Guy Debord

I thoroughly enjoyed our webspinna performances last week. There was remixing at many levels, words, phrases, sounds, and music, individual as well as class performance all rolled into one smooth fusion. I have no background in sound art besides playing the piano. I have always been in awe of composers wondering how they hear sounds as I see colors and images in creating visual work. I dabbled in animation last semester, where for the first time, I selected music and sounds off of the Internet composing tracks for my shorts. Thanks to the sound artists on the net. I totally loved the mixing of different medium and was able to create a psychological space for the visuals. Working on the webspinna furthered my awareness of the abundant sources that are floating in cyberspace.

“All aware people of our time agree that art can no longer be justified as a superior activity, or even as an activity of compensation to which one could honorable devote oneself. The cause of this deterioration is clearly the emergence of productive forces that necessitate other production relations and a new practice of life.” Writes Debord in his Methods of Détournement, an essay that was published in 1956. I wonder what he would write about on the current status of our global, techno-manic societies of the 21^st century? Would he embrace or reject the abundance of information, everywhere and anywhere? What would Debord think of the net artists, drifting in and out of virtual realities mixing and remixing, creating art instantaneously, spontaneously as art can be? How was art ever justified as a superior activity and why?

On the other hand, détournement, much like the cut-up method, certainly works well with the endless supply of resources. Anything can be and should be used. Debord stated, “Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can serve in making new combinations.” He goes on further, “It is the most distant detourned element which contributes most sharply to the overall impression.” This statement can be used as a metaphor to describe dualism. When opposites are juxtaposed, the total meaning transcends.

In Postproduction, by Nicolas Bourriaud, he quoted Douglas Huebler saying in the sixties, “The world is saturated with objects and he did not wish to produce more.” Bourriaud also used the word “chaos” a few times describing the excessiveness of our society. There is so much of everything, objects, noise, pollution, electronic messaging, etc. The artists of today have an organizing task at hand, recycling, remixing, and making sense out of the nonsense. We’re honing our skills in discretion.

The web, the virtual space with its matrix, has replaced the psychogeographical maps. What Debord termed dérive, “drift”, as the most important strategy for raising awareness of the urban landscape, we now “surf” the waves of the matrix, drifting in and out of virtual realities. What is reality?

To have a television once was a luxury. Now, having multiple sets in one household is commonplace not to mention the social isolation as its byproduct. “The spectacle reunites the separated, but reunites it as separated,” once again social alienation starting at the very basic level of the family unit. What kind of a society are we creating? Debord was concerned with effects of television, mass media, and capitalistic consumerism on society as a whole in the late fifties. “All that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” The spectacle. “To the degree that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary. The spectacle is the bad dream of enchained modern society which ultimately expresses only its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of this sleep.”-Debord

These are my thoughts on an array of large topics, I look forward to our discussion in class.