The RMIT Landscape Architecture Program Public Lecture Series 2010
Against architecture: detournement as a psychogeographical tactic in
underground culture
Speaker:
BRUCE RUSSELL
Guy Debord is famous for espousing both the study of urban
psychogeography and the practice of detournement as revolutionary
tactics in culture. In this lecture Bruce Russell adduces theoretical
and practical evidence from sources as diverse as the Situationist
International, Walter Benjamin, Andy Warhol, Andrei Tarkovsky and
Throbbing Gristle to argue that re-purposing the architectural
wastelands of industrial capitalism is not merely a necessary evil of
avant garde cultural practice, but in fact a secret weapon in the
arsenal of cultural insurrection. One interpretation of Debord’s ideas
might see architecture itself detourned in a collage of ruins - rather
than utopian new drifting cities being built in the sky.
When:
Wednesday 2nd June, 2010
Time:
6.30pm
Where:
RMIT University
Building 8, Level 11, Room 68 ( lecture theatre)
All Welcome
Drinks at 6.00pm
Bruce Russell is a practitioner in sound, who since 1987 has been a
member of The Dead C. This genre-dissolving New Zealand trio mixes rock,
electro-acoustics, noise and improvisation in equal measures. He has
also been active as a solo artist, and directed two of New Zealand’s
vanguard record labels, Xpressway and Corpus Hermeticum.
He is currently studying at RMIT towards a doctorate in sound. This
seeks to establish a theory of the social utility of improvised sound
work, building on Guy Debord’s critique of the commodity-spectacle,
Walter Benjamin’s refl ections on time and commodity fetishism, and
Karl Marx’s theory of value.
He is also programme leader in Information Design at the Christchurch
Polytechnic Institute of Technology.
Against architecture: detournement as a psychogeographical tactic in
underground culture
Speaker:
BRUCE RUSSELL
Guy Debord is famous for espousing both the study of urban
psychogeography and the practice of detournement as revolutionary
tactics in culture. In this lecture Bruce Russell adduces theoretical
and practical evidence from sources as diverse as the Situationist
International, Walter Benjamin, Andy Warhol, Andrei Tarkovsky and
Throbbing Gristle to argue that re-purposing the architectural
wastelands of industrial capitalism is not merely a necessary evil of
avant garde cultural practice, but in fact a secret weapon in the
arsenal of cultural insurrection. One interpretation of Debord’s ideas
might see architecture itself detourned in a collage of ruins - rather
than utopian new drifting cities being built in the sky.
When:
Wednesday 2nd June, 2010
Time:
6.30pm
Where:
RMIT University
Building 8, Level 11, Room 68 ( lecture theatre)
All Welcome
Drinks at 6.00pm
Bruce Russell is a practitioner in sound, who since 1987 has been a
member of The Dead C. This genre-dissolving New Zealand trio mixes rock,
electro-acoustics, noise and improvisation in equal measures. He has
also been active as a solo artist, and directed two of New Zealand’s
vanguard record labels, Xpressway and Corpus Hermeticum.
He is currently studying at RMIT towards a doctorate in sound. This
seeks to establish a theory of the social utility of improvised sound
work, building on Guy Debord’s critique of the commodity-spectacle,
Walter Benjamin’s refl ections on time and commodity fetishism, and
Karl Marx’s theory of value.
He is also programme leader in Information Design at the Christchurch
Polytechnic Institute of Technology.
(forwarded from Jon Dale).
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