Found vs. found

What:Found vs. Found

When:10 a.m.-5 p.m., Saturday and Sunday

Where:Heights Theater , 3951 Central Ave. NE, Columbia Heights, Minn.

Cost:$14, Event is 18+

Twenty-some years ago, Nick Prueher was at a thrift store in Wisconsin when he stumbled upon a McDonald’s training video called “Inside and Outside Custodial Duties.” Almost a decade later and hundreds of miles away, Chicago-resident Davy Rothbart would find an angry note left on his car addressed to a man named Mario and clearly written by a spurned but hopeful lover who, after declaring her outright hatred for Mario, innocently added as a P.S: “Page me later.”

These two discrete events — which may appear mundane to the untrained eye — would prove to be the inspiration for similar projects that pay special attention to the things we leave behind.

Prueher would go on to collect so many obscure videotapes that he and friend Joe Pickett put together the “Found Footage Festival,” which they have been touring around the country for seven years.

Rothbart printed his first “Found Magazine,” a compilation of found paper-bound miscellany, after quickly discovering his friends had also saved similar items that they’d found. Rothbart has since printed over a dozen “Found” books and magazines and has held down a corner of the found market since he sold out of his first 800 copies of issue number one in a single weekend.

On Monday night, the Found Footage Festival and Found Magazine will enter the found-ephemera gauntlet, if there ever was one, and bring out their best “finds” for a three-round battle royale where both teams will have 12 minutes each round to present and entertain the crowd with their selections.

Rothbart, who receives 100 to 200 pieces of mailed submissions for Found every week, has a sprawling collection that includes love letters, gossipy notes, photographs, to-do lists, doodles and the odd type-written budget that nonchalantly outlines expenditures for both rent, savings and crack on the same page.

Found Magazine’s material, which Rothbart’s mother calls “people watching on paper,” will be presented through emotional, tongue-in-cheek readings by none other than Rothbart himself, who will bring along his brother, Peter, to perform songs he wrote that were inspired by the miscellaneous bits in Found’s deep coffers. To Rothbart, the found item’s author often wrote their pieces with one person or just themselves in mind, and that’s exactly what makes it ideal substance for an audience-based project.

“They never anticipated anyone else would see it, so it’s so un-self conscious, so honest. I think people really hunger for things that are real and true,” Rothbart said. This vulnerability manifests itself in a different form in Prueher’s collection, which concerns itself with individuals who, contrarily, did have an audience in mind when creating their work, but their attempts to self-aggrandize and over-theatricalize result in an absurd or endearing display of often fragile egos.

In addition to snippets from the McDonald’s training video, Prueher and Pickett will also show a “Rent-A-Friend” that’s intended to be purchased by especially lonely homebodies and selections from a home shopping video from 1983. He and Pickett have also put together a “Wonderful Weirdos” compilation.

Prueher and Pickett’s Found Footage Festival finds its roots primarily in ’80s and ’90s instructional, exercise, home- made or odd footage that steers toward camp in an overly ambitious display of mediocre talent. Rothbart sees his collection as small windows into the private worlds of passing strangers.

“We’re surrounded by strangers walking down the street, sitting on the bus. It’s natural to be curious [about] what other people’s experiences being human is like. That’s what these notes give you in a really powerful and potent way,” Rothbart said.

Just how the particular items that comprise Found Magazine and the Found Footage Festival come into existence is often a mystery, but it is this partial peek into the lives of others that make the projects so popular. People may watch videos, read notes or see photographs never intended for their eyes — and then come to their own conclusions — but Rothbart believes this is all part of a natural desire to narrativize the unfamiliar and generate answers when only a small piece of the puzzle can be found.

“A certain degree of voyeurism is healthy,” Rothbart said.