The balloon goes up.

In the Society of the Spectacle - is resistance possible?
What spaces of resistance will be encountered in Gosford on the 16th.

Odilon Redon
Eye Balloon, 1878

The theoretical formulations presented by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle, take on a new relevance in this age of blogs, surveillance, MySpace, and technically mediated relationships.

CARNICERO Y MANCIO, Antonio
Ascent of the Balloon in the Presence of Charles IV and his Court. c. 1783

“If there's a "surveillance society" or a "society of the spectacle", I would submit that it's about informatics, and not primarily about the visual spectacle. These artifacts above are only a few instances that indicate how Things that can perform identity surveillance, tracking, tagging and wrangle some database informatics are what matter nowadays.” research.techkwondo.com/blog/julian/193


Debord traces the development of a modern society in which "All that was once directly lived has become mere representation." Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing." This condition in which authentic social life has been replaced with its image represents, according to Debord, that "historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life." The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity. "The spectacle is not a collection of images," Debord writes. "rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images."
(Wikipedia)


Ours is a world of Biennales, Art Prizes, Blockbuster Touring Shows and Festivals in which art is seen by many as an industry that provides entertainment services and boosts tourism; where its support is premised on its audience generating quality.

Art in the Gosford region will have a short life if it is based on a festival (spectacle) led “recovery”. It requires commitment to a creator based development rather than a secondary creative Industries strategy, which depends on the essential creator (artist) environment.


In describing the development of the Society of the Spectacle, Matt Kavanagh of McGill University writes:
“We live in the society of the spectacle. In the era of blogs, 24-hour news channels, and the instant celebrity of reality television, this probably goes without saying. But what does it really mean? Contrary to the list just enumerated, the society of the spectacle is not of recent invention, nor is it limited to pop culture. Instead "the spectacle" serves as a shorthand description for structural transformations in advanced capitalist societies during the post-1945 era. We might think of this as a broad shift from the factory-based industrial system of the early part of the twentieth century to the immaterial economy of today. Manufacturing has been replaced by service work and the trades have given way to symbolic labour (journalists, bureaucrats, academics) as the prevailing face of the middle-class. The key to this realignment is the increasing mediatization of society.

Most recently, the rise of the “Creative Class” as an economic force, and rapid promotion of the “Creative Industries” globally, together with knowledge-based enterprises reinforces Debord’s analysis.

What goes up...