No Text / No Truth / Jouissance and Revolution: An Interview with Craig Baldwin Jack Sargeant April 2001 Craig Baldwin Issue 13 An edit of this appeared in Fringecore 7, ‘The Pleasure Trippin’ Issue’, October-December, 1998 Further information on Craig Baldwin, his films and own exhibition project, Other Cinema, can be found at http://www.othercinema.com * * * Introduction Craig Baldwin constructs his films predominately from the twentieth century image-reservoir of film and television, plundering the visual tropes condemned to the landfill of history and recycling them. Particular favorites include science fiction and fantasy B movies, as well as, what Baldwin describes as “those touchstones of surrealist magic”: ethnography, documentary and educational films. Baldwin cuts / splices / mixes / edits these samples of the collective cinematic unconscious into new formations which both reconstruct and circumnavigate the culturally constructed meaning of the original footage, opening up these received images to a multiplicity of interpretations. Simultaneous to maintaining this act of image appropriation, Baldwin seeks to create a political dialogue throughout his films. Unlike many political filmmakers, however, Baldwin does not attempt to achieve some dubious notion of cultural enlightenment via his films, rather he seeks to explore perceived socio-political ideas through a combination of absurdist paranoia and quasi-Dada humour, this is made apparent in his film Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1991). Baldwin’s films also function as a political engagement with film (that is, as a physical medium) and cinema (as a cultural manifestation) because of their usage of found footage, which is re-used and subsequently re-contextualized via the act of detournement. A practice which serves to challenge notions of the individual as a singular source of ‘creative genius’, as well as raising questions concerning ‘authenticity’, plagiarism and ‘artistic precision’, instead suggesting that creativity, rather than being an elite process, is open to everybody (1). Baldwin is also involved with programming films at San Francisco’s ATA (Artists Television Access) an oppositional, underground screening space in the city’s Mission District. This space offers a forum in which filmmakers and audiences are able to screen and view work which would otherwise be unavailable. Annotated filmography (1976 – 1995) Stolen Movie (1976) (see below) Wildgunman (1978) “My punk rock movie – the one film that doesn’t have a written script, it is a diatribe, or a broadside, against the Marlborough Man, from advertising, the idea of the cowboy, sub/dom, manifest destiny…” A montage of images of cowboys, advertising and geo-political conflicts. RoketKitKongoKit (1986) (see below) Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1991). The film combines footage of UFO’s, gigantic dinosaurs, plagues, covert CIA and big business operations in Central American banana republics, mind control, Cuba, presidential assassinations (attempted and actualized), and more. Includes information on cattle mutilations, George Bush’s college fraternity, and the fact that John F. Kennedy was killed by an android because “no lone human being could have possibly hit a distant moving target two times within 1.8 seconds”. Collated during Iran-contra, El Salvador, Nicaragua, etc. the film combines satire and paranoia in its condemnation of Reagan / Bush / Thatcher era foreign policy, and covert American intervention in South and Central American politics. O No Coronado! (1992) Released on the quincentenial of European colonialisation, the film details the genocidal march of the Conquistador’s through the Americas utilizing archival footage, video-to-film effects. Unlike Baldwin’s previous works, O No Coronado! also utilizes a quantity of original footage (“Conquistador vignettes”) shot by Baldwin. The film was awarded a Phelan Award In Film by the San Francisco Foundation in 1992. While Baldwin’s previous films had all dealt with American imperialism within the terrain of the other, Sonic Outlaws (1995) focuses on the implicit-imperialism within America manifested via the cultural homogeny as articulated via the entertainment industry. Sonic Outlaws details the “electronic folk culture” that has emerged through activists/artists such as Negativeland, the Tape-beatles, the Emergency Broadcast Network, and the Barbie Liberation Organization, all of whom have sought to circumnavigate the socially dictated and accepted pleasures of culture, and to find new pleasures by playing with (and through) the debris of contemporary media. Further, these artists, like Baldwin, reject notions of socio-cultural truth in favour of an endless re-interpretation of cultural artifacts which exposes the gaps in master narratives and explode the unified text into a multiplicity of fragmented forms, each of which is open for multiple interpretations. Interview Jack Sargeant: I want to begin by asking about your education background, because you studied with Bruce Conner (2). Craig Baldwin: Sure. He was teaching at State, which was a public school, but he lives about three miles away anyway. He’s not a recluse, you come across him, and certainly his influence is all across San Francisco. But it is the sort of scene where you do have a relative amount of access. JS: But you were familiar with his work previous to going to college? CB: Oh yeah. Sure. But you know, Bruce Conner used to do light shows, that’s kind of how I got into filmmaking myself. That’s my whole approach, not from an academic point of view, or even from a documentary point of view, it’s more from a sub-cultural impulse – the clubs, rock and roll, youth subculture and creating this idea of kind of a ‘happening’. JS: You worked in clubs all over San Francisco? CB: A lot of clubs. Most of the South of Market clubs [i.e. downtown]. [Using] Five or six projectors… it’s not so much that you have to get access to this very rarefied, distanced, fine arts, it’s more like being part of a whole culture where people are very playful and sharing in the idea of creating an event. That’s more my relationship to Conner, it’s not so much tutor and mentor, it’s more like being immersed in this – not exactly psychadelia – but this whole environment of visual play, visual experimentation. JS: With his films like A Movie, Conner was part of a particular analysis of the media by people such as Marshall McLuen, the whole idea of a visual reservoir. CB: Well I don’t know if McLuen ever saw his stuff but ideas were in the air… JS: The Zietgeist. CB: Right. Again, sort of being able to literally enact this image culture that we are in anyway, but actually project it back on itself, with the agency of the imagination to be creative about it, not just be recipients but also happily celebrate it, be participants in it, this joyful, wallowing in excess, and maximizing it. JS: What was the first film that you made? CB: Well, there were no names for them… JS: Just experimental…? CB: They were just playing around with Super 8, stuff like that. The first one I made in a formalized way was – I made three or four when I was basically eighteen or so, Super 8 films – Why Not? . JS: What kind of things was going on in them? CB: A mixture of gestures, it wasn’t sync, it wasn’t dialogue based, gestures in front of the camera, plus extraneous material, collateral material, shots of this or that. Actually, I do remember being a subscriber to these Super 8 movie clubs, and I would get their reels, like movies from the silent era, old news reels, things like that. I took great delight looking through this old material. So even very early on, I used to [make] little home compilations, cutting up these little pieces, and then mixing them together. It’s definitely what you would call experimental film. JS: What year was this? CB: About 1974. JS: I’m really interested in the fact that you could buy so much footage so cheaply… CB: Oh, you can do it now. You’ve got a huge, huge subculture right now of Super 8, regular 8 even, and certainly 16mm. I am a subscriber to these zines, in fact there is a great journal you should check out called The Big Reel. You can subscribe – you wouldn’t want to – I mean I had to stop subscribing. You know the Sunday Paper with eight sections, maybe a total of 120 pages? The Big Reel looks like that. They actually made it more tabloid size now, but it used to be huge sections newsprint style, and I would just be pouring over them on my studio floor, from here [gestures down restaurant] to literally the front door. And I would just be tearing holes in the knees of my pants by moving while it was splayed out on the studio floor because I would be so obsessed with it. So there was a period of time when I never considered myself this kind of fine art filmmaker or even a documentary filmmaker, because, for me, it’s more like a joy in the material, in the McLuenesque sense of being, the proliferation of meanings, gestures, and images, and this obsessive collector sensibility, not a rarefied minimalist, but a maximalist. The playful quality of film. Once you subscribe [to The Big Reel and collector culture in general] like I say I had to stop, because I was spending all my money on collecting these films and what I would do, I would cut them up, and that’s how I made these collage reels that became my lightshow. And even to this day I sell [to] other filmmakers who are working in the so called collage – or collage essay – tradition. They come to me and I would be able to give them a shot of the [Golden Gate] bridge from the air, which they can’t get for themselves obviously, it costs $200 to rent a helicopter to go up and shoot the bridge, but I can get it from a PanAm commercial. Or the Hinndenburg Zepplin going down, or whatever the case is, this kind of material and the vast archive of the collective unconscious of popular imagery, so I’ll have that. So that’s one of the ways in which I actually make my living, but also it satisfies me because I invest in that, again not because of fine art – or popular art either – just because of this play, this obsessive, fetishistic love, of images, being able to control them. In a casual, informal West Coast, funk way – funk is a good word – in the kind of tradition of Robert Nelson (3), or even Harry Smith to a degree… Then I became a regular recipient of a list from a particular group of people, who send me their list every month to this day, that I correspond with and I call-up on the phone and buy. Like I say, this is part of a huge tradition, just like record collecting would be another example, going to the flea markets, of this underground subculture of people who are into having films and showing films, not because they want to go into business or into the industry as a job, but because they love it. The kind of films I ended up making were films which are filled with shots which I am attracted to, that I think are interesting or satisfying to look at. They give me some kind of visceral enjoyment. So this tradition of garage collecting or this exchange in the subcultural world – film geeks is what they’d be – people who fetishize the object of film. Not looking at what’s new or glossy, but looking at the rotting old bones… JS: Also like old forgotten or neglected technologies, the most obvious being things such as 3D cameras, or eight-track tapes. CB: Yes. So this idea of people with the flea market sensibility, or the do it yourself low budget, garage or junk aesthetic, so anyway this subculture I got into very early, you can go into camera stores and get little Super 8 digests of The Incredible Shrinking Man (4) for example, or certainly porn. Most of it’s just junk, there are so many of them. That’s the whole American idea of this popular imagery, just pumping it out, just planned obsolescence. You can walk down the street and find records or eight tracks in the gutter. The same with Super 8 and 16mm, it’s kind of disposable material. So my whole project was to reclaim it, redeem it, this trash, which had been ruled obsolete, no longer of interest, and certainly of no value because there was new product coming along, shiny new.. this year’s model…that became increasingly more predictable, more banal, commercial, whatever, so I was increasingly drawn towards the… JS: Detritus? CB: The detritus. The blemished. Whatever. Anyway, I was always part of that. My early films were experimental films like a lot of other young filmmaker’s films were. They were involved more with playing around with the camera. Very early on found footage found a way into the form of these Super 8 films, to try and tell something that was beyond the level of the real… mythic would be the word.. . slightly above the level of the real, they had more to do with larger ideas. Essays, collage essays as I call them, put a lot of different images together which have a certain kind of meaning which people know, there is a certain self-consciousness that certain shots mean certain things. Within the context, of course, of our received film history, and our popular culture. But anyway, I made a film called Stolen Movie, in which I would break through the front doors, whatever would get you past the ticket office, of a theatre, and go and shoot Super 8 off the screen. This was certainly a transgressive gesture against corporate media, but was also an example of using found footage in a way – whatever footage happened to be on the screen (laughs) at the time I made it in. So it was like a chance operation: Dada, nonsense, provocative, Situationist, and also found footage. All those kind of things, that was more my project, not to make a beautiful film, but to make a critical gesture against the film industry, which was so firmly in place, and was based on such bad, retrograde narrative ideas and stereotypes. JS: What drew you to Dada and Situationism? CB: Well again, psychoanalytically I can not tell you why I’m drawn to it, it’s more of a response of my nervous system, it wasn’t because I studied Dada in school [that] I turned on to the ideas, it returns to my personal history. We were talking early about the whole whiff and the warp of American popular culture, and I was repulsed by it, and I found this need to separate myself from it and criticize it, so I had to get out of the suburbs. So although I actually went to university, I did drop out of school and travel around for many years before I returned to school. But the whole point was that I wanted to leave the middle class ideas that culture was accepted without question, was something that we conform to and find our identity in. I was someone who had a very critical, antagonistic attitude about popular culture, so Dada was in terms of art history a gesture that was opposed to a bourgeoisie culture and also high art. So I found spiritual resonance with the Dada, Situationists, punk, all those movements. Again to try and set up an agency for individual creativity outside of marriage, the family, commerce, and even Art. More of this idea of libertarian anarchism, or autonomy, which is the word I would use. So there was a rapport with the ideas not through academic rote learning, but just because that was my origins, the whole development of my personality, from the straight, white suburbs, I was a creature of that, a victim of that. There’s nothing extraordinary in that, it’s a story a lot of people will tell you. Part of the milieu in which I grew up – comfortable middle class; I’m not putting my parents down for that, but as soon as I had the opportunity to leave I did. JS: You started collecting this stuff for rock shows and so on in the ’70s. At what point did you decide to start choosing pieces of film and constructing them as these mytho-narrative pieces? CB: Good question. There wasn’t any one particular point. It was just… you could take any chunk of the collage I would make and there would be a certain kind of form to it. I have fifty reels. I’m not talking about ten or twenty, I have fifty, or sixty, or seventy reels that I put together. You know, some people watch football, or play cards or whatever, it’s just the kind of thing I would do, an expression of my lifestyle: look at material and hack it up, and reconfigure it. For me that’s fun, it’s satisfying, it’s creative too, by the way. Within each cluster, bundle, whatever you call it, little montage sequence, there is an aesthetic sensibility. It ain’t no big deal by the way, there’s a million of them out there, these little reels. But sooner or later they get more refined, more worked on, more elaborate. For some of them, the performance is just one time out. Sometimes it’s a particular project, and most of those projects tend to be kind of political in my life. Let’s say there was a particular kind of wallpaper, the montage, when you are getting into a film project a lot of it has to do with language. Because, I always can find another image, I can always make the film a lot longer by adding a lot more from my image store. What really determines the whole shape of the project is the language, the literary part, the written part, so generally the point where there is a break is where there is a core, a platform or base, linguistically based, that’s when I say a collage essay – a neologism. Collage – that’s the visual part, the essay part is this kind of effort to make an argument, to make a point, tell a story (well, generally it’s real history). Let’s say there was a particular thing I wanted to talk about, in RocketKitKongoKit. In Mobutu [Mobutu Sese Seko], Congo at the time – in Zaire – there was a German rocket firm who leased out one tenth of the total landmass to test rockets in. So, that would be something that you would see in an investigative type journalistic magazine. I have a lot of African imagery, and a lot of science fiction imagery, I could just close my eyes and see: to lease out one tenth of the total land area of Zaire to test missiles in, what a story. Just in terms of larger visual structure, the science fiction material not only picture but also sound, on top of this ethnographic material – stuff about geography and peoples of the world – so, I could do that just by having a show, an installation, running two projectors side by side or whatever, but to get the details in a documentary way, to tell the story, to give it a little more body, and credence, of this contract, then I had to write the script. And at that point my material would come out of this larger reservoir of images, and it would take on a certain kind of form. In this case it was organized like a model kit: RocketKitKongoKit. Like the instructions of how to build a model, you glue pieces together exactly like a film. I was self conscious about movie making, like rocket building, or, for that matter, building a nation. All those ideas were there, the film tried to find a happy unity there with the content, at that point, when I did the research and I knew this certain story had to be told, we had a little bit about the history of the Congo, about Mobutu and the CIA, a little bit on the German rocket, the post-nazi careers of rocket makers. A little bit about the contemporary situation in Africa, the militarisation – as I see it – of the developing world. JS: Neo-colonialism. CB: Right. All the people wringing their hands “why are they so many wars in this part of the world? Where are all the guns coming from?” They were a byproduct of the geo-political strategising of the United States and the Soviet Union that they would pour so many arms down on people when that was the last thing they needed. Obviously get ploughshares, good computers, whatever, but that’s [weapons] the last thing a developing nation needs. Once they get into the hands of these fourteen year old kids, who’ve never been to school, and who can’t farm on their father’s land anymore because there is no roads to bring their crops to the city, and all these reasons we all know about, they end up in militias. And you’ve got blood baths and civil wars. That was the content. The point is I wanted to make those arguments, and I won’t claim I have some poetic sense, it was more in the terms of agit-prop, it was trying to raise people’s consciousness, but not through the Chomsky academic, or even strident left, but to talk to the sub-culture about issues of neo-colonialism or imperialism, so I was intent on this Yippie (5) ideal, not necessarily sterilizing the debate, but keeping it in a comic book [form], within the subculture, images that were not intimidating and only for the experts… That’s the point where stuff would separate off into a separate piece. Even though I was always part of that – there was a constant artesian well of material bubbling forward, at certain points, there was a certain issue I would have to confront, they were generally political issues and so then I’d write the script, get the narrators in, then wrap my imagery on top. So that really was the dividing line, at which I’d siphon off material and call it a project that had a beginning, middle and end. Those issues are constantly reflected through all of this stuff, you know, little Xeroxes, collages I would make, whatever, cable television shows, radio shows. JS: You’ve been involved with all of those other media as well? CB: Sure: mail art, Xerox art, I used to do little things in the street, agit prop, little Surrealist… John Hartfield (6). Funny cheap Xeroxes with a critical dimension, basically critical of foreign policy, for many years. (tape ends) JS: I want to discuss the political aspects of your work, which resonate in a particular way via the mobilization of a variety of techniques. CB: I was always very political, I felt that documentaries were great, but that they were a little bit guilt ridden, puritanical. JS: It’s also very bourgeois, the idea [from political documentaries] of raising somebody’s consciousness, as if the filmmaker’s ideas were somehow higher, or more noble. But what I saw in Tribulation 99 was that you weren’t raising people’s consciousness, you were making this funny movie, but underneath that there was a really serious point about colonialism and the relationship between Cuba, America, and Latin America. CB: Right. It was a trade off, I wanted to be on the margins, the subculture, but you don’t want to be trading on the most overexposed ideas of UFOs, or whatever, so what I try to do is take those ideas and customize then and tweak them, so they would accommodate the political argument. I could turn them inside out, so these urban myths would be vehicles to make points about whatever. So that was the strategy, not just going in with a straight political history of Guatemala, which would be too academic, and would turn people in the subculture off, so the idea was to go beneath that and take the low road, and tell stupid stories, paranoid conspiratorial kind of things, but actually, it wasn’t a pseudo-documentary, it was what I call a pseudo-pseudo-documentary just pretending to be a pseudo-documentary. Fake right: go left, by looking like you are taking people towards the gutter, but then actually, it’s redeemed and the beauty of it is that you get a large audience, who enjoy the montage, the cartoon, the sound and the fury, but then it also carries this other kind of meaning which doesn’t wear itself on its sleeve, like I am the morally pure political…. which I am, again I didn’t have to appeal to this idea of moral superiority. JS: What attracted you to colonialism as a theme for Tribulation 99 and Oh No Coronado!? CB: Because I am a child of the Vietnam War. I [have] this background from the Vietnam War, and I used to work for El Salvador Film and Video Projects, I used to be very involved with the solidarity movements with people struggling for democracy in Latin America, so that’s my background. My life long moral commitment to getting the US government out of people’s lives: that’s it. The travesties of other people’s sovereignty and blah blah blah, you know the whole thing, I just thought that it was something that outraged me. That was something that I wanted to make a film about. But a lot of experimental filmmakers make personal films, let’s say George Kuchar or Jack Smith, and that’s fine, but I always felt embarrassed to make a film about my own self, because I had this over compensation from being from the suburbs, and I always thought if I made a film about myself that would be more bourgeois, more narcissistic, more bourgeoisie individualism. So I was committed to making a film, not about another white guy, I mean what are my problems, I wanted to turn attention away from me as just a wanking, masturbating, angst ridden artist. I felt I wanted to be critical, make a critical documentary, but again not something that called upon people’s guilt, or that you had to go to school to study world history, which people could relate to because of the humour in it, a more popular bar room approach to it. It wouldn’t be academic, and moralistic, and that liberal politics that I saw as a product of the suburbs, but more radical grass roots politics of a sub-proletarian generation. People who didn’t want to have anything to do at all with not only the straight world, but also the world of straight politics. So anyway, that’s why I was committed to the ideas of anti-imperialism. Look at the records and history of the CIA you’ve got a greater, more interesting conspiracy novel than any fiction writer could come up with, all you can do is just tell the real history, the real story. The Covert Action Information Bulletin, I don’t know if you have ever seen that magazine, I couldn’t put it down. The stories of these things they were concocting around Cuba, the ways they were going to overthrow Castro, putting messages in the sky, and dropping little messages, it’s truly mind bending. I said “well these guys are like scriptwriters working for me, they’ve already written this incredible scenario, all I’ve got to do is put it in this movie, people will not believe it”. JS: When did you start making Sonic Outlaws? CB: 1993-94. They were busted in 1991. The abuse of power was always off-shore [in the previous films] and it occurred to me that there was this kind of liberal-tourism in going and finding these parts of the world in which there were outrageous abuses of power and then pointing my finger at it. But it is true that I felt guilty of this exoticism, voyeurism, of finding problems in other places in the world, so I brought it back home, to colonialism at home. JS: Without the ethnocentric conceits. CB: So I said, well this abuse certainly goes off in the United States, and there is a colonialism – certainly in the rock and roll business – so I realized after I became more acquainted with the Negativeland story that these guys were in a lot of ways in the same situation I was in. JS: As artists they utilized a series of very similar aesthetic techniques. CB: I was drawn to their case. But I saw it as a good movie, the form and content. And I could tell that story better than any other documentaries, who would just go ahead with the straight media style interviews, I could actually demonstrate this whole idea of what they were doing. JS: Exactly, in the film you are taking images, and manipulating sources, and via film using the same aesthetic and political statements as they are. And you are committing exactly the same crime that they are talking about, and accused of. CB: It’s not described. It’s not represented. It’s actually presented. It’s embodied. JS: “I am putting my signature to this crime, and this case”. CB: Yeah. That was the idea. And there is still not enough collage in that by the way, for my liking. It did well because it got into festivals and distribution because it was a documentary about this band. That was never really my intention. The language took over. From a filmmakers point of view there is a struggle between the story, the script, the language part, and the visual part. The language part: such and such happened, this person was involved, there is this narrative kind of demand. (I mean there is more than just narrative and visual, there is sound and whatever). So, in the course of making the movie, that is part of the job, as a filmmaker you have to resolve those tension between these two major aspects, one is the narrative, the other is the visual play. So, in Tribulation for example, where the visual really held its own, as opposed to most documentaries. But in Sonic Outlaws, the interview, the testimony, superseded the visual montage. Because the story is so strong and it is more of a journalistic piece. JS: You were closer to it too – Negativeland and the other people involved in the film are your contemporaries, whereas people in Latin America in the ’60s and ’70s are not. CB: Yeah. Good. I had access to it. You could always make visual montage after visual montage, there is a lot of material out there, but I had the interviews, and the interview had more value, I could see I had gone and set this stuff up. It’s a big deal, you have this personal testimony, so I had to prioritize. So, it made a space for itself in the film, and the montage fell back to the wayside. But, you see, I hate watching documentary, even though I am a documentary filmmaker, I am addicted to the form, but I hate watching talking heads, so any chance I got to replace talking head shots with collateral material, I would snap up. Illustrate is the word, but say something slightly off, so it wouldn’t be a direct line, but more metaphoric, this relationship where the people would have… there wouldn’t be a linear line but a spiral, the image sort of looked like what they were talking about but was inappropriate somehow. You know what I mean. That Surrealist kind of thing, that humourous, playful kind of thing, that would carve out a slightly bigger path than the original script would call for. Decking out this received collective unconscious about these images so they would proliferate meanings, it wouldn’t be whittling down, narrowing down on one point, but rather centrifical idea, a wider and wider source of material that I’m into. So for me, that’s the liberating imagination, part of the human consciousness. The personal part of the thing. It wasn’t just a documentary / a reportage / just the facts, but really giving free play and free reign not only to my own imagination, and my own fetish for playing with found footage, but also to the audience’s imagination, they can follow the argument, but they can also indulge in this horizontal / parallel activity. JS: The same as listening to a Negativeland record, where you get all these other references and engagements going on within that. CB: I think that’s the heart and soul of the project that I am involved in; it’s like DNA you have this double helix where you have these spirals, these two arguments, going simultaneously – they have this relationship – but they keep moving around each other, so they open up more of a space again. It’s kind of a schizophrenic kind of operation here. JS: Moving rhyzomically. In multiple directions simultaneously. What made you use mediums such as pixel vision for the interviews in Sonic Outlaws? CB: I also used a tube camera… JS: What’s a tube camera? CB: Its an old kind of video camera, it just has different qualities, you could put a different lens on it. If I brought a video camera today it would have certain lenses you couldn’t put on. They have certain perimeters. The older tube camera – you can supe-it-up, you can put a wide-angle lens on it. [The camera] gave a weird colour because it was older and fucked up, and it smeared. It had a different look. There was [also] Super 8, I could have shot the interview with the lawyer on video, but [Super 8] had a different quality. I shot different interviews on different formats, the reason is because I wanted it to be a collage of different formats… JS: Once again like Negativeland, in part a reflection of the themes with which you are dealing. CB: Just the same idea. Again, its not like a mission statement, but it was a good-faith gesture, it would be more interesting visually, there will be a width or a breadth of all these different kinds of possible approaches, possible platforms, typical standards to do this thing, because it will be more playful. Maximalise the diversity, the variety. We can cherish pure heterogeneity and diversity. Endnotes For more information on detournement and plagiarism see, for example, Stewart Home (ed.), What Is Situationism? A Reader, AK Press, 1996 Bruce Conner has directed numerous films, including: A Movie (1958), Cosmic Ray (1961), Report (1964/65), and Marilyn Times Five (1968-73). These films are characterized primarily via their usage of found footage (including footage from Hollywood movies and newsreels, etc) in order to challenge conventional notions regarding the nature of the presentation of information. Robert Nelson directed Plastic Haircut (1963), Oh Dem Watermelons (1965), Hot Leatherette (1967), The Great Blondino (1967), War Is Hell (1968), Deep Westurn (1974), and Hamlet Act (1982), amongst others. The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) was directed by Jack Arnold, who specialized in horror and science fiction films and directed such classics as It Came From Outer Space (1950) Creature From The Black Lagoon (1953) and Revenge Of The Creature (1954). Yippie is from the youth international party – the ’60s “dope and fucking in the streets” advocates such as Jerry Rubin etc. John Hartfield specialized in political photomontage images, many of which were engaged in an attack on militarism and fascism.