Titles
T-Z
Technologies Evolve: Visualizing Mixed Reality Over Time in ...Temporal Place(s): Transitory Representations of the Landsca...Temporospatial Mediator: Site-specific Theater within Cultur...The Digital Agency, Protest Movements, and Social Activism d...The Dormant Buildings of Imbros: Dami, Photogrammetry and Dr...The Empty Eerie: Exploring the uncanny nature of empty space...The Future of Dwelling: The KitchenThe Future of Object, Approach, and Setting when Curating in...The Image of Territory: Landscape Perception and Infrastruct...The Image, the Imaging and the Imagining of the InteriorThe Incomplete Results of an Act of MappingThe Inter-generational Comparison of Balinese Houses: a Spac...The Intersecting Landscapes of Cinema Production and Exhibit...The Poverty of EmbodimentThe Realities of FragmentsThe Role of Screen Space in Architecture and Film as Multime...The Screen as Surface, Site and SpaceThe Screen, Intimacy, and the Attention Economy: Are We Ever...The Space of VistaVisionThe Substantive Content of Eryri - A Lived Landscape with a ...The Time HouseThe Unrepresented Chicago of 1893The Urban Photographic Portrait: Paradigms and ProjectsThe Visual as Narrative Practice: Using Images to Construct...The Visuality of Urban Digital TwinsTlatelolco Disproved; a participatory mapping of life, in Ma...Tools to Imagine: Digital Methods of Investigating Classical...Towards the Unknown. Projection, Prediction, PotentialityTracing the Familiar: Spatial Research through Essayistic Fi...Undergoing Change: the Potential of a Liminal State for Hosp...Undocumented History: Accessing the Intangible Past Through ...Uniting Space and Time in the Documentation of Urban Setting...Visionary Rumours Lost in Space – between rationale and re...Visualising Storytelling through a Locally Based Digital Way...Visualization and Parametric Design of Sustainable Domes, In...Walk’s Eye: Traversing Diverse Territories with GoPro Came...Welcome and IntroductionWhiteness, Reloaded: Addressing the ghosts in reverse* of th...Who needs film for city symphonies? Edwin Rousby. Showcasing...‘Zoom-Walks’ and Cyanotypes: Materializing Screen Ontoph...“You’ve seen one post-apocalyptic city, you’ve seen th...
Presenters
Schedule

Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Judging a Book by its Cover: Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle and Just One Photograph
D. Evans-Pritchard
4:30 pm - 6:30 pm

Abstract

J.R. Eyerman’s oft-reproduced photograph of movie audience members wearing 3-D glasses while watching the premiere of Bwana Devil in Hollywood in November 1952 is an iconic image of the ways in which modern society is impacted by mass production, technology and consumerism. The photograph, which has come to symbolize the passivity of the consumer, mass production and the destruction of true art and community, is also on the cover of the English (U.S.) translations of several editions (1970, 1977) of Guy Debord’s highly influential book The Society of the Spectacle (1967). The migration of Guy Debord’s theories and philosophy of culture from France to the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s was defined by and impacted by this cover image which was not from France, was not part of the original book and, apparently, was not even known about by the author. The result is that the image is mainstream, frequently re-used and widely recognizable, the book less so. How has the Situationist International movement and Guy Debord’s anarchic theories and ethical standpoints been defined by J.R.Eyerman’s cover which links the book’s message directly to Hollywood and the movie-watching experience in the United States? How has the interpretation of Guy Debord’s counter-culture French theories in the United States really about the place of entertainment itself and the experience of a movie audience?

Biography

Deirdre Evans-Pritchard has been the Executive Director of the DC Independent Film Festival & Forum since 2011 and is adjunct Professor at the University of Maryland, Global College. She spent years integrating digital media and arts into higher education at USC Department of Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz and as a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Lebanon. She was the program editor for the AFI Anthropos Documentary Film Festival and Senior Program Officer for the Fulbright Program at AMIDEAST. She describes herself as a translator: between cultures, mediums and spaces and studies screen literacy.