It’s hard to get a handle on Wreck and Salvage at first — upon visiting the site, you’re met by an astounding array of content, albeit without much connecting it all together. But digging in reveals one of the web’s great repositories for weird and funny videos — and one of the fresher voices online, despite the fact that they rarely shoot a single frame.
Wreck and Salvage aren’t so much content producers as content remixers; creators Adam Quirk, Aaron Valdez, and Erik Nelson’s bread and butter is other peoples’ footage, which they ingeniously repurpose for their own needs. But by bringing a honed aesthetic vision and high-quality post-production values to these pieces, their work stands apart — even when it seems somewhat random.
By far the oddest of their series is Suppendapo, in which real people call in product orders for the pending apocalypse (post-apocalypse, I presume), and the calls are animated with clip art and text. It’s funny what you get when you solicit your own crank callers — for one thing, it’s confirmed that most people place those sorts of calls while drunk with friends.
The recent bulk of their work has been focused on the upcoming election, and the team’s Libertarian bent means that both parties are fair game. Some pieces, such as Club Iraq, have a clear point of view, but others usually stick to the random side of things. Those from the latter camp tend to be the most visually engaging but also the most extraneous — unless there’s a political message to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi doing a techno chicken dance that I’m missing. “If it clucks like a chicken, and walks like a chicken, it must be a techno chicken,” says Quirk via IM.
The Pelosi piece is part of an ongoing series W&S is doing for mash-up enablers RemixAmerica, which approached them about doing remixes of the Democratic and Republican conventions. The arrangement is a non-monetary one, with RemixAmerica providing footage and promotion, giving W&S a larger platform for their works — they’re currently hard at work on their RNC coverage. “Right now in my editor I have about a minute’s worth of kaleidoscopic Tony Danza footage, two hours of Fred Thompson and Joe Lieberman from last night’s RNC, and some footage of gorillas having sex,” Quirk says. “Not sure what I’ll make of all that.”
As any Marshall McLuhan fan knows, the medium is the message, and by transforming convention footage and singing Iraqi children into brief shorts, certainly some message is implied. What is the message, though? “It’s just finding the little pieces of awkwardness or uncomfortableness in a piece and stringing them together,” Quirk says. “A lot of times I don’t understand what I’ve just made. The brain has a dangerous habit of messing around with stuff it cannot or will not comprehend.” The W&S take may lack an informed point of view on policy issues (thus making it ever-so-slightly Paris Hilton’s bitch), but its apolitical irreverence is a fresh breeze in the sturm und drang of the 2008 election.
