Psychogeography and Imperial Infrastructure, by Brian Holmes,
Springerin.
Great social movements leave the content of their critical politics behind, in the forms of a new dominion. This was the destiny of the revolt against bureaucratic rationalism in the sixties. The Situationists, with the practice of the d rive and the program of unitary urbanism, aimed to subvert the functionalist grids of modernist city planning. They tried to lose themselves in the urban labyrinth, while calling for the total fusion of artistic and scientific resources in complete decors another city for another life , as the radical architect Constant proclaimed. With the worldwide implementation of a digital media architecture and the early signs of a move toward cinematic buildings we are now seeing the transformation of the urban framework into total decor (Lev Manovich: In the longer term every object may become a screen connected to the Net, with the whole of built space becoming a set of display surfaces . What kind of life can be lived in the media architecture? And how to explain the continuing prestige of Situationist aesthetics, in a period which has changed so dramatically since the early 1960s?