INFOTAINMENT
short fragment of the Infotainment installation (orginal 25 min)
In 2011 I was at the residency in Cluj, in Romania, working on a project concerning the question of remake in art. The hosting institution ( AltArt Foundation) wanted a work repeating, in a creative way, a chosen work of art created between the 1960-es and 2000. I decided to use Guy Debord’s The society of the spectacle, a found-footage film based on the famous book by the same author. By the way, the idea came to me during the preparation of my PhD thesis about the figure or repetition in audio-visual art. I decided to create 9 different pieces of art corresponding to the 9 chapters of my book and one of those chapters was about Guy Deobrd. Debord wrote his book on the spectacle in 1967 and in 1973 he produced, under the same title, a film adaptation of this strictly theoretical text. As far as I know, it was the first film adaptation of that kind. My idea was that we still live in the world that became spectacle. And that the diagnosis and the critic of the spectacular character of contemporary capitalist world must itself use spectacular means, it has to capture and reverse the hypnotic power of the image. This is the so called détournemont strategy, used by situationists in many differed domains of subversive activity, including Debords film, where he used images to criticize the seductive power of image. My intention was to show the actuality of Debord’s thought, but I focused particularly on one aspect of the spectacle, which is dominating in our times, that is the becoming spectacular of information (a phenomenon usually called “infotainment”). Spectacle is not just o predominance of the image. The audiosphere becomes spectacular as well. Information is more related to the sound than to the image and that is why I decided to use the strategy of détournement and create a spectacular sound collage or patchwork made of spectacular information combined with pieces of pop music, fragment of films, special sound effects and of course parts from the original text written by Debord, etc. The final product was a kind of trailer of actuality…
The project is is composted of a sound installation (system 5.1 dolby surround) and a light box (106cmx106cm)
Brno, 6 III - 15 IV 2012, REMAKE: REthinking Media Arts in C(K)ollaborative Environments
dr Jacek Dobrowolski`s text
Montage: Aleksandra Hirszfeld, Mateusz Adamczyk
Special thanks to:
Joanna Sokołowska – vocal
Ioana Lascu – female voice I
Adriana Neagu – female voice II
Călin Deac – male voice
and:
Rarita Zbranca, Istvan Szakats (for perfect organization and great atmosphere), Michał Herer (for
inspiration), Mateusz Falkowski (for consultation), Grześ Kurek (for materials), Jacek Dobrowolski (for
text)
