Kiss Off

Abstract

‘Kiss off’ is a collaborative videographic essay produced by a prompt from Ian Garwood’s Indy vinyl for the masses project, which tasks makers with building short, sequential videos around a pop song. Our team approached the project through a collective inquiry into archives to examine their authority, fragility, and potential for resistance. Structured in five interrelated segments, ‘Kiss off’ dramatises cinematic trespasses into archival spaces, layers personal ephemera with fictional imagery, stages collages of erasure and preservation, and reflects on the materiality of editing itself. Each contributor’s intervention was guided by the shared question: what does it mean to behave badly in the archive? The final section turns to videographic practice itself as a form of glitch and archive, incorporating our own catalogues to expose both the vulnerability and reciprocity of collaboration. In this way, ‘Kiss off’ positions playful experimentation as rigorous scholarly critique.