three masterpieces of détournement

02May13

Admittedly, only the last of these three works — the unparalleled Can Dialectics Break Bricks? — is truly an example of détournement in the classic sense, but all three of them do engage in the practice of using borrowed material for purposes wildly different than those they were originally intended for.  Détournement is a technique […]

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Tags: "A User's Guide to Détournement", "Building a Human", alienation, aliens, Can Dialectics Break Bricks?, capitalism, Chariots of the Gods?, David Blaire, detournement, Erich von Daniken, experimental video, film, Gil Woman, Gulf War, Guy Debord, haiku, independent film, kung-fu, Marx, Mizuta Masahide, moai, movies, Peter Serafinowicz, revolutionary thought, Robert Popper, Situationism, subversion, the mark of Cain, video, Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees, William Burroughs

honeyland and alienation — a cartoon rhapsody

18Nov09

Múm’s video for Rhubarbidoo (off Go Go Smear The Poison Ivy, their latest album) is one of the most re-enchanting videos that I’ve seen for a long time.  If, as Max Weber has argued, Enlightenment rationalization, especially as it manifests itself in the bureaucratized capitalism of Western society, results in a disenchanted world where we […]

Filed under: animation, art, cinema, culture, film, history, music, nature, philosophy, society, technology, video   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: Adorno, alienated labor, alienation, American farming, animation, Aya Yamasaki Brown, bee society, Beholden, capitalism, cartoons, childhood, consumerism, creation, creative destruction, Dialectic of Enlightenment, disenchantment, Disney, Enlightenment, Enlightenment thought, exploration, Fantastic Planet, fantasy, Flowers and Trees, Gulliver's Travels, hive as factory, homo ludens, Honeyland, Horkheimer, imagination, industrial militarism, industrialism, industrialization of American Farming, Ingibjörg Birgisdóttir, invention, iron cage, Jason Malcolm Brown, Lilliputians, Max Weber, Múm, montage, natural world, nature, play, re-enchantment, Rhubarbidoo, Rockwell, science fiction, social control, social unconscious, They Made Frogs Smoke 'til They Exploded, totalizing systems of control

COMBO and MUTO — revolutionary urbanism with a spraycan

18Oct09

BLU, the Bologna-based street artist and wall-art animator, has recently teamed up with David Ellis, a Brooklyn-based “motion painter,” to produce the animated work COMBO, an amazing piece of urban re-inhabitation that imaginatively brings dead urban space back to life through the use of paint and stop motion.  In the opening sequence of COMBO, a […]

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Tags: alienation, animation, Beneath the paving stones — the beach!, BLU, COMBO, David Ellis, dead space, detournement, Guy Debord, imagination, la plage!, motion painting, MUTO, non-space, revolutionary urbanism, Situationist International, Sous les pavés, stop motion, street art, urban geography, video, wall-art animation

homage to lonely, part 3 — passengers, interiors

28Jul09

Valéry, who had a fine eye for the cluster of symptoms called “civilization,” has characterized one of the pertinent facts. “The inhabitant of the great urban centers,” he writes, “reverts to a state of savagery — that is, of isolation.  The feeling of being dependent on others, which used to be kept alive by need, […]

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Tags: 15mm Heliar, 35mm Ultron, alienation, analog, analogue, civilization, film, Japanese trains, LOMO LC-A+, lonely, modernity, passengers, photography, public transit, rangefinder, trains, transit, transportation, Voigtlander Bessa R2A, Voigtlander Bessa-L, Walter Benjamin