Notre Dame Zoo
Yuhang Yang
Guy Debord talks about the society of spectacle according to the Situationist International. The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which “passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity”. “The spectacle is not a collection of images,” Debord writes, “rather, it is a social relation among people, mediated by images.”
According to Debort’s description, contemporary capitalist society has evolved from a production stage to a unique landscape stage in which every detail of life has almost been alienated into a landscape:“all living things have only become Characterization. If the capitalist mode of production has fallen from existence to possession in the way people live, then the landscape society further transforms possession into appearance.
The Society of the Spectacle is a critique of contemporary consumer culture and commodity fetishism, dealing with issues such as class alienation, cultural homogenization, and mass media. When Debord says that “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation,” he is referring to the central importance of the image in contemporary society. Images, Debord says, have supplanted genuine human interaction.
Thus, Debord’s thesis says: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”
Situationalists are greatly influenced by Dadaism and Surrealism. Based on this background, Guy Debord proposed the concept of Psychogeography in 1955. Emphasis on personal psychological experience, that is understanding and studying urban space and social environment from the psychological level.
In the real world, people cannot realize that they can only see a kind of landscape illusion created by capitalists. Because people are too addicted to this landscape illusion, how to ‘break’ this illusion has become one of my aims. If this illusion is compared to an electronic screen, how can people realize that it is a ‘screen’? Is there something wrong with the screen? That way, people will focus on ‘glitch’ rather than on what’s on the screen. In my concept, ‘glitch’ are a way to break the landscape. These glitch can interact with people and help people interact more with the world.
A seemingly utopian social form is actually designed to cater to specific political needs. The building overemphasizes the clear structure and functional division of the space, symbolizing the people inside the building, and the capitalist achieves the purpose of operating the person in this way.
My first concept, glitch, has been formed. Starting from the society of spectacle, the combination of Constant’s New Babylon and psychogeography will analyze the site. In order to blur the function and space boundary of the building itself, people in the active guiding space are exposed to external information, and the elements of glitch are used to disrupt and deconstruct the space, and the private space, public space and political space are juxtaposed. Through this irrationality, An absurd scene. Just like his paintings, it reveals the confusion of the human beings on the surrounding environment. Although there are so many unreasonable things happening around, it is still undetectable, doing the work that has already been arranged. We need to break this dogmatic spatial division and feel the city and space in a state of entertainment.
In the second part, the concept is still starting from the society of spectacle, but it will be more inclined to the narrative of architecture. Decoding is just an expression of my creation of this non-existent but reasonable space
First we go back to the title:notre dame zoo. After my investigation, the type of person described by Notre is what we call a humanist. They tend to care for people’s individuality, emphasize the maintenance of human dignity, humanity, and promote freedom and equality and self-worth, which is very similar to the ideal Utopia. But with the development of technology, dystopia has become more and more realistic. The cities depicted in Metropolis are divided into two classes, capitalists and workers’ groups. Advances in technology have led to the replacement of politics by capital, a situation that often occurs in cyberpunk’s worldview, which is what we call Cybernetics. But if Cybernetics fails, robots begin to have self-awareness. After learning how to evolve, how do we think about them, can we treat them as a thoughtful person? The boundary between man and God is immortal and time limit. When a person has an infinitely long life, he becomes a god. At the beginning we created cyborg, we are mortal as creators, but when cyborg has its own thoughts, at a certain level, they are immortal, as long as they upload their own information to the network, they You can live forever. In this case, cybernetics fails and we can get along with them equally.
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