Rejected or Unused Clips, Arranged in Order of Importance (2003)

• 81%
• 2003
• Documentary
• Seth Price

Rejected or Unused Clips, Arranged in Order of Importance purports to be a collection of unused video and audio clips left over from the artist's other works, from an abandoned audio piece on religious themes to an exploration of web video as it emerged in a time before YouTube and video search engines. Interlacing voice-over and sound with the sorts of graphic imagery that could belong equally to advertisements, corporate reels, amateur home pages, and video games, Price takes on religious and scientific discourse, the history of experimental cinema, the interrelation of culture and technology, and the social naturalization of violence. At the same time, however, this index of material at once discarded and made useful, with its claim to a formal structure based on "importance," provokes the question of how much its themes and messages are actually intended to cohere and communicate.