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the free space of the commodity

Les LeVeque

1995 00:02:52 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:3Video
Tags:
Consumer culture, Language, Media Analysis

Description

"In the free space of the commodity, I digitally took apart moving image sequences and re-animated them into an encoded montage to create a metaphor of experience where the viewer feels like a fiber optic cable has been hard-wired into their consciousness — a look where the image is simultaneously visible and invisible. My hope was to create a work that re-presented information as a kind of subliminal narrative that critiqued the currently popular technotopian rhetoric."

— Les LeVeque

"The free space of the commodity presents a story of consumption and exclusion as information overload in the organism of advanced consumer capitalism. Against a backdrop of a day of Headline News (compressed into 60 seconds), the narrative is visually fragmented — an encoded montage portraying the bourgeois protagonist's consumption habits while he speaks, in Morse Code, about his predicament. Meanwhile, the invisible, and virtually inauidible, antagonist is denied access, removed from the freeway and arrested."

— Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Michigan: Black and Red Books, 1977)

This title is also available on Les LeVeque Videoworks: Volume 1.

About Les LeVeque

Les LeVeque is an artist who works with digital and analog electronic technology. His projects include single and multi-channel videos and video/computer-based installations. His projects have been exhibited and screened internationally. His work is also represented by Kerry Schuss Gallery in New York City.

"In the work of Les LeVeque we encounter insights born — not only the formal strategies deployed, (condensation, expansion, reversal, mirroring...) — but of the ecstatic destruction of the reified "realities" of the consciousness industries, the purveyors of the spectacle. They remind us — and even now we are in need of that reminder — that these "realities," presented as eternal, are in fact shallow pliable, not fixed. They are subject to investigation; they may be reconfigured as games in which we are in control, where the terrors and seductions to which they subject us in their unilateral discourse may be altered according to our will, for our pleasure and amusement, for our provocation, for increasing our understanding of the machines of consciousness that process us. They are important viewing, and they are considerable achievements. They remind us that the insights and efforts of a single individual can be deployed via computational means to wreak havoc with the massively and expensively constructed tissue of lies that envelope us. And just as important: they are smart and they are fun."

— Keith Sandborn, January 15th, 2010