<nettime> CLASS WARGAMES COMMUNIQUE 7

[Richard Barbrook <richard@imaginaryfutures.net>]

CLASS WARGAMES SUMMER OFFENSIVE

Comrades! Raise your glasses of champagne to mark 
Class Wargames' decisive victory on the cultural front: 
the launch of our film on Guy Debord's The Game of War. 
For the first time, the Situationist politics of this military 
simulation are carefully explained in sound and vision. 
After watching this movie, opponents of spectacular 
capitalism will understand the importance of studying 
The Game of War. By playfully competing against each 
other over its board, they are learning the strategic and 
tactical skills required for success in the deadly struggle 
against the global bourgeoisie. In our film of Debord's 
game, Class Wargames has divided these teachings 
from the battlefield into five sections: terrain, combat, 
cavalry, arsenals and lines of communication. Analyse 
their insights with great care, fellow workers. As the crisis 
of neo-liberalism intensifies, you will need this military 
knowledge to thwart the wicked schemes of bankers 
and bureaucrats. Remember well the lessons of socialist 
history: clever tactics and smart strategy are our most 
powerful weapons. 

In the early-1970s, Debord created his film adaptation 
of The Society of the Spectacle by splicing together clips 
taken from other people's movies and then adding his 
own soundtrack. When social relations between individuals 
are mediated through images, this avant-garde technique 
of dÃtournement acts as the proletarian antidote to capitalist 
monopolisation of historical memory. Quoting from the products 
of commercial cinema involves much more than recruiting 
glamourous movie stars and expensive special effects for 
audiovisual subversion. As Debord emphasised, these borrowed 
film excerpts are transformed in the editing process into a 
revolutionary critique of the spectacular misrepresentation 
of the human adventure. Torn out of its original context and 
carefully placed in a new juxtaposition, the cinematic propaganda 
of the class enemy can be turned against itself. The imagery of 
bourgeois ideology must be metamorphosed into the elucidation 
of Situationist theory. Expropriating the media expropriators is 
the premonition of cybernetic communism in the present.

When Debord was working on the film adaptation of The Society 
of the Spectacle in the early-1970s, making a movie out of movie 
clips was very difficult. Buying celluloid stock, hiring editing suites 
and organising cinema screenings had required serious money 
from a generous sponsor. Fortunately, over the past three-and-a-half 
decades, digital technology has caught up with this Situationist 
technique. Class Wargames only needed a small grant from the 
Arts Council to fund a film constructed on a Mac laptop with i-Movie 
out of video from our performances and excerpts from our DVD 
collection. Best of all, we are now able to distribute our cinematic 
creation to a worldwide audience for free over the Net. DÃtournement 
is no longer the privilege of a minority of avant-garde artists. Media 
communism is now embedded in everyday life. Become a 21st century 
Debord - a director of remixed movies. Sweep away the anachronistic 
barriers of intellectual property. Switch on the computer, start up the 
video editing software, plug in an external drive filled with rendered 
DVDs and begin making your own film. Everyone is a practical 
Situationist. 

Ludic Labour!

=============================

CLASS WARGAMES FILM LAUNCH 

27th September 2009
12.00-17.00

HTTP Gallery
Unit A2, Arena Design Centre
71 Ashfield Road
London N4 1LD

Click here for map and location details
http://www.http.uk.net/docs/gettingto.shtml





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