovery following Hurricanes Irma and Maria in September 2017 and the 2019–20 earthquakes on the archipelago. The effects of Hurricane Maria, in particular, were compounded by the woeful US federal response under Donald Trump. Both the hurricanes and the earthquakes resulted in schools being closed on top of a general trend of closures from the 1990s onwards, which had picked up pace from 2016 as part of a series of austerity measures under Puerto Rico’s then Governor Ricardo Rosselló and Secretary of Education Julia Keleher. In this chapter, Sánchez-Rivera and Tanna explores how the video draws attention to obscured colonial histories and imagines the future undoing of coloniality and capitalism through a queer/anti-racist alliance. This reading of the video as counter-archive draws on the work of critics who have centred issues of racialisation and dehumanisation in theorisations of and engagements with colonial archives and archival practices, and discusses whether the video unwittingly re-enacts racial hierarchies through ‘mestizaje logics’, despite its anti-colonial stance.
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133-154
The Material Impact of ‘the Digital’ in Counter-Archival Video Works by Hito Steyerl and Brenda Lien Annie Ring doi:10.59860/vc.c58c2cc
In response to the ubiquity and purported immateriality of Internet cultures, contemporary screen artists Hito Steyerl and Brenda Lien have both deployed aesthetic strategies aimed at a new defamiliarisation, to reveal and explore the material impacts of new technologies. Repurposing some of the most familiar content and interfaces of the contemporary Internet, the citational screen works by these artists draw attention to the computational practices of our present day that are creating real but often hidden impacts on lives, bodies, and environments. Ring analyses video works by Steyerl and Lien in which portrayals of apparently abstract technological processes are intruded upon by surprising images of materiality.
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155-186
From the Cyborg to the Rendered Body: Conceptualising Redistributions in Composite Agency Through Hito Steyerl’s Citational Figures Lucy Bollington doi:10.59860/vc.c69b713
In 1985, Donna Haraway instated the cyborg as a provocative conceptual figure expressing the entangled dynamics of power, control, and protest in the information age. This theory was pathbreaking in part because of the challenge it posed to the prevailing tendency within feminism to seek ‘alliance with nature and against technology’. Even today, almost forty years on, the cyborg arguably remains the most prominent figure for conceptualising entangled relationships between humans and technology. Yet, despite this enduring influence, already in 2006 N. Katherine Hayles suggested that the cyborg was beginning to look out of date. Hayles proposed replacing the cyborg, not with another figure, but with a concept: ‘the cognisphere’, a term drawn from the work of Thomas Whalen. Bollington now proposes that we supplement the cyborg with a new conceptual figure for the sociotechnical present: the digitally-animated figure, or ‘rendered body’, that appears with striking frequency across films by some of today’s most prominent artists. Bollington discusses in particular the acclaimed German-Japanese artist Hito Steyerl’s Factory of the Sun (2015), which stages a transition from the cyborg to the rendered body, a transition propelled by Steyerl’s understanding of the importance of machine-machine ecologies in shaping the terms and operations of contemporary power, capitalism, and protest today.
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187-204
Twin Faces as Sites of Uncertainty in Algorithmic Image Cultures Edward King doi:10.59860/vc.c7c3650
In November 2017, a number of identical twin social media stars with vast online followings posted videos on their YouTube accounts to mark the release of the iPhone X. There was one feature of the new range of phones that the twins were especially excited to test for their millions of followers: Face ID. This new security system seemed to be a gift to twin consumer tech reviewers determined to identify flaws in the interface: what better test for face-recognition algorithms than identical twin faces? Most videos showed the twins were able to unlock each other’s phones. But Face ID is only the latest biometric technology promising to ‘stabilize the messy ambiguity of identity, to automatically read a stable, individual identity off the body’. Biometric systems emerged in parallel with twin studies methodologies during the second half of the nineteenth century, in response to the rapid growth of an urban population deemed a potential threat to security.
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Bibliography entry:
Ring, Annie, and Lucy Bollington (eds), Citational Media: Counter-Archives and Technology in Contemporary Visual Culture, Visual Culture, 7 (Legenda, 2025)
First footnote reference:35Citational Media: Counter-Archives and Technology in Contemporary Visual Culture, ed. by Annie Ring and Lucy Bollington, Visual Culture, 7 (Legenda, 2025), p. 21.
Subsequent footnote reference:37 Ring and Bollington, p. 47.
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15 May 2025 • 242pp