From antiglobalist activists and corporate adbusters to online hackers and guerilla street artists, the influence of the Situationist International (SI) is writ large across our contemporary cultural landscape. Formed in 1957 as a merger of four European avant-garde groups with backgrounds in Marxism and Lettrism, the SI would over the next decade introduce many key intellectual and artistic concepts to us, including the society of the spectacle, pyschogeography, unitary urbanism, and at least one major work of critical and utopian architecture in Constant's New Babylon: City for Another Life. In 50 Years of Recuperation McKenzie Wark, the critically acclaimed author of A Hacker Manifesto,explores how our contemporary understanding of art, politics, and even reality itself has been shaped by these original culture jammers.

Product Description: The contemporary public domain, the "free" space where culture is produced and exchanged, is under pressure. The exchange and distribution of cultural products ("content" in the form of music, image or text) is easier in digital society, but increasingly hemmed in by corresponding moves towards greater regulation and control, new copyright laws and intellectual property policy...read more