Last week we reported on Mish Mash, a competition held by Getty Images. The gist of it was that Getty is granting access to their vault for use of a mountain of source material and is simply asking creatives to concoct engaging video using their glut of film, TV and ad footage as a resource.

With the threat of PIPA and SOPA looming, that seemed unprecedented and rather daring. Our hats went off to them.

But, they’re not alone in that deserved praise. Lately we’ve noticed the folksy art of collage has been getting a serious boost from digital culture, as a whole.

For ages, collaged ephemera remained the fodder of the underground. Artists as divergent as Robert Rauschenberg to William S. Burroughs to Afrika Bambatta used the art of sampling, mixing and re-appropriating in order to express a narrative; be it thru sculpture, sonnet or song. But lately we’ve been noticing an influx of video collage used to tell stories, promote upstart projects, and even more recently, advertise brands thru a series of inspired virals.

So, in lieu of the golden key to Getty’s vaults, you ask ‘where is the source material from?’ Found footage of pop cultural detritus is the name of the game. Be it old exercise VHS, late night infomercials for adult diapers or oddball B-movie from the 80’s, it doesn't matter. It all gets scrambled mixed and mashed together to create something spellbinding.

Sites like Everything Is A Remix and EverythingIsTerrible are guiding lights in this movement, that now is crawling out of the underground and testing its mettle in the world of branding and advertising. Nike recently launched the Counts viral, for the impressive, and Data Dimension-worthy Nike + Fuelband. The entire video is constructed from sampled video of everything from The Warriors movie to the dubious Happy Feet.

And less we forget about last weeks viral star: the bizarrely amazing send up of Lionel Richie’s Hello by Matthijs Vlot. A collage, chopped and spliced together from hundreds of film and TV clips. The resulting effect is uproariously funny.

While the unstable nature of recent copyright law debates are shifting the legality of communication and information exchange via web, there really is no telling how long we all have before the Internet becomes a very cold, and uninspired place.

Grab what you can, while you still can.

Links to consider:

http://www.everythingisaremix.info/

http://www.everythingisterrible.com/

http://www.nike.com/fuelband/

http://www.youtube.com/user/nike?v=MT50eLLxPco

http://vimeo.com/35055590