What it is about obscure elements of your own obscure perspective knitting themselves together and reminding us that the world is a far more interesting place than most folks ever bother to consider?
Had one of those moments today. Re-read a book this afternoon, Culture Jam by Kalle Lasn (review coming at some point, after I’ve grokked the supplementary material that suddenly seems increasing relevant)
At any rate, the author makes great mention of a french movement known as Situationist International, and I was interested enough to do a quick database search at my local library. Sadly I came up dry.
Then comes the anomaly, a link from talking plant about a guy who’d rigged a scanner into a camera led me to a link where I found an number of films by the founder of Situationist International. I’m in the process of downloading some for viewing.
Fascinating to me. Mostly because of the possibilities, I don’t have any firm beliefs one way or another (or at least not easily definable ones) about the appearance of what might be called coincidence suddenly appearing out of a world that seems largely ruled by random chance, but it is certainly fun to consider meanings.
January 23rd, 2006 at 9:02 am
Hi,
The text most worth reading is Guy Debord’s “Society of the spectacle” To say it’s compact is like saying space is pretty big. Whether it’s compact in a good way is for you to decide. The xext best text is “The SI and its times” by Debord & Sanguinetti. The style of films made by Debord can be described as “detournement”, which is pretty much stealing. The Situs made much of Lautrement’s statement “plagerism is necessary. Progress demands it”. One important situ film not present on the excellent www.ubu.com/ link you brought to my attention (and 1,000 thanks for that!) is “can dialectics break bricks?” from Vienet, which is the only known full length detourned feature.
Cheers,
Simon
January 23rd, 2006 at 9:19 pm
I looked up random
and my thoughts ran rapidly
to a new question,
new at least to me:
If time is not a line
with an arrowhead on it,
maybe time
is more like a network?
Every moment a node?
Nodes, I’m thinking,
come in all sizes -
a few are hubs
with bigtime connectivity
like Atlanta airport,
a fair number
with middling connectivity
(some to the hubs),
and lots of backwater nodes.
Then I looked up hub
and network theory
and…..
well,
maybe Einstein
overlooked the possibility
that it’s a small world
after all?
Whew.
Maybe I’d better
unask the question!