Sunshine & Grease

Speaking of Lectures... 1/06/10

By Lach.

Here’s another thing worth going to at RMIT. Tomorrow night!

BRUCE RUSSELL

Against architecture: detournement as a psychogeographical tactic in underground culture

Public lecture
Wednesday 2nd June, 2010
Drinks from 6:00PM
Lecture 6:30-7:30PM in RMIT University, Landscape Architecture program, Building 8, Level 11, Lecture Theatre

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.

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 reflections 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.

YEAH.

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