Thus far, I have focused on the inner workings of the apparatus of video surveillance, a category to which webcams belong, and the elements that make the webcam a specifically cinematic medium that affects subjectification. By highlighting the genesis of its archival mode as based on a database of digital referents, I have attempted to emphasize the dual role of the Affected Personal Cam that records audiovisual traces in a seemingly random manner, thereby creating apparently trivial footage. Leading up to describing how historical facts are constructed by the narrative determining the database logics of the digital archive, I pointed out the means by which the production of determining code influences these records’ storage and categorization. Presently departing from Manovich's assumption that code is culture, it is possible to advance the hypothesis that the act of appropriating webcam materials is a form of producing culture. The ways in which artists approach this phenomenon vary in degree and outcome – some use the cameras on-site, while others edit the material they borrow from their continuous footage generation. I will now turn to the analysis of the act of appropriation in the case of video-surveillance footage, but also of general archival materials. The artists who work with archive footage that I focus on in this section mix film material with other sources, some originated by surveillance, but displaying by this act a clear choice for an aesthetics that is considered substandard and, in this case, medium-specific and extremely expressive.