For millennia, sports have been intrinsic to daily life, physical well-being, civic identity, and social harmony. That presence has expanded in the last century to occupy entire sections of newspapers and news hours, in turn begetting 24-hour television channels, talk radio stations, and endless punditry. Lately, sports have assumed a larger, more multidimensional place in our culture, advancing, for instance, further into the fields of contemporary art and film. The traditional schism, and often times, antagonism (jocks vs nerds, square vs cool) between sports and art have been blurred. Sports are now seamlessly integrated with pop culture, celebrity culture, music, and fashion trends. Meanwhile, ancillary aspects of sports have nearly eclipsed the sports themselves. In the information age, fans are the new experts, gambling with likenesses, and athletes are sets of statistical profiles and avatars. Sports economies are shifting towards the virtual; the daily fantasy site FanDuel paid out more than $500 million in cash prizes last year, new streaming platforms have emerged for live viewing of video game play, and eSports leagues are increasingly lucrative.

Whether you call it collage, compilation, found footage, détournement, or recycled cinema, the incorporation of already existing media into new artworks is a practice that generates novel juxtapositions and new meanings and ideas, often in ways entirely unrelated to the intentions of the original makers. Such new works are, in other words, “inappropriate.” This act of (in)appropriation may even produce revelations about the relationship between past and present, here and there, intention and subversion, artist and critic, not to mention the "producer" and "consumer" of visual culture itself. Fortunately for our purposes, the past decade has witnessed the emergence of a wealth of new audiovisual elements available for appropriation into new works. In addition to official state and commercial archives, resources like vernacular collections, home movie repositories, and digital archives now also provide fascinating material to repurpose in ways that lend it new meaning and resonance.

Founded in 2009, the Festival of (In)appropriation is a yearly showcase of contemporary, short (20 minutes or less), audiovisual works that appropriate existing film, video, or other media and repurpose it in “inappropriate” and inventive ways. The show is curated by Jaimie Baron, Lauren Berliner, and Greg Cohen.