\u201cTaking Hostages: Exercises in Design D\u00e9tournement\u201d is now online. The 114-page book contains \u201cdesign fiction\u201d essays by 13 students from the NSCAD Master of Design class of 2012, edited by me, with a foreword.<\/p>\n
The concept of \u201cd\u00e9tournement\u201d comes from Guy Debord, a poet connected with the \u201cSituationist Internationale\u201d that was active in the 1950’s and ’60’s.<\/p>\n
For the Situationist, d\u00e9tournement<\/em> is \u201cplagiarism, where both the source and the meaning of the original work was subverted to create a new work.\u201d (Urban Dictionary) Subsequent forms of d\u00e9tournement have taken the form of “culture jamming”, where standardized commercial and promotional practices are subverted by campaigns such as Adbusters’ “Buy Nothing Day”. I would argue that these approaches are ultimately self-defeating because they are so easily re-integrated into a corporate agenda.<\/p>\n Culture jamming has been quite recently exercised, for example, in the \u201cHitler meme<\/a>\u201d of countless YouTube videos using the movie \u201cDownfall\u201d. In these works, a portion of the movie where Hitler rants emotionally about his Generals’ incompetence and perfidy (which is filmed with actors speaking German) is re-subtitled with text that might lead non-German speakers to believe that Hitler tirade is actually about a lost football match, or the use of the \u201cComic Sans\u201d font in Nazi propaganda<\/a>, or how to find a tub of ice cream in war-ravaged Berlin. This phenomena gained its counter-culture cred when the movie’s copyright holder exercised \u201cYouTube takedown\u201d actions, only to reverse them a few months later<\/a> after an extensive internet brouhaha.<\/p>\n Another recent example of contemporary d\u00e9tournement<\/em> is Limor Fried’s \u201cTV-B-Gone\u201d, which is a powerful infrared TV remote which allows the operator to switch off a television\u2014or otherwise \u201cjam\u201d it\u2014surreptitiously and anonymously from a distance, or her \u201cWave Bubble\u201d, a (completely illegal to use) RF jammer that prevents cellphone use. These are just a few more current examples of d\u00e9tournement. Designers can and do make use of parody and\u2014as Limor Fried calls it\u2014\u201cdesign noir\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n The work in \u201cTaking Hostages\u201d are speculations which use as their foundations the work of others. They share a purpose to satirize, and not lecture, but their point is not to merely elicit laughter. Nor are they intended to be didactic or by frontal attack attempt to batter down the walls of our credulity. Each work seeks, with subtlety, to \u201cexpress our indifference toward a meaningless and forgotten original, and concern itself with rendering a certain sublimity.\u201d (Debord, 1967<\/a>). This book\u2019s design projects and accompanying essays serve to demonstrate the range of speculative concepts that can be released in a single spasm: \u201cTaking Hostages: Exercises in Design D\u00e9tournement\u201d includes, among others, Joseph Rau\u2019s tree design which lampoons designers\u2019 inability to leave well-enough alone, Hodgkinson and Cianci\u2019s pop-up store for garbage, Martyn Anstice\u2019s hand-crafted newspaper, and Kevin Dahi\u2019s Syrian T-55 tanks, d\u00e9tourned into ambulances.<\/p>\n [issuu width=520 height=200 backgroundColor=%23222222 documentId=120416145645-246b694ac3154a9c9f2047ef66cdb293 name=takinghostages_nscad_mdes2012 username=fire5ign tag=canada unit=px v=2]<\/p>\n \u201cTaking Hostages: Exercises in Design D\u00e9tournement\u201d is now online. The 114-page book contains \u201cdesign fiction\u201d essays by 13 students from the NSCAD Master of Design class of 2012, edited by me, with a foreword. Design D\u00e9tournement The concept of \u201cd\u00e9tournement\u201d comes from Guy Debord, a poet connected with the \u201cSituationist Internationale\u201d that was active in … Continue reading \u201cTaking Hostages\u201d goes to press<\/span> The Essays<\/h3>\n