totality.tv
A website devoted to new research on the Situationists. What is living
and what is dead in the legacy of the Situationist International?
totality.tv will present Situationist aesthetics as a valid critical and
creative strategy for our times. It will continue, and reinvent, the
Situationist’s critical approach to working both in and on the media.
Totality for Kids
A graphic essay by Kevin C. Pyle and McKenzie Wark
They found each other in that lost quarter of Paris. It was the best
made labyrinth for retaining wanderers. There they found, in their
wanderings, the portents of the decline and fall of this world. Among
this provisional micro-society were those you could define only by what
they weren’t. Deserters, lost children, and the girls who had run away
from home and the reformatory. Professionals all – of no profession.
What starts bad can thankfully never improve.
Spectacles of Disintegration
Is adventure dead? Are we doomed to live in a world where our actions
amount to nothing? Where every day is much like another? Are we
condemned to play only in safe playgrounds, on appointed playdates? To
find our desires thwarted, diverted, co-opted – and sold back to us as
package tours and theme parks? Recognizing and escaping this sordid fate
is the first objective of a Situationist theory – and practice.
50 Years of Recuperation
The Buell Lecture, Columbia University, 3rd October 2007, COMING SOON
from Princeton Architectural Press
The Situationist International (1952-1972) were perhaps the last of the avant gardes. They strenuously fought the recuperation of their uncompromisingly radical ideas by mainstream art and architecture, only to find their images and ideas plundered and neutralized by the culture industries. Discussions of their work today are marred by bad faith rhetorics ranging from a facile aping of their most radical gestures or a sanitizing scholarship which makes them all too safe for art or architectural consumption. In 50 Years of Recuperation, McKenzie Wark tries a new tactic for re-energizing this extraordinary body of work. Rather than a recuperate the work which is either partial or apologetic, he attempts to embrace the Situationist heritage as a whole, as both political and aesthetic, as both within and always exceeding the disciplinary boundaries of art and architecture.