Introduction - Citational Media as Counter-Archives
Annie Ring, Lucy Bollington
From Citational Media: Counter-Archives and Technology in Contemporary Visual Culture (2025), pp. 1-22, doi:10.59860/vc.c8d2a8e
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| Part of the book: Citational Media Edited by Annie Ring and Lucy Bollington Legenda Abstract. 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. Full text. This contribution is published as Open Access and can be downloaded as a PDF, or viewed as a PDF in your web browser, here: |
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