Contingent meanings: reframing appropriation in contemporary video installation

© 2017 Dr. Nicholas HertzogVideo documentation of examined exhibition Decomposing Contingencies (2017) is available at https://vimeo.com/230541522 and available as video file.This thesis, which comprises this dissertation together with accompanying creative work, addresses the implications of video and installation on the framing of contemporary appropriation-based artistic practices. This framework utilises a central concept of contingency that is distinguished from discourses of chance in order to focus on questions of meaning and the creative potential of ambiguity. My approach repositions appropriation practice away from gestures of critique and towards more nuanced strategies that extend ambiguity into practicable artistic methods. Accordingly, contingency is positioned as a network of potential from which meaning forms precarious alignments and is accelerated through contemporary conditions of digital exchange. This research identifies instances of contingency in existing video material and further accelerates this contingency through appropriation, reconfiguration and recombination. Digital video offers a vast range of material and potential configurations, presenting the contemporary practitioner with ever-increasing creative opportunities, coupled with increasing pressures of choice and gesture. The contemporary ubiquity of copying and appropriation in digital practice alters the role of these cultural strategies, detracting from their implied gestural quality and positioning the appropriation in a framework of increasingly ambiguous meaning. My approach to this contemporary condition involves positioning my own appropriation practice towards strategies that acknowledge and embrace an inherent uncertainty, and away from previous models that emphasise the importance of criticism and reference. Following this cultural positioning, contingency is presented as the potential for meaning to emerge from situations of uncertainty and the potential of unforeseen occurrences. Within the construction of video works, my strategies of obscuring and removal of reference reduces the emphasis on the act of appropriation itself, instead emphasising the contingencies of assemblage and arrangement. I argue that digital video is an expansive network of media relationships and contingencies of circulation and exchange. Accelerating these processes produces new video works that combine pre-existing video and shape an elusive intentionality and loose association of material. The ambiguities and uncertainties of this contingency approach are given a stable expression through the installation, which differentiates my video assemblages from the flux of their emergence through contemporary circulation. I argue that the experiential capacity of the installation then provides the conditions for meaning to be generated in the context of its encounter. While this establishes the creative potential and relevance of contingency, I also argue that contingency can present potential risks and inherent difficulties of differentiating ambiguity from meaninglessness. My approach balances these conditions through rigorous and reflexive engagement with the materiality of digital video and its installation in which contingency can emerge as meaning. Video documentation of examined exhibition Decomposing Contingencies (2017) is available at https://vimeo.com/230541522 and available as video file