Assemble. That’s the watchword of British artist and filmmaker Louis Henderson. For the past thirteen years, Henderson has been building a 2.0 filmography, essentially using the teeming universe of expanding images and sounds from the Internet, better known as net-found footage. In this respect, his protean texts and films take an archaeological approach to examining the materiality of the Internet while exploring themes as varied as politics, sociology, and anthropology. More specifically, Henderson’s practice stresses the permanence of cultural relics related to colonial pasts. We met with him ahead of his intervention in the Cinema Department’s net-found footage workshop in 2023.

“The world has already been filmed, it is now a matter of transforming it”, said Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle in 1973. This reservoir of images has since been made available by the Internet. In this article, the French filmmaker and critic, Jean-Sébastien Chauvin, considers the practice of filmmakers who – rather than adding images to the world – recycle traces of historical events or fragments of everyday life in a deliberately non-productive approach. The montages they make (re)articulate the flow of images found on the Internet, producing often-engaged narratives that counter the alienating logic of spectacle denounced by Debord. This article introduces a programme devoted to “net-found footage”, presented at the Entrevues film festival in Belfort from 22 to 27 November 2022.

From a fantasy aroused by some men′s underwear packaging, to the search for oneself in the depths of social media, to research into one′s own Iraqi origins; these three films created within the framework of Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel’s net-found footage workshops at the HEAD – Genève can be watched here.