Student Work
Art
Anti-Advertising Agency
Bansky
The Pirates of the Amazon
Wooster Collective
Jason Eppink's The Pixelator
Graffiti Research Lab
Visual Resistance
Billboard Liberation Front
Packard Jennings
the yes men
Modern Television - Phil Patiris
Barbara Kruger 1 2
Marilyn Minter
Guy Debord & Asger Jorn
Forkscrew
ArtForum Ad Project
Research
CorpWatch.org
PRwatch.org
AdBusters
The Center for Responsive
Politics
Center for the Study of
Political Graphics
Detourned Sites
Mcspotlight.org
The Whirled Bank
Gatt.org
DOWethics.com
Detournment Software
www.reamweaver.com/
Theory
John Berger
Publicity Images
from Ways of Seeing
A User’s Guide to Détournement, GUY DEBORD, GIL J WOLMAN
Detournment @ word iq
psychogeography.org
Situationist International archives
Situationists texts
Situationist archives
Society of the spectacle
Guy Debord
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Project: Subvertisement
"Ultimately, any sign is susceptible to conversion into something else, even its opposite." - Guy Debord and Gil Wolman, 1956
Détournement is the act of turning around images (news, advertising or other popular representations) and reconfiguring them to reveal (and sometimes satirize upon) the ideological messages conveyed through them. Détournement is a concept famously employed and theorized by Guy Debord, artist and writer well known for his text "The Society of the Spectacle", which describes a cultural state in which our knowledge, beliefs and relationships to the world are mediated by images that bear little-to-no resemblance to reality. In fact, it is precisely the function of the spectacle to obscure reality rather than represent it. The maintenance of the social order requires it. To put it in hollywood terms (how absurd is this), the spectacle is Neo's perception of the world before he meets Morpheus. The spectacle is necessary so that we will continue to give our life energy to the machine that, while enslaving us, offers up the beautiful dream of the spectacle. Détournement follows the pill offered by morpheus and provides a way of responding to the spectacle by claiming, reexamining, casting doubt, and by challenging its authority.
See also net détournement project
détournement: Some definitions:
The theft of aesthetic artifacts from their own contexts and their diversion into contexts of one's own devise. [Greil Marcus, "Lipstick Traces", p. 168]
A politics of subversive quotation, of cutting the vocal cords of every empowered speaker, social symbols yanked through the looking glass, misappropriated words and pictures diverted into familiar scripts and blowing them up. [Marcus, p.167]
"In détournement, an artist reuses elements of well-known media to create a new work with a different message, often one opposed to the original. Détournement is similar to satirical parody, but employs more direct reuse or faithful mimicry of the original works rather than constructing a new work which merely alludes strongly to the original. It may be contrasted with recuperation, in which originally subversive works and ideas are themselves appropriated by mainstream media. Détournement's use by Barbara Kruger familiarized many with the technique, and it was extensively and effectively used as part of the early HIV/AIDS activism of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Examples of contemporary Détournement include Adbusters' "subvertisements" and other instances of culture jamming, as well as poems composed collaboratively by Marlene Mountain, Paul Conneally, and others, in which quotations from such famous sources as the Ten Commandments and quotations by United States President George W. Bush are combined with haiku-like phrases to produce a larger work intended to subvert the original source." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detournement
Assignment: Appropriate one or a series of print ads or public relations images and create a détournement.
Ask yourself: Where are the products that this company sells made, and who makes them, under what conditions? What are possible social effects of using this product? What values do the advertising of this product represent? Who profits from the consumption of this product at whose and what expense?
As Always - Detailed project parameters and software demonstrations will be given in class.
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