archive.org/details/prelinger

One of the key collections of the vast open access resource that is the Internet Archive is the astounding collection of films that Rick Prelinger has been acquiring since 1983. Over 2,000 ephemeral films – home movies, educational, advertising and industrial titles, from a period that spans the 1920s to the 1980s – are free for every filmmaker with a penchant for appropriation to watch, download, reinvent and then upload to the site in the Prelinger Archive Mash Ups section if one so chooses too. And there are some great lessons to be learned to from the films of the past; whether it’s how to survive germ warfare or why loose girls aren’t popular or how ants repair their cities there’s a vast array of movies to check out.

Milica Tomic - One Day

Dates: 12 March – 30 May | Location: FACT, Liverpool

In a period of global unrest, FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) presents a timely exhibition. MyWar explores conflict in a digitally networked world through the work of 12 international artists. Their work investigates the realities and myths of war at a time when the boundaries between the public and the private are being steadily eroded.

The exhibition follows two lines of enquiry. In the first, the artists adopt a radically personal approach to war. In his video work Episode I (2004), Dutch artist Renzo Martens reflects on the narcissism of news media and the role of the camera in places of political unrest. Travelling to war zones, the artist turns the camera onto himself and asks the war’s victims, not what is happening to them, but what they think of him. In the second thread of the exhibition, artists explore the ways web technologies have infiltrated global wars. Joseph DeLappe’s artistic intervention dead-in-iraq (2006-ongoing) adds the names of real war casualties to virtual online recruiting game America’s Army to counteract the anonymity of a mediated war and memorialise its victims. Thomson & Craighead’s A Short Film about War (2009) gathers first person war images and stories from blogs to construct a new, global narrative of a ubiquitous war, distributed across the Internet, without boundaries.

For more information on the exhibition, visit the FACT, Liverpool website.