The Extinct Hitchhiker

Tron

Daft — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 09:34:05 +0000

Re-edited trailer.

Tron Legacy promotional posters.

www.simoncpage.co.uk

Thierry Guetta Is Not Real

Daft — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 19:56:23 +0000

Who is Thierry Guetta? Camera man turned street art superstar.

Who is Thierry Guetta? A spectacle, a construction – the reaction of an artist who has seen his art for the street, and for the people, consumed and captured and sold.

Who is Thierry Guetta? A joke. A punch line. A masterpiece.

What better way to one-up the “art world”, one that took what Banksy produced on our streets and sold it for £25,000/ £50,400/ £57,000/ £102,000/ £37,200/ £31,200/ £96,000/ £72,000/ £33,600, than to create this persona that creates unreal nothings and sells it for prices picked out of the air? Exit through the gift shop.

No doubt the man is real, but who is Thierry Guetta?

Dispatches

Daft — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 01:10:19 +0000

“He had one of those faces, I saw that face at least a thousand times at a hundred bases and camps, all the youth sucked out of the eyes, the color drawn from the skin, cold white lips, you knew he wouldn’t wait for any of it to come back. Life had made him old, he’d live it out old. All those faces, sometimes it was like looking into the faces at a rock concert, locked in, the event had them; or like students who were very heavily advance, serious beyond what you’d call their years if you didn’t know for yourself what the minutes and hours of those years were made up of. Not just like all the ones who looked like they couldn’t drag their asses through another day of it. (How do you feel when a nineteen-year-old kid tells you from the bottom of his heart that he’s gotten too old for this kind of shit?) Not like the faces of the dead or wounded either, they could look more released than overtaken. These were the faces of boys whose whole lives seemed to have backed up on them, they’d be a few feet away but they’d be looking back at you over a distance you knew you’d never really cross.”

Cultural Monopoly

Daft — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 17:23:24 +0000

Under the private culture monopoly it is a fact “tyranny leaves the body free and directs its attacks on the soul”. The ruler no longer says, “You must think as I do, or die”. He says, “You are free not to think as I do, your life, your property, everything shall remain yours, but from this day onward you are a stranger among us”.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer – The Dialectic of Enlightenment

Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Daft — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 00:08:26 +0000

The experience of bewildered disorientation in an environment too complex for the individual to comprehend is a characteristic theme of postmodern culture.

Postmodern media themselves – the TV set, the TV camera, the TV networks, the computer, the internet – involves networks of relationship that are too complex for the ordinary consumer of the cultural products they mediate to understand.

THE SCHEMA OF MASS CULTURE – PART 2

Daft — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:40:52 +0000

“Advertising has absorbed surrealism and the champions of this movement have given their blessing to this commercialization of their own murderous attacks on culture in the name of hostility to the same.”

“The viewer is persuaded of the merit of his own averageness and he may one day receive the supreme prize as ‘Mr Average Customer’.”

Now I am become Death…

Daft — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:08:51 +0000

Foucault on the “atomic scientist” Oppenheimer being the point of transition between the universal and the specific intellectual,

“It’s because he had a direct and localized relation to scientific knowledge and institutions that the atomic scientist could make his intervention; but, since the nuclear threat affected the whole of human race and the fate of the world, his discourse could at the same time be the discourse of the universal.”

The Schema of mass culture – Part 1

Daft — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:18:50 +0000

“The commercial character of culture causes the difference between culture and the practical life to disappear.”

“Since the beginning of the industrial era an art has been in vogue which is adept at promoting the right attitudes and which has entered into allegiance with reification insofar as it proffers precisely for a disenchanted world, for the realm of the prosaic and even the banausic, a poetry of its own nourished upon the work ethic.”

“Reality becomes its own ideology through the spell cast by it’s faithful duplication.”

“With the liquidation of its opposition to empirical reality art assumes a parasitic character. Inasmuch as it now appears itself as reality, which is supposed to stand in for the reality out there, it tends to relate back to culture as its own object.”

Theodor Adorno

Walking in the City

Daft — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:52:19 +0000

“Their story begins on ground level, with footsteps. They are myriad, but do not compose a series. They cannot be counted because each unit has a qualitative character: a style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation. Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities. Their intertwined paths give their shape to space. They weave places together. In that respect, pedestrian movements form one of these “real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city.” They are not localised; it is rather they that spatialize.”

- The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau

Habitus

Daft — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:16:33 +0000

“The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively “regulated” and “regular” without being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at the ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor.”