Author(s): McKenzie Wark

Architecture and Urbanism

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.