My project proposal for the Schlosspost Web Residency is to generate a number of image macros, combining some of the popular images (Look at all this.., Picard face-palm etc.) with quotes from the 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, and share them on the Web.
In his book, Debord argues that modern life presents itself as an immense accumulation of images that mediate the relations among people: The Spectacle. The text is a keystone to the Situationist movement of the 1960s; the way Situationists saw it, the spectacle must be confronted from the inside by creating situations deliberately constructed for the purpose of reawakening a society put to sleep by the spectacle’s lullabies. They employed a technique which they referred to as détournement: »the integration of present or past artistic productions into the construction of a broader milieu« as well as the appropriation of the main expressions of mass culture into critical context. The image macros appear to be a perfect virtual embodiment of the Situationist strategies: with origin in the pop culture, they circulate the World Wide Web free from copyright, ready to be used with new content each time. What I intend to do is to use the image macros the way Situationist artists 40 years ago used the comic strip.
The generated macros will be published on a WordPress blog created for that purpose, together with the statement of the project, and hopefully shared through the social media feeds by Schlosspost.