Becoming Strangers: Travel, Trust, and the Everyday

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Becoming Strangers Travel, Trust, and the
Everyday

• Day 19 Drift

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Some Useful Posthuman Ideas

• JOHN CAGE. Stop worrying about your problems,
  wake up, and attend to the things around you as
  if you were always living in the middle world.
• MICHEL FOUCAULT. Youre not the center of the
  universe. Think big, if you are to understand
  how the world works.
• KIMSOOJA. Keep moving. You might never learn
  who you arebut you do weave yourself into the
  world, and thereby give the world shape and form.
• TOM PHILLIPS. Drift, turn, return.

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Situationist International

• Avant-garde movement based chiefly in France.
  Founded 1957, disbanded 1972.
• Chief figures include Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem,
  and Asger Jorn.
• United Western Marxist politics with formal
  experimentation in the visual and literary arts.

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The Problem (according to the S.I.)

• The old Marxist distinction between the
  infrastructure (the economy) and superstructure
  (culture) no longer obtains.
• We live in the Society of the Spectacle. We no
  longer buy consume things. We buy display
  images.
• In other words we want what we see on TV or at
  the movies. And what we see are spectacles.
  Not any shoe, it must be Air Jordans! We seek
  The Good Life enough to pour Cristal on
  the carpet! Hair like Jennifer! Pecs like Brad!
• Our lives are entirely shaped guided by the
  mass media. There is no escape even Nature
  has become a commodified spectacle. Dont forget
  to stop at REI !

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The Solution (according to the S.I.)

1. DETOURNEMENT. French for un-turning. The
   strategic defacement, meddling, or transformation
   of spectacles in order to expose their falsity
   and absurdity and thereby deprive them of their
   authority, naturalness, and inevitability.
2. DERIVE. French for drift. Walking or
   otherwise acting without predetermined aim or
   goal. Cut across, ignore, or transgress all
   artitificial barries, physical or conceptual.

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Examples of Detournement
Image from Vancouver-based AdBusters magazine
GOOGLE BOMBING. Activists exploited
Googles search protocol hierarchies so that
anyone searching for miserable failure would
be directed to a biography of George W. Bush.
(Still works.)
Marcel Duchamp, LHOOQ (1919)
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Examples of Derive
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What is a book?
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From Scroll to Codex
Roman wax tablet diptych (ca. 50 CE)
Codex Sinaiticus, Greek biblical codex (ca. 350
CE)
Egyptian papyrus scroll (ca. 1000 BCE)
Coptic codex (ca. 200 CE)
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Convergent Evolution?
Dresden Codex. Mayan treatise on astronomy,
11th century CE copy of 8th century original
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Whyusespaces?
Book of Kells (ca. 800 CE)
In the Classical world, scribes did not put
spaces between words. The first people to put
spaces between words were Irish monks (6-8th
centuries CE). They did so because their Latin
was too poor to read texts aloud without help.
Early manuscript copy of Virgils Aeneid
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Take Nothing for Granted!

• All of the following had to be invented and
  popularized
• Upper lower case letters.
• Page numbering.
• Table of contents.
• Index.
• Paragraph divisions.
• Quotation marks.
• Italics.
• Not until the 16th century did the basic look of
  the book emerge. It did not become standard
  until the 19th century.

Aldine Press publication, designed by Aldus
Manutius. (ca. 1500 CE)
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Tom Phillips

• Contemporary British avant-garde visual artist
  and poet.
• Born in 1937 and educated at St. Catherines
  College, Oxford.
• Best known for A Humument, a treated novel that
  is an ongoing work in progress.
• For more information and an extraordinary number
  of images, visit his site http//www.humument.com.

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A Humument Origins

• Inspired in part by John Cage, one Saturday in
  1966 Tom Phillips went for a walk with the intent
  to base an artwork on the first affordable book
  he came across.
• He ended up purchasing a Victorian novel, A Human
  Document (1892) by W.H. Mallock.
• He began by crossing out selected words and
  typing up what was left.
• Then he realized that the pages full of
  cross-outs and doodles were interesting works of
  art.

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A Humument An Overview

• Phillips overpaints each page in a different
  manner. Selected words are left legible.
• He retains the hero and heroine in Mallocks
  original novel Robert Grenville and Irma
  Schilizzi.
• He adds, though, another character, Bill Toge,
  who can only appear when the words together and
  altogether appear in Mallocks text.

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Adventures in Detournement and Derive
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Further Adventures
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Some Lessons of A Humument

• Movement travel can take place in and
  through a cultural artifact, not only through
  3-D space.
• Travel through and in despite of boundaries can
  both disrupt those boundaries and bring
  unforeseen things to light.
• Such travel produces effects by creating new
  spaces in De Certeaus sense.