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.
postscript 