On a chilly San Francisco evening earlier this month several hundred people milled about a smallish and unremarkable parking lot near the intersection of Eighth and Folsom streets. Across the expanse of a mildly dingy, low-level white brick building appeared numerous video and film projections; more were found abutting the corner of the adjacent building and, with more staccato regularity, lining the wall of a neighboring alley. Amidst the crowd a band played live while near the parking lot’s entrance still images, primarily of books, flashed across a raised billboard covered by a white sheet threatening to slip down at any moment. The occasion of this one-night-only takeover of urban space was an event called “Prelinger on Prelinger,” staged by The Illuminated Corridor, an organization that sponsors roving visual and sound installations in the public sphere, and the San Francisco Cinematheque.

The impetus for this casually entangled, low-key happening was located both in the aforementioned white brick building and, simultaneously, in cyberspace. The second floor of 301 Eighth Street houses The Prelinger Library, a private collection of some 50,000 books, periodicals, and pieces of ephemera belonging to Rick and Megan Prelinger, which they make available to the public for browsing during weekly open hours. As anyone who has dropped in will tell you, this is not your normal library. It is highly idiosyncratic, a subjective construction built over the years by two bibliophiles with personal, if wide-ranging, tastes and interests—film history, the Pacific Northwest, the ideology of the far right—whose marriage had the added benefit of joining two book collections. Even more unusual is the library’s organizational structure, as the three aisles unfold in a morphology of themes—what Megan Prelinger calls “a map of my brain”—rather than, for example, the Library of Congress system, in order to optimize happy accidental discoveries.

The billboard projection at the “Prelinger on Prelinger” event, as perhaps has by now been surmised, paid homage to the building’s contents next door, and comes closest to the event’s claim to turn the library inside out for the night. The remaining projections, as well as the live music ensemble, found their sources in a different Prelinger endeavor. In the early 1980s, Rick Prelinger began to crisscross the country by truck, collecting ephemeral films discarded by schools, libraries, and other institutions. “He is credited with almost single-handedly saving this entire genre from extinction,” Gideon Lewis-Kraus wrote in last May’s issue of Harper’s Magazine (a feature highly recommended for those interested in a detailed account of the library and film archive, as well as their custodians).

In 2002, the Prelingers sold their film collection, which numbered more than forty-eight thousand works, to the Library of Congress for a fraction of its value and subsequently uploaded two thousand of the films to the Internet Archive. Artists, filmmakers, bricoleurs, and daily surfers can download the films and do with them what they will, while commercial entities are required to license the works from Getty Images. To this end, both the library and the film archive are deemed by the Prelingers to be “appropriation-friendly,” a phrase that clearly spells out the stakes of this project and the “Prelinger on Prelinger” event, for which the invited sound and video artists and filmmakers were asked to pilfer from and riff on the films of the Prelinger Archive found online.

Nearly all of the participating artists projected films downloaded—and thus made digital—while employing some form of live manipulation. Whether low-tech or high—Craig Baldwin simply placed an altered fan in front of his projector while Thickness/Monolayer sat hunched in deep concentration over a laptop with headphones on—this meant that opposite the smattering of projections across the walls were manned stations of laptops, projectors, tangles of cords and various other equipment. When combined with the mingling white lab coat-wearing Illuminated Corridor staff, the place had the whiff of a science or trade fair—the image of Duchamp happily presiding over his rotoreliefs at Paris’s annual salon des inventions springs to mind. And yet, everything on view was found (first by the Prelingers and then by the night’s participants) and remained anonymous, and both ownership and materials were manipulated collectively. The sensation of witnessing a collective pool of images reworked from all angles was only strengthened by the way in which the many projections—at least nine—on the main wall jostled together. It took some effort to figure out what belonged to whom—which seemed to be very much part of the point. As was an underlying politics of fluid exchange from film canister to Internet file to street performance. As was the tongue-in-cheek gesture of calling the event “Prelinger on Prelinger,” considering the expanded field of authorship celebrated here.

Rick and Megan were indeed on hand, as hosts during the pizza-fueled library open hours upstairs and, later, as spectators cheerily greeting friends and colleagues downstairs. Panorama Ephemera (2004), a film made by Rick Prelinger that collages together excerpts from the film collection, was also projected on the brick wall, accompanied by a live score conducted by Gino Robair and performed by a number of musicians. Yet Panorama Ephemera became just another component of the collective experience, projected slightly larger than the other works, but overlapping with them both physically and thematically: at one uncanny moment, footage of a spectacularly fast female typist demonstrating her skills on perhaps the latest model typewriter, red nails clacking rapidly and assuredly, was shown as part of Panorama Ephemera, and seconds later, the same footage reappeared in the dual-projection corner installation by Killer Banshee, now obscured by a crackling white light overlaid live onto the original image.

One of the most remarkable reworkings of the Prelinger Archive resulted in an installation in which the films’ content had been entirely obscured. Steve Dye set two projectors behind a pile of trash and pointed them skywards. The effect was as much sculptural as filmic, the beams of light (primarily footage of water in their previous life) working the heavily textured wall and annexing the entire debris-strewn corner of the parking lot into his mise-en-scène. Similarly, in the alley between Peter Nyboer (who provided Astroturf and a couple of lawn chairs for viewers) and Sarah Lockhart, Lance Grabmiller projected the earliest Prelinger films he could find on the Internet Archive, which happened to include footage of San Francisco’s 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. He had isolated and enhanced the inherent damage to the films, which resulted at times in near total abstraction. Notably, the only films included in the event were the five or so sports-themed projections by Cinepimps on the lower left portion of the main wall. Despite a shared Americana sensibility, the films came from Cinepimps’ own collection rather than that of the Prelinger Archive, and so turned the screw even further by appropriating not the shared caché of material with which everyone else had worked, but the event itself.