The Society of the Spectacle (A Digital Remix) is a ten-minute DVD art-loop that uses source material from the writing, images, recordings, and other psychogeographical wanderings of arch-Situationist and French philosopher Guy Debord. The art work is composed by members of DJRABBI, a digital art collective of political activists, and includes visual remixes by Rick Silva aka Cuechamp, the sonic detours of Trace Reddell aka the pHarmanaut, and original subtitles by Mark Amerika aka Kid Hassid.
The artists filter the Situationist icons, concepts and strategies through an eclectic mix of contemporary software and “net art ideology”, a space of mind where the society of the spectacle becomes hostage to “the virtual condition.” But locating a post-Leftist pleasure politics of new media hactivism and social engagement does not require an overturning of terror; rather, it demands an improvisational detour into the spiritual unconscious. Here, an emerging model of the network-distributed art collective decomposes the raw elements of a runaway information economy in order to resituate the role of the artist as intellectual sabateur. Using hyperimprovisational methods and techniques to invent a provocative style of digital poetics, the artists encounter the immediate presence of terror and fear in both political and media culture. Offering neither a spectacular critique of the spectacle nor an apology for their own tendencies toward spectacularly accidental juxtapositions, the artists behind the SOS remix host a polysensory potlatch of conceptual and material resistance against the official, separatist amnesia of historical practice. […]
The visual images of the DVD are an accelerated remix of pictures generated from Google searches on the Internet. The Google “search terms” come from Debord’s writing. Each image that is found on the Internet is trimmed and spliced into Debord’s original collage of black and white stock footage. Thousands of manipulated images are then compiled into a stream of agit-pop iconography that challenge the viewer’s capacity to see the world anew. […]
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