Learning from Labubu — Benedict Seymour

Learning from Labubu

A workshop at CAA Hangzhou

This workshop takes as its starting point Benedict Seymour’s video Boom, labubu! — a video that reworks and repurposes existing social media materials to ask questions about how we see the world and the social relations that shape it. Through close analysis of this work, participants will be introduced to the practice of digital détournement: the art of taking existing audiovisual material and refunctioning it to produce something genuinely new, critical, and imaginative. We will then break into groups to write, develop and produce new short video works in response to Boom, labubu! exploring a range of media, tactics, and concerns

Schedule

日期	时间	课程内容
Day1周二 4.21，2026	09:30 – 12:30	• 导入；放映与分析《Boom, Labubu!》；这部作品如何重构现有媒体素材，以及这样做的因素。 Intro – screening and analysis of Boom, labubu! How does this video rework existing media and why?
14:00 - 17:00	• 解析影片中的素材，音乐视频、材料、影像并分析内容；分组讨论原影片中的议题及可能采用的技术与方法。 Break into groups to identify issues, materials and techniques to explore in response to the original video.
Day2周三 4.22，2026	09:30 – 12:30	• 讨论创作新短片的概念。收集并分享初步反馈。 Bring in and share initial responses and ideas.
14:00 - 17:00	• 各小组开始着手制作一段2至3分钟的短视频方案，在设计中需结合音频、视频和文字元素，并考虑在社交媒体上的传播效果，以及是否使用人工智能（用还是不用？） Groups start work on developing a new short 2-3 minute video treatment to use sound, video, text considering possible social media distribution and AI (to use or not to use?)
Day3周四 4.23，2026	09:30 – 12:30	• 各小组分别与导师会面，分享正在撰写的剧本初稿。进行反馈与讨论。 Separate groups meet tutor to share work in progress toward a rough script/screenplay. Feedback and discussion.
14:00 - 17:00	• 根据反馈继续完善视频作品，目标是在第5天前完成作品。 Continue refining the videos, aiming to complete them before Day 5.
Day4周五 4.24，2026	09:30 – 12:30	• 就创作中出现的具体问题给逐一讨论、咨询和解决。 Drop In: Students with specific questions or problems can come in to discuss one-to- one.
14:00 - 17:00	• 继续今天的创作问题讨论、咨询和解决。 Drop In: continued.
Day5周六 4.25，2026	09:30 – 12:30	• 放映已完成的视频，并针对每部作品进行讨论。 Screening of completed videos with discussion of each work.
14:00 - 17:00	• 放映已完成的视频，并针对每部作品进行讨论。Boom, labubu! 卡拉OK（中文/英文/等）。 Screening of completed videos with discussion of each work. Boom, labubu! karaoke (Chinese/English/etc).

Films by Benedict Seymour shown/discussed:

Boom, labubu!
https://bseymour.cargo.site/Boom-labubu

Bang!

(directed by Matthew Noel-Tod, script Benedict Seymour)

https://bseymour.cargo.site/Bang

Olympicfield
https://bseymour.cargo.site/Olympicfield

Dead the Ends

https://bseymour.cargo.site/Dead-the-Ends

Can dialectics break Gravity?

(with Matthew Noel-Tod)

https://bseymour.cargo.site/Can-Dialectics-Break-Gravity

References:

Sianne Ngai

- Our Aesthetic Categories

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674088122

– Theory of the Gimmick

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674278745

A User's Guide to Détournement

Guy Debord & Gil J. Wolman

Les Lèvres Nues #8 (May 1956)

https://www.sionline.researche-editions.cddc.vt.edu/presitu/usersguide.html

Hegel, Marx, Plato – dialectics, from socratic dialectic to materialist dialectic and dialectical materialism:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CDialectics%E2%80%9D%20is%20a%20term%20used,the%20more%20sophisticated%20ones%20later.

[For Matthew Noel-Tod’s film ‘Bang!’ I rehearsed this historical development drawing on Lucio Colletti’s ‘Marxism & Hegel’ https://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Hegel-Lucio-Colletti/dp/0902308734 ]

La jetée (The Pier), Chris Marker

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pf4AY_DI9BE

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, Guy Debord

https://vimeo.com/1084741607

Traité sur bave et eternité / Treatise on venom and eternity, Isidore Isou

https://m.ok.ru/video/4631409593018

To learn from labubu is to introduce the labubu into the algebra of détournment and bricolage.

Learning from labubu can be a model for recombinant (desktop) cinema

Jetplanes circulate, detournement hijacks and redirects – and as we learn from global trade interruptions today stopping or redirecting this traffic impacts social reproduction (of capital) and so is powerful.

key terms

détournement =

"diversion"

“转移”、

“Zhuǎnyí”

"hijacking"

“劫持”

“jiéchí”

"rerouting"

“改道”

“gǎidào”

refunction / refunctioning
重新功能

Chóngxīn gōngnéng

功能恢复
Gōngnéng huīfù

to détourn is to divert - hijack - make strange - rework - reroute - recirculate - disrupt - interrupt - break - translate - disrupt - divert - subvert – INVERT

bricolage
拼贴

Pīn tiē

détournement
偏转
Piānzhuǎn

RECONTEXTUALISE

重新语境化
Chóngxīn yǔ jìng huà

PLATFORM CAPITALISM
平台资本主义
Píngtái zīběn zhǔyì

MONOPOLY
垄断
Lǒngduàn

MONOPSONY

买方垄断
Mǎifāng lǒngduàn

REAPPROPRIATION

重新拨款
Chóngxīn bōkuǎn

PARASOCIAL ANTHEM

准社会
Zhǔn shèhuì

SAMIZDAT

地下出版物
Dìxià chūbǎn wù

REBUS

谜语
Míyǔ

how do you do it?

(see ‘A User's Guide to Détournement’)

basic: swapping out elements of the original textual and visual organisation (text, voice, sound, etc) and altering the sequence

captions
subtitles, dubbing (voice over)
sound, sound effects, acousmatique, found and incidental or foley sound
music: add, subtract, reorganise (working with or against mood and narrative markers already there)
visual and sonic abstraction or materialization
formless interventions - squiggles and graphic or geometrical incisions

alteration in the material and tonality of the source; colour, texture, tone (light and dark).
superimposition, overlaying of material, transparencies - (using part of the source; adding material)

structural eg sequence order
detail (mise-en-scene)

The plot

Labubu - advent of chinese soft power - phenomenal arrival of china on world stage of cultural power

Platform critical - platform reflexive popularism

Social media critiques – of circulation (capital)

looting returning in the form of platform and cloud capitalist monopoly

Sabotage, recontextualisation, allegory – reference back to labour

Again, the question of international solidarity against race/war and militarism
the crisis spreads as far as my work place - HE UK
culture of stans and stars, insta etc - Charli and co

Marx’s inversion of subject and predicate;

labubu as hobgoblin haunting the capitalist spectacle

QUESTIONS AND PROPOSITIONS

Can we model a vision of solidarity thru reinhabiting and recombining these parasocial relations (‘para-socialism’)?

(ie Dua and Charli and the commitments and contradictions they perform) ?

Rather than a simple first person mode of narrating our own so called individuated lives

maybe through these materialist archetypes (material girl /boy assemblages) we can rehearse and stage or project new class race and gender relations that challenge the rule of the border and the categories of capital

So the pop video recombination becomes a tool of recomposing labour - if only in imagination - and in code before and in between movements of practical contestation and of international solidarity

The video is at once more and more ambitious and more and more modest – dwindling from larger critical ambitions and discursive abstraction and mapping to ‘cheering up’ the global comrades amid intensifying genocide and militarism.

But fairy tale, hypothetical recontextualised fragment or meme like montage of distractions is also a way of mapping the development and (apparent) im/possibilities of collective action through disintegrated spectacle.

Like Singing in the Rain in the 1950s or Demy and Varda and Godard in the ‘60s (nouvelle vague) where the political & social becomes more explicit in a form of consoling morale enhancing mass entertainment in austerity , platform reflexive recombination and dramatization might be a way to find hope and open up unspoken possibilities in the present.

The possibility of refunctioning the network effects and ponzi style dynamics of the labubu as platform capitalist commodity economy is the secret of Boom, labubu! and its inversion of the capital and market sanctioned labubu boom

BOOM LABUBU - LYRICS

OUT NOW – Nov 2025

If every labubu is a unique surprise...

Verse 1

Charli was a teacher in UK HE

but one day they XCX’d her.

Got herself a job in a factory

working 996 far across the sea.

Working 996 in the factory

making cute labubus for you and me

Verse 2

One day Dua joined her, new girl on the line

packing dolls in boxes one at a time.

“Wouldn’t it be cool,” she says with a wink

“if things could really boom – just not how they think?”

CHORUS 1

“Boom boom, labubu!

baby, bye bye!

Boom boom labubu.

I think we could try?”

Verse 3

Way back west & deep in decline

Trump is on top but

Bibi’s on the line:

“Yes, yes King Don, we’ll stop it, be cool

Just send us some more …aid

So we can blow up this school?”

“Sure thing, Bibi, baby

well what can I say, you know we’ve got your back

have a beautiful day.

Wait a minute – I’ve just had a thought

I’m going to send a little something

just to show our support!”

[to aide: ‘Send Mr Netanyahu… the best labubu they got!)”]

CHORUS 2

“Boom boom, labubu!

Bibi – buy buy!

Gonna smile so hard

I think he might cry”

Verse 4

Charli looks at Dua:

“What you trying to say?

You know I love to Vroom Vroom

but we can’t drive away.

We’re not Thelma & Luigi

or Bonnie and Clyde…

If we break out of here,

we’ve got nowhere to hide”

“Wait a minute, Charli,

there’s some thing you should see.

Things aren’t quite as bad

as they seem to be.

If every labubu is a unique surprise

maybe we can break out

without going outside?”

CHORUS 3

“Boom, labubu!

Bibi, bye bye

Boom boom, labubu!

but she’s on our side” [Xi’s on our side]

Verse 5


Back in Washington

Seems all is not well

Trump is scowling

Like his gift went to hell

“Get me that labubu company,

nobody gets to take out my buddy Bibi!”

But guess who’s down at Pop Mart for a visit today?

“He looks like a labubu

but from farther away?”

“He’s not quite a labubu,

More like Winnie the Pooh!”

“Nihao Mr President,

how the fuck do you do?”

Chorus

“Boom, labubu!

Bibi, bai bai!”

“Xi jiu women ao bi xu zijiu?”

“Ming ming bai bai”

“习救我们？还是必須自救”

(Xí jìu wǒ mén? Ao bì xū zì jiù?) [Will Xi/She save us or must we all try?]

“习救我们？还是必須自救”

(Xí jìu wǒ mén? Ao bì xū zì jiù?)

“习救我们？还是必須自救？”

(Xí jìu wǒ mén? Ao bì xū zì jiù?)

“Is she gonna save us or must we all try?”

“I think we should try”
“Ming ming bai bai!”

[It’s very clear]

---

Learning from Labubu?

(Introduction/ theoretical essay for the workshop):

Why the labubu, what has it got to teach us? Why waste any more on time on it? Isn’t school one of few places you might get to step away from it (though could be its tagged to your bag or looking after your phone).

Sianne Ngai’s theory of the cute seems designed to illuminate the logic of the labubu. For Ngai the cute is always about power, about vulnerability, and about the way that implicationsof vulnerability appeal to our narcissism and cruelty, giving us the illusion of being in control when really we are following orderslaid down to us by capital and state. The infantilisation of all discourse, and its sweetening by cute avatars and emojis is the most blatantbut also normalised and forgotten, un-seeable,moment of contemporary power.

Cuteness enables consumers to enjoy a certain fantasy of ourselves as having power over domestic commodities that, in reality, are much more in control of us. The Labubu consumer believes – or pretends to believe (which may be the same thing) – that they are exercising taste, hunting a collectible, expressing identity. What they are actually doing is participating in an engineered system of desire — the blind box mechanism, artificial scarcity, the serialised drop schedule — that controls their behaviour with great precision. For Marx this is about the expansion and realisation of economic value, and we are just bearers - the human dolls - in this process. Labubus are the ugly/cute, slightly demonic enforcers in this scenario.

The cute object's apparent helplessness conceals its command over the consumer's attention, money, and social performance. Labubu dangling from a luxury bag is not the toy on display; it is the consumer who is on display, interpellated by the commodity into performing a particular kind of desiring subject.

Ngai also theorises the mimetic dimension of cuteness: cuteness is a mimetic aesthetic — think of the way puppies and babies push us into producing baby talk, forcing us to imitate their infantile qualities in the language of our aesthetic evaluation.

The vast ecosystem of Labubu content — unboxing videos, "haul" posts, fan communities using diminutives and exclamation marks, strangers squealing at each other's bag charms — is this mimetic pull at scale, it’s networked and networking (market-making) form. The commodity reshapes the language and behaviour of those who encounter it in the image of its own soft, malleable form.

Cuteness is, in Ngai's view, a "commodity aesthetic," born out of a desire to have a simpler relationship to our commodities. (There is a parasocial moment to this as to some of the other relations in Boom labubu! – cf Charli and Dua as celebrity friends and partners.)
Labubu offers what feels like an uncomplicated attachment — a toy, a little friend, an expression of whimsy.

The fact that its primary market is young adults — younger consumers want to build toy collections for the sense of "affordable exclusivity" it gives them— suggests that cute collectibles now perform for adults what the nursery once performed for children: a bounded space of emotional safety, organised around gentle, non-threatening objects that one can dominate.

Sianne Ngai’s analysis of the gimmick also comes to mind here.

Labubu as a system, rather than merely an object, shows the logic of the gimmick in play. Ngai defines the gimmick as striking us at once working too little — a labor-saving trick — and working too hard — a strained effort to get our attention. The gimmick is not a fourth aesthetic category alongside the ‘cute zany interesting’ (Our Aesthetic Categories, Ngai) but, as she argues, an undercurrent running through all of capitalist culture.

The blind box could exemplify the gimmick. When we call something a gimmick, we are registering uncertainties about value bound to labor and time — misgivings that indicate broader anxieties about the measurement of wealth in capitalism.

The blind box makes the uncertainty of value literal: you do not know what you are paying for until you have already paid. The same amount of labour and the same retail price (around £15–30) purchases either a "common" Labubu worth retail value or a "secret" edition that sells on secondary markets for thousands. As such the toy builds a greater than normal element of gambling into the purchase of the child-friendly commodity, and again we could see this as building in a training of behaviour, along with that of the parasocial nexus of labubu culture, display, mimetic distinction.

The blind box mechanism could be seen as a neat formal embodiment of the way capitalist commodity exchange structurally obscures the relationship between labour, value, and price. You register this obscurity as gimmickry — the trick of the thing — but you submit to it anyway, because the pleasure is inseparable from the not-knowing.

Labubu's packaging — the opaque box, the illustrated exterior, the promise of a surprise — is pure gimmick: it claims to deliver something whose value is contingent on an artificial rarity the manufacturer controls entirely. Resale values skyrocketed for rare Labubu editions. A secret blind box from the Big Into Energy series fetched over 2,000% above retail, with one piece selling for 45 times its original price.
This extreme price disparity between identical retail products — differentiated only by which one happened to come out of your box — could be seen as the gimmick of the commodity form itself: the pretence that exchange value corresponds to some intrinsic property of the object, when in fact it is produced (in this case) as much by the social machinery of scarcity, hype, and manufactured desire, and the labour time involved in its production process.

Like other gimmicks, there is in fact a lot of labour going on in the labubu process.
Labubu is felt as working too hard when one looks clearly at the Pop Mart apparatus: the engineered drops, the Roboshops in airports and luxury department stores, the co-branding with Vans, the celebrity placements with Rihanna, Dua Lipa and Blackpink's Lisa, the theme park, the animation studio aspiration. It is a strenuous machine of attention-capture. But the product itself performs effortlessness — a fuzzy monster, a surprise, a bit of fun. The labour of producing and sustaining the frenzy is carefully concealed behind a façade of whimsy.

Ngai also notes that the gimmick is "protected by its own slickness, as a thing whose sheer stupidity cleverly neutralizes the critical feeling it incites," defending itself from intellectual curiosity in a way that puts any person seeking to analyze it at a comical disadvantage. To analyse Labubu critically — as a system of manufactured desire, gamified scarcity, and affect labour — is to immediately seem humourless, missing the point, unable to take delight in a silly toy. The cute object pre-empts critique by making critique seem to be the problem. This is not a coincidence; it is a structural feature of the gimmick. This is another reason why to learn from labubu we may also need to try to adopt some of the toy and discourse apparatus’s own wiles and tricks. A music video mis-appropriation – theft of labubu’s fire – might be more productive than a tedious staightfaced critique.

Though the zany is primarily Ngai's category for performance and affective labour, it bleeds into the Labubu phenomenon through the culture of unboxing. The zany more specifically evokes the performance of affective labor — the production of affects and relationships — as it comes to increasingly trouble the very distinction between work and play. This explains why this ludic aesthetic has a noticeably unfun or stressed-out layer to it. It is not only in the labubu factory that workers are are busy doing unpaid labour, it is outside the wage in the ‘experience economy’ of the doll and its language games.

The unboxing influencer embodies zany affective labour: they perform excitement, squeal, react, share their ‘haul’ (like a bad parody of the haul of rioters and lifters which first appeared on the internet around the time of the 2011 riots and which labubu seems to domesticate and build back into capitalism?). All for an audience, constituting work that feels like (and must look like) play. A TikToker's Labubu unboxing video went viral almost overnight, clocking up 2 million views and 200,000 likes, says NPR. The value produced here is not just attention and mimesis leading to purchases; it is the affective training of other consumers in how to desire. The unboxer is simultaneously enjoying a toy and labouring to reproduce the conditions for others' purchases. Someone has to tell us and show us the ‘heartstopping’ or ‘heart beat quickening’ process of unboxing for us to get into it - desire is always the desire of the other.

Ngai's account of post-Fordist capitalism emphasises hypercommodification — the saturation of life with commodities that demand affective, not just practical, engagement. The cute, the interesting, and the zany are the aesthetic categories best suited for grasping how aesthetic experience has been transformed by the hypercommodified, information-saturated, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism.

Labubu lives at the intersection of all three axes: it is hypercommodified (serialised, versioned, limited, resold), information-saturated (its value is inseparable from the social media ecosystem in which it circulates and means), and performance-driven (its display on bags and in unboxing videos is its use value).

Pop Mart’s business model is also a crystallisation of post-Fordist IP logic. To keep its brand fresh, Pop Mart has taken a page from Disney's playbook, doubling down on expanding its IP portfolio, launching pop-up stores, a film studio and a theme park — Pop Mart's founder Wang Ning once hinted at his aspiration to turn the company into "China's Disney."

This aspiration is telling: Disney is the apotheosis of affective IP capitalism, where the commodity is not a thing but an imaginary world, and where love for characters translates endlessly into purchasing behaviour across every medium and product category. Labubu is being positioned as a character first and a commodity second — but this is precisely Ngai's point about how the cute operates: its apparent humanisation of the object (it has a backstory, a personality, it is kind-hearted but mischievous, it has a boyfriend named Tycoco [?]) is the mechanism by which the commodity relation is naturalised and deepened.

One final Ngai-ian thread is worth pursuing. She notes that cute objects possess a formal instability: the cute is an inherently unstable category, both inducing feelings of protectiveness or sympathy as well as an accompanying suspicion of an object's capacity to manipulate us. This can shade over into the uncanny - the cute unravelling into the strangely familiar. And not just in a psychoanalytic (Freudian) sense – though that is for sure a factor – but in the more Marxian way I want to emphasise, where labubu is a ‘monster of the market’ that allows us to see the monstrosity of the market, and of our potential power within and against it. Marx’s first english translator rendered the famous ‘a spectre is haunting europe, the spectre of communism’ as ‘a hideous hobgoblin is haunting europe, the hobgoblin of communism’. My video departed in part from enthusiasm for the idea that the labubu could be, or become, a figure or device for the second coming of this hobgoblin: let’s make the labubu haunt capitalism (again), let’s make its smile show a little more of its fangs, lets be the network of anti-labubu-worshipping labubu fans (the collective labubu) we want to see in the world!

Labubu’s monstrous teeth and pointed ears are not accidental; they activate the affective undertow that Ngai identifies as always latent in the cute. The violence suppressed in cuteness — the squeeze that could crush, the protective embrace that is also a gesture of domination — is given a stylised form in Labubu's mild monstrousness. It looks like it might bite. This slight threat is precisely what makes it more compelling, not less: it introduces a frisson of danger that prevents the object from being merely saccharine, and makes the consumer's mastery of it feel like a more meaningful achievement.

Cute, in Ngai's terms, always risks tipping into the abject or the uncanny. Cuteness can unravel into scary. Pop Mart has found the precise calibration point at which Labubu sits permanently on this edge — cute enough to be non-threatening, monstrous enough to be interesting, ugly enough to provoke the "ugly-cute" discourse that generates millions of social media impressions. The form is the marketing.

Labubu is a commodity that aestheticises powerlessness (its own, and by extension the consumer's, caught in systems of artificial scarcity they cannot control). It is a gimmick that registers deep anxieties about value, labour, and what things are worth, concealing this registration behind a furry smile. It is an instrument of affective labour for the influencers who animate its ecosystem. And it is a post-Fordist IP asset designed to transform a single character into an infinitely extensible world of purchasable attachments. None of this makes Labubu less enjoyable if you are receptive to its googly eyes and jagged grin. But in a context of extreme social stress - genocide and war in the west - the compulsive attachment to the labubu and the compulsions it imposes and entrains – especially among those old enough to know and do better (or worse) – does strike some as obscene, or at best symptomatic.

The gimmick is an aesthetic form which we regard with suspicion. But this can make it a privileged place to intervene if we aim to sharpen people’s suspicions of what passes for everyday normality in a capitalist world. In making dubious claims to value, the gimmick is the aesthetic counterpart to the commodity form, and as such it lies latent in everything made to be sold in capitalism. Labubu in that sense, too, has a lot to teach us because it can come to function as an emblem of capitalism and of the commodity more generally, rather than just some exceptionally tacky exception.

And this means that to play with and invert it – to play with it wrongly – can help us to detourn it and turn it upside down. Rather than chains hidden by cuteness, in the old phrase of Marx’s, the labubu’s cuteness can become a way to help us manifest these and so make them into radical chains, chains of solidarity.

That was the challenge and appeal of building the labubu into this song for me.

The workshop will discuss how this worked in much more granular detail and look at some of the tools and techniques used to make the labubu perform a different kind of pedagogy, to teach us something better.

LEARNING FROM LABUBU

Workshop full notes:

A workshop at CAA Hangzhou

This workshop takes as its starting point Benedict Seymour’s video Boom, labubu! — a video that reworks and repurposes existing social media materials to ask questions about how we see the world and the social relations that shape it. Through close analysis of this work, participants will be introduced to the practice of digital détournement: the art of taking existing audiovisual material and refunctioning it to produce something genuinely new, critical, and imaginative. We will then break into groups to write, develop and produce new short video works in response to Boom, labubu! exploring a range of media, tactics, and concerns

To learn from labubu is to introduce the labubu into the algebra of detournment and bricolage - of recombinant (desktop) cinema

Learning from Labubu

A workshop at CAA Hangzhou

This workshop takes as its starting point Benedict Seymour’s video Boom, labubu! — a video that reworks and repurposes existing social media materials to ask questions about how we see the world and the social relations that shape it. Through close analysis of this work, participants will be introduced to the practice of digital détournement: the art of taking existing audiovisual material and refunctioning it to produce something genuinely new, critical, and imaginative. We will then break into groups to write, develop and produce new short video works in response to Boom, labubu! exploring a range of media, tactics, and concerns

Structure [see below - after this first tranche u have earlier notes ]

Why labubu

Watching and analysing how it attempts a pedagogy by labubu using detournement and bricolage of existing material to unlock the critical potential of a capitalist commodity. As well as Boom labubu! we will look at specific films from my archive to illustrate key points of the techniques discussed

Between detournment and bricolage

We will go into more detail and cover macro and micro level

Plot and sequence structure

Sourcing

Allusion and superimposition

Look at Debord on the possibilities of extended detournement

Basic mode of taking something bad and making it better by inversion and transposition

Fairy tale parasocial parable

Plausibly deniable allegory

Displacement and circulation ‘from below’ - working class doing dream work

Key sources and different ways they are re-used

The importance of randomness and trying things out

Testing continuity

Making new connections by recontextualising -

One image plus another =

New connections

Quote Debord and Wolman again

Battle of Algiers

Scene handbag

Farocki - Inextinguishable fire - one or more commodities - parallel to labubu and pager say

Pager video

2 dua and charli videos

Main video - Vroom vroom

Labubu factory and public promotion in documentary

Ai me /jia Zhangke

Watch films over and over with and without sound

In and out of sequence

Show new films to demonstrate various new possibilities you explored

Bang

Gravity

Subtitles English

Doesn’t need to be understood in detail to show basic moves eg re sequence reversal layering etc

Think about how the students works can then be edited and translated together eg if we bring forward a day to make a new work in Chinese / English / by me (& XJ)

Labubu /Chinese whispers version

Qiao qiao hua / Er Yu (whisper culture? Secret talk / ear talk)

First you see hear repeat respond to boom labubu

Then I/we respond to that

redetournment
Aller et detour /retour

China aller et detourn

Learning from labubu is the algebra of detournment and bricolage - of recombinant desktop cinema

So this is no longer about labubu but about what we can say or do with it as an (explosive) device - like children playing with a male doll dressing it up female

And Labubu is chosen because there is a new equation in images possible here: adding Labubu to pager to explosives = a different result.

Israel and the fascist world have learned how to detourn ordinary words and things (pager) from erstwhile anti imperialists (Algerian decolonization) but the video re-turns this (redetournment) and also gives it a twist (allegorisation through the scene of workers leaving the labubu factory at the end / turning it into a roller disco or dancehall - implicitly making mass sabotage and interruption of 996; from sabotage to the refusal of work for obnoxious forms of commodity production / for better conditions)

I will compile the outputs from the students in adobe premiere as we go along

If students like they can also use the existing videos as raw materials and are free to add to them /subtract

Collective mathematics of labubu

If Labubu is now too uncool and devalued it can be replaced or satirized and humiliated etc

If this video is too political in q Chinese context it can be remade and you can find ways to talk about sensitive issues that are playful and thoughtful but where you are protected as authors. Art can operate more freely than social media or other promotional /commercial forms but often because it conceals to reveal and hides in the light. As Oscar Wilde said: give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth. Here a lot of the game is to find a good mask and to say what is urgent but otherwise silenced

Labubu’s whispers/whiskers

Chinese Labubu (chinese whispers)

Chinese players of this game may wish to de-detourn or ‘return’ the gift of the Labubu. That is, your response to my presents /presence maybe to send Dua and Charli (Dua ya and Xiaoli) back to UK and to their source files and videos. Their songs could reemerge as a key part of the material, or you could keep elements of my video but turn their words and music. You have many options - as with AI - but some limitations in that I would like you to also think about the logic of Labubu, socially, economically, culturally, as character or story or currency or investment - primary and secondary or tertiary markets…

Chinese detournment might be reverse detournment which suspends or inverts compulsive critique. Try rewriting something stridently political or polemical in a different register.

Instead of exposé or satire the video might be (much more) affirmative - what happens when you expose something as stable successful etc (thinking about the western term china shock). To a contemporary western citizen encountering somewhere that just efficiently works without crisis could be the greatest detournement possible.

What else is interesting about the labubu which the video explores or could do?

The temporality and consumer dynamics of blind boxing. The role of anticipation imagination and consumer desire . This gives us the plot of boom labubu where stealth is a factor to release desire -

Blind boxing means you can hide something in the box

(Here as elsewhere elements of the tradition of working class sabotage are implicit or potential even in the most advanced /regressive capitalist commodities) .

The role of (reciprocal) narcissism and social rivalry status distinction etc

The possibilities for abjection (of these)

For entryism and changing the payload of the hyper popular commodity

The labubu. Viewed as vehicle.

Smuggling and anti-money laundering.

Everybody loves our labubu

A parallel to art - uniqueness - denegation of artwork as absolute commodity

Mass production of this minimal difference

(Simulated uniqueness?)(pseudo authenticity and originality)

Make Labubu fake again!/ at last

The Labubu often inspires hostility and provocation in a moment of social disaster by offering transparently meretricious solace - the liberal reaction to genocide in USA was labubu + brunch.

As such it become a symbol of absolutised consumerism in a moment of maximal destruction of humanity and cries out for detournment as emancipation and liberation and protest

Include discussion of use of your own footage and of AI or cgi / graphics etc

The importance of writing and also of different speeds of video/sound

(Add acceleration and deceleration to modes or detournment)

Famous detourned film includes 24 hour psycho

Other Labubu features of note

Ugly beauty

Another modernist aspect

The gothic and monstrous in Marx

Socialist surrealism - a land without crises?

This morning we will intro the how we can ‘learn from labubu’ and in the afternoon split into groups to identify materials and techniques with which to respond to the Boom, Labubu!

Students can work with their own fresh material (2-3 mins max) or rework the ‘original’ music video.

Any of the sources we use can be part of a new video in response. I will share a list of all the films discussed and video sources, etc.

https://bseymour.cargo.site/Boom-labubu

https://bseymour.cargo.site/Olympicfield

https://bseymour.cargo.site/Can-Dialectics-Break-Gravity

https://bseymour.cargo.site/Dead-the-Ends

DAY ONE

What is (learning from) the labubu

bricolage and detournement

bricolage

拼贴

Pīn tiē

détournement

偏转

Piānzhuǎn

what is détournement (today), in the era of Labubu and AI?

How can we learn from a consumer commodity that is designed to circulate, be consumed, replicate, addict, colonise, activate consumers, etc? My video as an example.

Jetplanes circulate, detournement hijacks and redirects - and as we learn from global trade interruptions today stopping or redirecting this traffic impacts social reproduction (of capital) and so is powerful.

what is détournement? how and why to detourne?

watch some examples of détournement / my videos

guy debord - in girum

chris marker - la jetée

DTE

can dialectics break bricks (1970s)

can dialectics break gravity (2014)

[computers as detournement machines - computer generated voice etc; translation etc]

traité sur bave et eternité - treaty on venom and eternity (1951)

irma vep (1996) (end) / tv series (2022)

key terms

détournement =

"diversion"

“转移”、

“Zhuǎnyí”

"hijacking"

“劫持”

“jiéchí”

"rerouting"

“改道”

“gǎidào”

refunction / refunctioning

重新功能

Chóngxīn gōngnéng

CHINESE TERMS!

the root of all evil - a motherlode for detournement like Downfall (film) - search to find this kind of supercut/viral video

万恶之源

Wàn'è zhī yuán

Core

核心
Héxīn

Corecore
核心核心
Héxīnhéxīn

what is détournement?

to détourn is to divert - hijack - make strange - rework - reroute - recirculate - disrupt - interrupt - break - translate - disrupt - divert - subvert - INVERT

how do you do it? (see detournement a user’s guide )

basic: swapping out elements of the original textual and visual organisation (text, voice, sound, etc) and altering the sequence

captions,
subtitles,
dubbing (voice over)

sound, sound effects,
music: add, subtract, reorganise (working with or against mood and narrative markers already there)

structure

sequence order
detail (mise-en-scene)
superimposition of images (collage and transparencies)

visual and sonic abstraction or materialisation

formless interventions - squiggles and graphic or geometrical incisions,
alteration in the material and tonality of the source; colour, texture, tone (light and dark).
superimposition, overlaying of material, transparencies - (using part of the source; adding material)

watch:

Isidore Isou Traité sur bave et eternité / Treatise on venom and eternity. This acts on several levels during its course: Subversion of genre/feature film content with its first person narrator and subject drifting (‘deriving’) thru the city; direct scoring scratching blotting etc of film; subversive and powerfully anti-naturalistic use of sound

detournement can make strange, redirect the familiar, or deflate the would be strange mysterious exalted

it can take debased reactionary material and redirect it: racist content can be transformed, existing divisions in the material (eg china versus japan) can be altered into class division - Can Dialectics Break Bricks?

all of this can alter the economy of the text/film/meme or clip in question

什么是 détournement？

détournement 的意思是转移、劫持、使陌生、重做、改道、循环、扰乱、中断、打破、转换、扰乱、转移、颠覆、反转。

如何做到呢？（参见“挪用”用户指南）

基本操作：替换原有文本和视觉组织（文本、语音、声音等）的元素并改变顺序

字幕

配音

声音、音效、音乐：添加、删除、重组（与原有的氛围和叙事标记相配合或反配合）

结构

顺序

细节（场景调度）图像叠加（拼贴和透明胶片）

视觉和听觉的抽象或物化

无形干预——曲线和图形或几何切割，改变源素材的材质和色调；色彩、纹理、色调（明暗）、叠加、素材交叠、透明度——（使用部分素材；添加素材）

参见伊西多尔·伊苏的《毒液与永恒论》（Traité sur bave et eternité / Treatise on venom and eternity）。这种手法在其创作过程中从多个层面发挥作用：颠覆类型/故事片的内容，以第一人称叙述者和在城市中漂泊（“衍生”）的主题为特色；直接对电影进行配乐、刮擦、涂抹等处理；颠覆性且强烈的反自然主义声音运用。

挪用可以使事物变得陌生，重新定义熟悉的事物，或削弱原本可能显得陌生、神秘或崇高的事物。

它可以将堕落的反动素材重新塑造：种族主义内容可以被转化，素材中现有的分歧（例如中国与日本）可以被转化为阶级分歧——辩证法能打破砖瓦吗？

所有这些都可以改变相关文本/电影/梗或片段的经济性。

– as example

Displacement in the text again displacement ‘on the ground’

A combo of sources

Cloverfield: source for plot, structure/scenes

Storyline of source:

一群纽约客正在享受一场告别派对，却浑然不知他们即将面临人生中最恐怖的一夜。一个摩天大楼般大小的怪物降临城市，所到之处皆是死亡和毁灭。朋友们用手持摄像机记录下纽约在他们周围崩塌时挣扎求生的过程。

Olympic Games promotional video 2009

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ICqSfYJ2f8

+ Mobile phone cam footage. Using what seemed already very low res video helps create the effect of being an older camera/tech found in the future, in the aftermath of the attack/ olympics

West Ham 2026! - critical response

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL7o94EO3L8

NOTE

Hypothetical films, speculative fictions, pitches or sketches for films that might be made, or that might not be makeable. Trying to say or show what cannot be said or shown.

Describing the technique and composition of Boom labubu I realised it is almost like a series of prompts for an AI video that AI cannot will not make, or which I cannot or will not pay to have made. The video becomes at once a series of potential and also unmade films. The video is a prompt/ pitch/sketch for an AI to render - but which I render it myself. In short it repeats the gesture of Debord’s melancholic and recessive détournement insofar as the film involves not showing or sharing as much as Vienet’s expansive and accessible polemicizing.

A NOTE ON THE STRANGE/DEFAMILIARISATION (displacement?)

the relation between west and east, and of exoticisation or danger in making strange, but also defamiliarisation, making the close far away, showing how odd and strange our everyday is already by estrangement techniques.

capitalist reality or what Mark Fisher called capitalist realism relies on suppressing the strange, naturalising the relations of exploitation and domination, and is part of the east-west traffic in commodities and their social relations

the valuation of the strange and distant is complex or dialectical - at once about what is far away and rare, desirable, different, and what is denigrated, devalued - a cheap or free input to main stream capitalism.

the value relations of the e/stranged are a concern in the labubu video and something the song attempts to show and make less comfortable

- this includes reworking propaganda materials, including the doll itself, which is a kind of advert for china and for its abiltity to ‘normally’ inhabit and expand the terms of global capitalist consumer culture, its ability to play nice - something it might need in the context of increasing US demonisation and making strange and scary of china. a scary monster with a cute smile might tame the fangs of menace the US habitually projects...

we aim to intervene in this concept where the west is trying to polarise relations - very brutally with the tariffs and war - while also acutely aware of its own crisis of value - no longer the top, the hegemon the centre, holding on by means of its skills in propaganda and packaging and its control of the terms of trade - key institutions, politics, military power underneath the shiny surface of creativity and knowledge economy. west may still have something to trade, beyond threats, but it is also anxious and paranoid

this is the situationn for our exchange of détournments and may well include a lot of complete (but what is ever complete?) misunderstanding... to find ways of misunderstanding each other together might be the most utopian part of the project - a good (and more real?) way of learning from labubu’s plastic internationalism that acknowledges the differences a bit more?

DETOURNMENT DEFINITION

AI sez:

Détournement is a technique developed by Guy Debord and the Situationist International in the 1950s and 60s. The word is French — roughly translating as "diversion," "hijacking," or "rerouting" — and the practice involves taking existing cultural materials (films, advertisements, texts, images) and reworking them to produce a meaning that contradicts, subverts, or critically transforms the original.

[ADD DETOURNMENT A USERS GUIDE]

The core idea is that the products of consumer capitalism — its images, its spectacles, its media — can be turned against themselves. Rather than making something from scratch, you seize what already exists and redirect it. A corporate advertisement becomes a critique of consumerism. A pop song becomes a political statement. The familiar is made strange, and in that estrangement, something is revealed about the world the original material was naturalising or concealing.

For Debord, this wasn't just an aesthetic trick — it was a political act. The "spectacle" (his term for the total media environment of consumer capitalism) [TOTALLY WRONG] works by making its version of reality seem natural and inevitable. Détournement disrupts that naturalisation by showing that images and narratives can always be cut up, reordered, and made to mean something else. Nothing is fixed. Everything is constructed.

It connects to related ideas in modernist art and film — Brecht's alienation effects, Eisenstein's montage, the cut-and-paste of Dada — but is distinctive in its explicitly political and anti-capitalist orientation, and in its focus on existing mass media material as both target and raw material.

Today, détournement is everywhere, often without the name: memes, remix culture, supercuts, culture jamming, and video essays all carry its DNA — though usually stripped of the revolutionary intent Debord had in mind.

[see below for the q re AI - is it detournment etc?]

NOW LET US DETOURNE THIS….

This would be one example of digital detournement

So is translation - just feeding this into a digital translator would be a detournement of the original digital text (and arguably every AI prompt is automated mass detournement and plagiarism already)

give me examples of great works or instances of detournement in films music and writing you have seen

Film

Jean-Luc Godard's entire late career is essentially a sustained practice of détournement — Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98) is the masterwork, layering found footage, stills, texts, and music to rewrite the history of cinema and the 20th century simultaneously. Nothing is used as intended; everything bleeds into everything else.

Chris Marker's A Grin Without a Cat (1977) reworks newsreel and documentary footage from global revolutionary movements to construct a melancholy meditation on political hope and failure. The existing images are made to testify against their original framing.

Craig Baldwin's Tribulation 99 (1991) hijacks B-movie sci-fi footage to tell a paranoid, satirical history of CIA intervention in Latin America. The absurdity of the sources amplifies rather than undercuts the political argument.

Music

Public Enemy's production team the Bomb Squad built a whole aesthetic from stolen, compressed, and weaponised samples — familiar sounds made aggressive and disorienting. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988) is détournement as sonic warfare.

Negativland spent decades hijacking corporate jingles, news broadcasts, and pop music to expose the machinery behind media culture — their collision of U2 material with outtakes from Casey Kasem remains one of the most legally punished acts of musical détournement ever made.

The KLF's The Manual literally instructed anyone how to hijack the pop industry's own formulas to get a number one hit — then they burned a million pounds and deleted their entire catalogue.

Writing

Kathy Acker systematically plagiarised and rewrote canonical texts — Great Expectations, Don Quixote, Blood and Guts in High School — inserting herself, pornography, and punk politics into the inherited literary tradition, making it say what it had suppressed.

Stewart Home's Skinhead novels rework pulp fiction conventions with Situationist theory embedded inside them — the genre eating itself from within.

William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin's cut-up technique — literally cutting up newspapers, their own texts, and others', and rearranging them — was conceived as a way of breaking the control of language itself, exposing the hidden messages already running through media.

Advertising and Visual Culture

Adbusters magazine made a practice of subvertising — taking real advertisements and minimally altering them to expose or invert their logic. Joe Camel becomes a skull. A Calvin Klein ad becomes a comment on body image and exploitation.

Barbara Kruger's text-and-image work appropriates the visual language of advertising and magazine culture and turns it into accusation — "Your body is a battleground," laid over imagery that makes the slogan land like a verdict.

The Internet Age

The Yes Men have repeatedly impersonated WTO and corporate spokespeople in press conferences and media appearances, using the borrowed authority of institutional language to make satirical announcements that expose real corporate positions. Several times journalists reported it as genuine news before the hoax was revealed.

Give me a detailed close analysis of an instance of detournement in film

Chris Marker's A Grin Without a Cat (1977) — The Sequence of the Cats [THE CATS?]

The Film and Its Context

A Grin Without a Cat (Le Fond de l'air est rouge — literally "the air itself is red") is a three-hour essay film assembled almost entirely from found footage: newsreel, television broadcasts, documentary material, and footage shot by Marker and his collaborators across two decades of global political upheaval — Vietnam, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Chile, France 1968. Marker did not shoot most of what we see. His intervention is entirely in the selection, sequencing, juxtaposition, and the voice that speaks over the images.

[IN YOUR CASE

The title comes from Lewis Carroll — the Cheshire Cat disappears leaving only its grin, then the grin disappears too. Marker uses this as a figure for the fate of the revolutionary left: first the substance vanishes, then even the smile.

A Specific Instance: The Chilean Footage and Allende's Death

One of the film's most devastating sequences deals with the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile in September 1973. What Marker does here is a precise and brutal act of détournement.

He begins with official and celebratory footage of Allende's election victory in 1970 — crowds, speeches, the visual language of democratic triumph and popular hope. This material was produced to document and celebrate a political moment. It means, in its original context, arrival, possibility, the beginning of something.

Marker then cuts — without sensationalism, almost clinically — to the footage of the coup itself: the bombing of the Palacio de la Moneda, military columns moving through Santiago, the junta's press conferences. Much of this footage was produced by or for the military government, or by international news agencies reporting the coup as a news event — as something that simply happened, a transfer of power, a fait accompli.

By placing these two bodies of footage in direct sequence, Marker forces them into a relationship their producers never intended. The celebratory footage is retrospectively saturated with tragedy — you watch people celebrating something that will be destroyed. The coup footage, framed now as the violent negation of what came before, cannot be received as neutral reportage. The military's own images become evidence against them.

The Role of the Voice

What makes this détournement rather than simply editing is the voice-over — quiet, essayistic, almost conversational — which refuses to tell you what to feel while making absolutely clear what is at stake. Marker doesn't rage. He observes. He asks questions. He draws connections across time and geography that the individual pieces of footage, left alone, could never make.

The voice is itself a kind of détournement of documentary convention. Documentary voice-over traditionally anchors meaning, explains, reassures. Marker's voice unsettles — it opens gaps rather than closing them, draws attention to what the images cannot show, what has been lost, what the camera was not there for.

What the Détournement Produces

The effect is something none of the source materials could produce alone or in their intended contexts:

The election footage cannot, by itself, carry the weight of what came after. The coup footage cannot, by itself, indict itself — it was produced to normalise or celebrate the junta's seizure of power, or to report it as simply one more news event in a world full of them.

Placed together, under Marker's voice, they produce a third thing: a historical argument, a political accusation, and an elegy simultaneously. The images are the same images. What has changed is their relationship to each other, their position in a sequence, and the frame — verbal and temporal — through which we are invited to receive them.

This is détournement at its most precise: not parody, not pastiche, not simple recontextualisation for ironic effect, but the production of a genuinely new critical object from materials that were, in their original lives, working in the opposite direction — naturalising power, celebrating victory, or simply processing atrocity as news.

Why It Matters

What Marker demonstrates is that the images produced by and for power are not owned by power. They can be seized, repositioned, made to contradict themselves. The coup footage that the junta produced to project legitimacy becomes, in A Grin Without a Cat, testimony to what legitimacy was destroyed. The mechanism of that reversal is purely cinematic — sequence, juxtaposition, voice, time — and it requires no special effects, no original shooting, no reconstruction. Only intelligence, political clarity, and an understanding of how images work.

That is what détournement, at its best, does.

NOTES - ON WORD PLAY

• Le fond de l’air est rouge – title of a 1977 essay film. The literal translation is “the back of the air is red,” but idiomatically, it means “the essence of the air is red,” the implication being that the socialist movement didn’t actually exist. The English-subtitled film is called A Grin Without a Cat, a reference to the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland.

AND/BUT:

This is certainly the case in A Grin Without a Cat, originally called Le Fond de l’air est rouge, which means approximately “the depth (or ground, or base, or heart) of the air is red.” The film’s French title evokes the Marxist convictions that surge through Marker’s career, and also the blood that has been spilled for revolutionary causes; the English title, nodding to Lewis Carroll, metaphorically echoes Marker’s contention that when international socialism lost the Soviet Union and the Communist Party as focal points, the forces of reform veered into limited, uncoordinated struggles, becoming like a spearhead without a spear.

Recalling his last conversation with the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, on the eve of Portugal’s leftist uprising in 1974, he writes that revolution “was in the air, and had to be, like the grin of the Cheshire Cat.” Althusser “would always see that grin,” Marker continues. “And he wouldn’t (nor would anyone) ever see the Cat.”

ASK STUDENTS TO TALK ABOUT OTHER THINGS WHERE THEY HAVE SEEN AN EXAMPLE OF (SOME OF) THIS

STRESS THAT THE SOCIAL MEDIA ASPECT IN THE WORKSHOP IS IN TERMS OF WHAT SOURCES STUDENTS MAY USE

ANALYSE DETOURNEMENT IN YOUR FILM

Sources - original footage here is ONLY SOUND/ words/music

Some of the sound is already detourned cos sampled - eg Charli XCX - watch some of Vroom, show the source image clips

Some is AI/ loop which was fed with words but these were dropped in the end - WHY DID YOU DROP THEM?

Ask students to think/guess/answer

Throughout we can do this as a discussion - why did i do x y z ? Guess… why might you? etc

How does digital detournement differ if at all from analogue? How does AI differ from pre AI digital?

Social media as a massive apparatus of detournement

Some media coming out of this condition - DESKTOP CINEMA

Before that TABULAR CINEMA - eg Farocki

Marker?

Hoberman complimented Marker's "genius for poetic aphorism", and concluded, "More impressionistic than analytical, A Grin Without a Cat is a grand immersion. Is it a tract without a thesis?"[3] In Cineaste, David Sterritt described Marker as a "committed Marxist and ... a sophisticated skeptic" while characterizing A Grin Without a Cat as "a film without a dogma". Sterritt wrote: "In sum, A Grin Without a Cat is not a lesson in history but a lesson in how history is dismembered and remembered by every generation in its own faulty way. The film is like a dream gradually coming into focus, or rather, a dream having its last bursts of energy as it gives way to newer but equally skewed patterns of cognition, imagination, and wishful fantasy."[1]

Old examples of comic detournement and breaking 4th wall — Woody Allen

DEFINE SOME GROUND RULES OF THE RESPONSES TO THE VIDEO - TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR TECHNIQUE/ FOR CONTENT/ RE AI / AND QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER RE AI

[USE SOME OF YOUR APPROPRIATION MATERIAL FOR THIS FROM GSMITHS?]

Is AI detournement, and is detournement (even) possible after (and with) AI?

These are exactly the right questions to be asking right now, and they pull in opposite directions.

The Case That AI Is Détournement

On the surface, AI image and video generation looks like détournement's logical endpoint. It is trained on the entire visual and textual output of human culture — absorbing, digesting, and recombining it at a scale no individual artist could approach. Every output is in some sense a reworking of existing material. Nothing is made from scratch. The model has no originary vision, only the capacity to recombine what it has consumed.

There is also a democratic or democratising argument: AI tools put the capacity to rework, remix, and reframe cultural material in the hands of anyone. The technical barriers that once separated a Chris Marker from someone with a political idea and no editing skills are dissolved.

And some artists are genuinely using AI as a détournement tool — feeding corporate imagery, propaganda, or mass media back into models and prompting them to generate mutations, contradictions, distortions of the source. Treating the model itself as a found object to be rerouted.

The Case That AI Is the Opposite of Détournement

But Debord would almost certainly have seen AI as the spectacle's most advanced form yet — not its subversion.

Détournement depends on a specific kind of intentional violence against source material. You take something, you understand what it is doing and why, and you redirect it with political and critical consciousness. The meaning of the act comes from that understanding — from the gap between what the material was and what you have made it become. Marker knows exactly what the junta footage was produced to do. That knowledge is what makes his intervention legible and powerful.

AI has no such understanding. It does not know what an image means, what power produced it, what it was designed to naturalise or conceal. It recombines without comprehension. Its outputs may look like détournement — strange juxtapositions, unexpected combinations — but they are generated by pattern matching across a training set, not by political intelligence working on specific material with specific intent. The resemblance is formal, not substantial.

There is also the question of who owns and operates these tools. The major AI systems are products of some of the most capitalised corporations in human history. They are trained on material scraped without consent, optimised for engagement and commercial utility, and governed by terms of service that ultimately serve their owners' interests. Using them uncritically is not hijacking the spectacle — it is renting the spectacle's most sophisticated production facility and calling the output radical.

The Deeper Problem: Is Détournement Still Possible At All?

This is where the question gets genuinely difficult, and it applies before and beyond AI.

Détournement was theorised in a media environment where the spectacle was relatively legible — there were identifiable images, identifiable sources, identifiable power structures producing them. You could grab a Coca-Cola advertisement and invert it because everyone understood what a Coca-Cola advertisement was and what it was doing.

The contemporary media environment is far more fluid, self-aware, and absorptive. Capitalism has learned to pre-emptively détourne itself — to ironise its own products, to incorporate critique as content, to turn subversion into a brand value. Adbusters becomes an aesthetic. The Yes Men's tactics become a TV format. The meme, which is structurally a form of détournement, is now the primary language of advertising. The spectacle has developed antibodies.

In this environment, the critical gap that détournement depends on — between what something was and what you have made it — is constantly being closed from the other side. The machinery of platform capitalism is extraordinarily good at absorbing, neutralising, and monetising acts of rerouting. Your subversive video becomes content. Content generates engagement. Engagement generates data and revenue for the platform. The détournement has been détourned.

[ie being interrupted by (more or less brutal interruptions) when one is eg trying to think about detournment or watch a film is possibly a more serious form of the destruction of critique?]

What This Means for Practice

None of this means the attempt is worthless — but it does mean the conditions of the practice have changed fundamentally, and that changes what is required of it.

If détournement is still possible, it probably requires: a sharper specificity of target and intent; a more sophisticated understanding of platform logic and how it absorbs critique; a willingness to work outside or against platform distribution rather than through it; and a genuine political intelligence that AI, whatever else it can do, cannot supply.

AI can be a tool within a détournement practice — for generating material to be worked on, for producing elements that are then consciously rerouted, for simulating the visual languages of power in ways that can be turned against them. But it cannot be the author of détournement, because détournement is precisely the exercise of critical consciousness against the given — and critical consciousness is the one thing AI does not have and cannot fake, whatever its outputs look like.

The question Boom, labubu! implicitly poses — and that this workshop is really asking — is whether that critical consciousness can still find forms adequate to the present. That is an open question. But it is the right one to be working on.

========

HYPOTHETICAL FILMS:

PLATFORM-REFLEXIVE RECONTEXTUALISATION

This lecture explores critical video in the age of social media, presenting 2 or 3 recent works and discussing my approach and ideas.

Topics include platform capitalism and popular pedagogy, the cost-of-living crisis and higher education in the UK, and the possibilities for international cooperation in a networked age.

My work constructs speculative fictions using image, music and text to recontextualize and reimagine mainstream media. Zero budget visual and musical responses to present conditions rework available social media in a spirit of critical inquiry and play.

My recent research and video practice has begun to engage with cultural and social relations between people in UK, China and the far east. Challenging dominant ideas that position us as rivals or enemies, I prefer to imagine us as comrades and potential collaborators.

From my music video ‘You make me feel so (1917)’ in 2017 to ‘Boom, labubu!’ in 2025, recent films have told new stories and initiated new dialogues between east and west. Together critical western artists and workers can collaborate across borders and imagine other forms of freedom.

本尼迪克特·司墨的讲座探讨社交媒体时代的影像创作，本次讲座将呈现两至三件其近期作品，并阐述其创作方法与理念。影像内容涵盖了社交媒体平台的资本化与大众教育、英国生活成本危机和当下的高等教育现状主题，以及网络时代国际性合作的各种可能性。司墨运用影像、音乐与文本构建思辨性虚构叙事，重构主流媒体的语境并重新想象其形态。用零预算的视觉表达，并结合音乐创作来探究社会问题与游乐精神，作品本身对当下社会现状作出回应，并重新诠释现有社交媒体素材。

其近期研究与影像实践开始关注英国、中国及远东地区人群间的文化社会关系。司墨的研究挑战将人类定位为对手或敌人的主流观念，更倾向将大众视为同志与潜在的合作伙伴。从2017年音乐视频《你让我感觉如此（1917）》到2025年作品《轰！拉布布！》（You make me feel so (1917)；Boom, labubu! 2025），其近期影片持续探索和书写东西方新型叙事，开启跨文化对话。东西方艺术家与劳动者可以跨越国界协作，共同构想当下创作的多元形态。

HYPOTHETICAL FILMS

First I want to talk about my previous work a little then discuss two

of what I am calling HYPOTHETICAL FILMs :

You Make Me Feel So (1917) and Boom, Labubu!

Hypothetical films I define as pitches for unmakeable movies that remake what has been made

The two examples are from 2018 and 2025, both geopolitical pop videos anticipating the present moment of war in the west and perhaps beyond:

But first some history

(including a key prototype work from 2009 - Olympicfield)

STRUCTURE OF TALK

A history of looting as social context and aesthetic strategy in the context of capitalist crisis and (expanding) looting or ‘non-reproduction’ . Non-repro is imposed as a solution from above on a population below in a short and long term crisis of austerity - from the Thatcher era and immediate aftermath in the 90s - riots - regeneration - the sell off of council and state properties for reproduction of the working class; privatisation and financaialistion) to the present great inflation and cost of living crisis via a period of hope and ‘creative economy’. In UK the cost of living crisis coincides with a crisis of the education sector and the reproduction of a critical working class population

History

THE OCCUPATION (2001)

THE LONDON PARTICULAR (2003)

Crisis in the uk – Thatcher – restructuring of the urban and its population/s.

Regeneration and gentrification: the transfer of wealth from poor to rich – land and capital – real estate property looting as responses to crisis

Displacement - the loss of means of re/production (most visibly of housing and the systems of life) for the working class

A class analysis of theft and looting, and of ‘accumulation by disposession’ or ‘primitive accumulation’ in a specific phase of capitalism

2008 crisis

Olympicfield –

The olympics as large scale land grab, engendering debt issues

OLYMPICFIELD (2009)

Continuing theme of enclosures and capital as alien invasion displacing populations

Begins techniques of found footage or

recontextualisation and recombination (inversion!) aka detournement

Godard situationists etc - modernist and surrealist forms of montage; Brecht and co

2008 crisis

Bang! (2012) - with Matthew Noel-Tod – allegories of riots and regen

species comminism

second class citizens - humans and other animals

DEAD THE END ENDS (2017)

Technique of appropriation, of found footage as a form of looting from below

DTE does recontextualisation and détournement on grand scale using platform-era forms inc the meme and gif as basic units of narrative - scene and thematics -

expanding montage and mise en scene thru superimposition, aggregation or juxtaposition of image and layered or collided chunks of sound & found musical motifs

Music and sound design were always important in my films

Petit mal Antifamily etc -

This becomes central in music video projects in the last ten years

YOU MAKE ME FEEL SO 1917 (2018)

2017/18 - anniversary of russian revolution

revolutionary defeatism

militarism and race/ war

N/S Korea and Trump

binaries

(inc east/west; gender; class etc)

BOOM LABUBU! (2025)

Parasocial-ist (sur)realism

The plot

Labubu - advent of chinese soft power - phenomenal arrival of china on world stage of cultural power

Platform critical - platform reflexive popularism

Social media critiques – of circulation (capital)

looting returning in the form of platform and cloud capitalist monopoly

Sabotage, recontextualisation, allegory – reference back to labour

Again, the question of international solidarity against race/war and militarism

the crisis spreads as far as my work place - HE UK

culture of stans and stars, insta etc - Charli and co

Marx’s inversion of subject and predicate;

labubu as hobgoblin haunting the capitalist spectacle

QUESTIONS AND PROPOSITIONS

Can we model a vision of solidarity thru reinhabiting and recombining these parasocial relations

(ie Dua and Charli and the commitments and contradictions they perform) ?

Rather than a simple first person mode of narrating our own so called individuated lives

maybe through these materialist archetypes (material girl /boy assemblages) we can rehearse and stage or project new class race and gender relations that challenge the rule of the border and the categories of capital

So the pop video recombination becomes a tool of recomposing labour - if only in imagination - and in code before and in between movements of practical contestation and of international solidarity

The video is at once more and more ambitious and more and more modest – dwindling from larger critical ambitions and discursive abstraction and mapping to ‘cheering up’ the global comrades amid intensifying genocide and militarism.

But fairy tale, hypothetical recontextualised fragment or meme like montage of distractions is also a way of mapping the development and (apparent) im/possibilities of collective action through disintegrated spectacle.

Like Singing in the Rain in the 1950s or Demy and Varda and Godard in the ‘60s (nouvelle vague) where the political & social becomes more explicit in a form of consoling morale enhancing mass entertainment in austerity , platform reflexive recombination and dramatization might be a way to find hope and open up unspoken possibilities in the present.

The possibility of refunctioning the network effects and ponzi style dynamics of the labubu as platform capitalist commodity economy is the secret of Boom, labubu! and its inversion of the capital and market sanctioned labubu boom

KEY TERMS

GENTRIFICATION

中产阶级化

Zhōngchǎn jiējí huà

REAL ESTATE

房地产

Fángdìchǎn

LOOTING

抢劫

Qiǎngjié

PROPERTY

财产

Cáichǎn

MONOPOLY AND MONOPSONY

Lǒngduàn hé lǒngduàn

垄断和垄断

TRANSFER OF WEALTH

财富转移

Cáifù zhuǎnyí

TRANSFER OF WEALTH FROM RICH TO POOR

财富从富人向穷人转移

Cáifù cóng fù rén xiàng qióngrén zhuàn yí

ACCUMULATION BY DISPOSSESSION

通过剥夺积累

Tōngguò bōduó jīlěi

REFUNCTION

功能恢复

Gōngnéng huīfù

RECONTEXTUALISE

重新语境化

Chóngxīn yǔ jìng huà

PLATFORM CAPITALISM

平台资本主义

Píngtái zīběn zhǔyì

MONOPOLY

垄断

Lǒngduàn

MONOPSONY

买方垄断

Mǎifāng lǒngduàn

LOOTING FROM BELOW

自下而上的掠夺

Zì xià ér shàng de lüèduó

REAPPROPRIATION

重新拨款

Chóngxīn bōkuǎn

RECONTEXTUlSATION AS REAPPROPRIATION

重新语境化即重新挪用

Chóngxīn yǔ jìng huà jí chóngxīn nuóyòng

COLLABORATION

合作

Hézuò

PARASOCIAL ANTHEM

准社会

Zhǔn shèhuì

SAMIZDAT

地下出版物

Dìxià chūbǎn wù

REBUS

谜语

Míyǔ

YOU MAKE ME FEEL SO 1917

트Generation, aka 트G, was a trans-communist italo-k-pop outfit in the 20-teens. Their commitment to revolutionary defeatism has never been more topical. 'Revolutionary defeatism is a concept made most prominent by Vladimir Lenin in World War I. It is based on the Marxist idea of class struggle. Arguing that the proletariat could not win or gain in a capitalist war, Lenin declared its true enemy is the imperialist leaders who sent their lower classes into battle. Workers would gain more from their own nations' defeats, he argued, if the war could be turned into civil war and then international revolution.' Let's make it real tho, 2022.

K-pop project: 트Generation

[Transgeneration]*

“... let's make it real tho”

Revolutionary defeatism as a pop song to learn and sing.

Starting from the present virtual state of exception (2017-18 -> ?), this music video project considers whether kpop has latent kommunist potential.

Anticipating the revolt of Korean women against still dominant gender/class & race binaries, the video reaches across the demilitarized zone (DMZ) as it follows the psychedelic journey of 2 young lovers on a magic memory foam mattress soaring beyond race, class and gender.

With the help of a cameo from the great Harisu, Korea’s first transgender pop star, the denouement pits trans love against conscripted (terf?) war.

You Make Me Feel So (1917) is a trans-kommunist anti-militarist anthem from the era of Trump 1.0 and BLM. As we segue to proxy and trade wars maybe it’s getting more (un)timely?

동무: Dongmo: Friend/comrade

K-pop = Kommunist pop with 동무- character-istics

동무may be ultimately of Sino-Korean origin, from

동모 同謀, dongmo, “planning together; complotting; collusion”). 동무 (dongmu) was originally a non-ideological, neutral word for "friend" once used all over the Korean Peninsula, but North Koreans later adopted it as the equivalent of the Communist term of address "comrade".

Music, concept, video – B. Seymour.

Research, discussion, translation, vocals – Soohyun Choi

LEARNING FROM LABUBU

A 5 DAY WORKSHOP AT CAA HANGZHOU

This morning we will intro the how we can ‘learn from labubu’ and in the afternoon split into groups to identify materials and techniques with which to respond to the Boom, Labubu!

Students can work with their own fresh material (2-3 mins max) or rework the ‘original’ music video.

Any of the sources we use can be part of a new video in response. I will share a list of all the films discussed and video sources, etc.

https://bseymour.cargo.site/Boom-labubu

https://bseymour.cargo.site/Olympicfield

https://bseymour.cargo.site/Can-Dialectics-Break-Gravity

https://bseymour.cargo.site/Dead-the-Ends

DAY ONE

What is (learning from) the labubu -

accumulation and reorganisation,

subversion, sabotage, hijhacking,

dissemination, entryism

bricolage and detournement

bricolage

拼贴

Pīn tiē

détournement

偏转

Piānzhuǎn

what is détournement (today), in the era of Labubu and AI?

How can we learn from a consumer commodity that is designed to circulate, be consumed, replicate, addict, colonise, activate consumers, etc? My video as an example.

Jetplanes circulate, detournement hijacks and redirects - and as we learn from global trade interruptions today stopping or redirecting this traffic impacts social reproduction (of capital) and so is powerful.

what is détournement? how and why to detourne?

watch some examples of détournement / my videos

guy debord - in girum

chris marker

[chinese trans of] la jetée

DTE

can dialectics break bricks

can dialectics break gravity

[computers are detournement machines - computer generated voice etc; translation etc]

traité sur bave et eternité

irma vep (end) / tv series

key terms -

détournement =

"diversion"

“转移”、

“Zhuǎnyí”

"hijacking"

“劫持”

“jiéchí”

"rerouting"

“改道”

“gǎidào”

refunction / refunctioning

重新功能

Chóngxīn gōngnéng

what is détournement?

to détourn is to divert - hijack - make strange - rework - reroute - recirculate - disrupt - interrupt - break - translate - disrupt - divert - subvert - INVERT

how do you do it? (see detournement a user’s guide )

basic: swapping out elements of the original textual and visual organisation (text, voice, sound, etc) and altering the sequence

captions,
subtitles,
dubbing (voice over)

sound, sound effects,
music: add, subtract, reorganise (working with or against mood and narrative markers already there)

structure

sequence order
detail (mise-en-scene)
superimposition of images (collage and transparencies)

visual and sonic abstraction or materialisation

formless interventions - squiggles and graphic or geometrical incisions,
alteration in the material and tonality of the source; colour, texture, tone (light and dark).
superimposition, overlaying of material, transparencies - (using part of the source; adding material)

watch:

Isidore Isou Traité sur bave et eternité / Treatise on venom and eternity. This acts on several levels during its course: Subversion of genre/feature film content with its first person narrator and subject drifting (‘deriving’) thru the city; direct scoring scratching blotting etc of film; subversive and powerfully anti-naturalistic use of sound

detournement can make strange, redirect the familiar, or deflate the would be strange mysterious exalted

it can take debased reactionary material and redirect it: racist content can be transformed, existing divisions in the material (eg china versus japan) can be altered into class division - Can Dialectics Break Bricks?

all of this can alter the economy of the text/film/meme or clip in question

什么是 détournement？

détournement 的意思是转移、劫持、使陌生、重做、改道、循环、扰乱、中断、打破、转换、扰乱、转移、颠覆、反转。

如何做到呢？（参见“挪用”用户指南）

基本操作：替换原有文本和视觉组织（文本、语音、声音等）的元素并改变顺序

字幕

配音

声音、音效、音乐：添加、删除、重组（与原有的氛围和叙事标记相配合或反配合）

结构

顺序

细节（场景调度）图像叠加（拼贴和透明胶片）

视觉和听觉的抽象或物化

无形干预——曲线和图形或几何切割，改变源素材的材质和色调；色彩、纹理、色调（明暗）、叠加、素材交叠、透明度——（使用部分素材；添加素材）

参见伊西多尔·伊苏的《毒液与永恒论》（Traité sur bave et eternité / Treatise on venom and eternity）。这种手法在其创作过程中从多个层面发挥作用：颠覆类型/故事片的内容，以第一人称叙述者和在城市中漂泊（“衍生”）的主题为特色；直接对电影进行配乐、刮擦、涂抹等处理；颠覆性且强烈的反自然主义声音运用。

挪用可以使事物变得陌生，重新定义熟悉的事物，或削弱原本可能显得陌生、神秘或崇高的事物。

它可以将堕落的反动素材重新塑造：种族主义内容可以被转化，素材中现有的分歧（例如中国与日本）可以被转化为阶级分歧——辩证法能打破砖瓦吗？

所有这些都可以改变相关文本/电影/梗或片段的经济性。

– as example

Displacement in the text again displacement ‘on the ground’

A combo of sources

Cloverfield: source for plot, structure/scenes

一群纽约客正在享受一场告别派对，却浑然不知他们即将面临人生中最恐怖的一夜。一个摩天大楼般大小的怪物降临城市，所到之处皆是死亡和毁灭。朋友们用手持摄像机记录下纽约在他们周围崩塌时挣扎求生的过程。

Olympic Games promotional video 2009

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ICqSfYJ2f8

West Ham 2026!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL7o94EO3L8

Hypothetical films, speculative fictions, pitches or sketches for films that might be made, or that might not be makeable. Trying to say or show what cannot be said or shown.

Describing the technique and composition of Boom labubu I realised it is almost like a series of prompts for an AI video that AI cannot will not make, or which I cannot or will not pay to have made. The video becomes at once a series of potential and also unmade films. The video is a prompt/ pitch/sketch for an AI to render - but which I render it myself. In short it repeats the gesture of Debord’s melancholic and recessive détournement insofar as the film involves not showing or sharing as much as Vienet’s expansive and accessible polemicizing.

A NOTE ON THE STRANGE/DEFAMILIARISATION (displacement?)

the relation between west and east, and of exoticisation or danger in making strange, but also defamiliarisation, making the close far away, showing how odd and strange our everyday is already by estrangement techniques.

capitalist reality or what Mark Fisher called capitalist realism relies on suppressing the strange, naturalising the relations of exploitation and domination, and is part of the east-west traffic in commodities and their social relations

the valuation of the strange and distant is complex or dialectical - at once about what is far away and rare, desirable, different, and what is denigrated, devalued - a cheap or free input to main stream capitalism.

the value relations of the e/stranged are a concern in the labubu video and something the song attempts to show and make less comfortable

- this includes reworking propagdana materials, including the doll itself, which is a kind of advert for china and for its abiltity to ‘normally’ inhabit and expand the terms of global capitalist consumer culture, its ability to play nice - something it might need in the context of increasing US demonisation and making strange and scary of china. a scary monster with a cute smile might tame the fangs of menace the US habitually projects...

we aim to intervene in this concept where the west is trying to polarise relations - very brutally with the tariffs and war - while also acutely aware of its own crisis of value - no longer the top, the hegemon the centre, holding on by means of its skills in propaganda and packaging and its control of the terms of trade - key institutions, politics, military power underneath the shiny surface of creativity and knowledge economy. west may still have something to trade, beyond threats, but it is also anxious and paranoid

this is the situationn for our exchange of détournments and may well include a lot of complete (but what is ever complete?) misunderstanding... to find ways of misunderstanding each other together might be the most utopian part of the project - a good (and more real?) way of learning from labubu’s plastic internationalism that acknowledges the differences a bit more?

DETOURNMENT DEFINITION

AI sez:

Détournement is a technique developed by Guy Debord and the Situationist International in the 1950s and 60s. The word is French — roughly translating as "diversion," "hijacking," or "rerouting" — and the practice involves taking existing cultural materials (films, advertisements, texts, images) and reworking them to produce a meaning that contradicts, subverts, or critically transforms the original.

[ADD DETOURNMENT A USERS GUIDE]

The core idea is that the products of consumer capitalism — its images, its spectacles, its media — can be turned against themselves. Rather than making something from scratch, you seize what already exists and redirect it. A corporate advertisement becomes a critique of consumerism. A pop song becomes a political statement. The familiar is made strange, and in that estrangement, something is revealed about the world the original material was naturalising or concealing.

For Debord, this wasn't just an aesthetic trick — it was a political act. The "spectacle" (his term for the total media environment of consumer capitalism) [TOTALLY WRONG] works by making its version of reality seem natural and inevitable. Détournement disrupts that naturalisation by showing that images and narratives can always be cut up, reordered, and made to mean something else. Nothing is fixed. Everything is constructed.

It connects to related ideas in modernist art and film — Brecht's alienation effects, Eisenstein's montage, the cut-and-paste of Dada — but is distinctive in its explicitly political and anti-capitalist orientation, and in its focus on existing mass media material as both target and raw material.

Today, détournement is everywhere, often without the name: memes, remix culture, supercuts, culture jamming, and video essays all carry its DNA — though usually stripped of the revolutionary intent Debord had in mind.

[see below for the q re AI - is it detournment etc?]

NOW LET US DETOURNE THIS….

This would be one example of digital detournement

So is translation - just feeding this into a digital translator would be a detournement of the original digital text (and arguably every AI prompt is automated mass detournement and plagiarism already)

give me examples of great works or instances of detournement in films music and writing you have seen

Film

Jean-Luc Godard's entire late career is essentially a sustained practice of détournement — Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98) is the masterwork, layering found footage, stills, texts, and music to rewrite the history of cinema and the 20th century simultaneously. Nothing is used as intended; everything bleeds into everything else.

Chris Marker's A Grin Without a Cat (1977) reworks newsreel and documentary footage from global revolutionary movements to construct a melancholy meditation on political hope and failure. The existing images are made to testify against their original framing.

Craig Baldwin's Tribulation 99 (1991) hijacks B-movie sci-fi footage to tell a paranoid, satirical history of CIA intervention in Latin America. The absurdity of the sources amplifies rather than undercuts the political argument.

Music

Public Enemy's production team the Bomb Squad built a whole aesthetic from stolen, compressed, and weaponised samples — familiar sounds made aggressive and disorienting. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988) is détournement as sonic warfare.

Negativland spent decades hijacking corporate jingles, news broadcasts, and pop music to expose the machinery behind media culture — their collision of U2 material with outtakes from Casey Kasem remains one of the most legally punished acts of musical détournement ever made.

The KLF's The Manual literally instructed anyone how to hijack the pop industry's own formulas to get a number one hit — then they burned a million pounds and deleted their entire catalogue.

Writing

Kathy Acker systematically plagiarised and rewrote canonical texts — Great Expectations, Don Quixote, Blood and Guts in High School — inserting herself, pornography, and punk politics into the inherited literary tradition, making it say what it had suppressed.

Stewart Home's Skinhead novels rework pulp fiction conventions with Situationist theory embedded inside them — the genre eating itself from within.

William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin's cut-up technique — literally cutting up newspapers, their own texts, and others', and rearranging them — was conceived as a way of breaking the control of language itself, exposing the hidden messages already running through media.

Advertising and Visual Culture

Adbusters magazine made a practice of subvertising — taking real advertisements and minimally altering them to expose or invert their logic. Joe Camel becomes a skull. A Calvin Klein ad becomes a comment on body image and exploitation.

Barbara Kruger's text-and-image work appropriates the visual language of advertising and magazine culture and turns it into accusation — "Your body is a battleground," laid over imagery that makes the slogan land like a verdict.

The Internet Age

The Yes Men have repeatedly impersonated WTO and corporate spokespeople in press conferences and media appearances, using the borrowed authority of institutional language to make satirical announcements that expose real corporate positions. Several times journalists reported it as genuine news before the hoax was revealed.

Give me a detailed close analysis of an instance of detournement in film

Chris Marker's A Grin Without a Cat (1977) — The Sequence of the Cats [THE CATS?]

The Film and Its Context

A Grin Without a Cat (Le Fond de l'air est rouge — literally "the air itself is red") is a three-hour essay film assembled almost entirely from found footage: newsreel, television broadcasts, documentary material, and footage shot by Marker and his collaborators across two decades of global political upheaval — Vietnam, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Chile, France 1968. Marker did not shoot most of what we see. His intervention is entirely in the selection, sequencing, juxtaposition, and the voice that speaks over the images.

[IN YOUR CASE

The title comes from Lewis Carroll — the Cheshire Cat disappears leaving only its grin, then the grin disappears too. Marker uses this as a figure for the fate of the revolutionary left: first the substance vanishes, then even the smile.

A Specific Instance: The Chilean Footage and Allende's Death

One of the film's most devastating sequences deals with the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile in September 1973. What Marker does here is a precise and brutal act of détournement.

He begins with official and celebratory footage of Allende's election victory in 1970 — crowds, speeches, the visual language of democratic triumph and popular hope. This material was produced to document and celebrate a political moment. It means, in its original context, arrival, possibility, the beginning of something.

Marker then cuts — without sensationalism, almost clinically — to the footage of the coup itself: the bombing of the Palacio de la Moneda, military columns moving through Santiago, the junta's press conferences. Much of this footage was produced by or for the military government, or by international news agencies reporting the coup as a news event — as something that simply happened, a transfer of power, a fait accompli.

By placing these two bodies of footage in direct sequence, Marker forces them into a relationship their producers never intended. The celebratory footage is retrospectively saturated with tragedy — you watch people celebrating something that will be destroyed. The coup footage, framed now as the violent negation of what came before, cannot be received as neutral reportage. The military's own images become evidence against them.

The Role of the Voice

What makes this détournement rather than simply editing is the voice-over — quiet, essayistic, almost conversational — which refuses to tell you what to feel while making absolutely clear what is at stake. Marker doesn't rage. He observes. He asks questions. He draws connections across time and geography that the individual pieces of footage, left alone, could never make.

The voice is itself a kind of détournement of documentary convention. Documentary voice-over traditionally anchors meaning, explains, reassures. Marker's voice unsettles — it opens gaps rather than closing them, draws attention to what the images cannot show, what has been lost, what the camera was not there for.

What the Détournement Produces

The effect is something none of the source materials could produce alone or in their intended contexts:

The election footage cannot, by itself, carry the weight of what came after. The coup footage cannot, by itself, indict itself — it was produced to normalise or celebrate the junta's seizure of power, or to report it as simply one more news event in a world full of them.

Placed together, under Marker's voice, they produce a third thing: a historical argument, a political accusation, and an elegy simultaneously. The images are the same images. What has changed is their relationship to each other, their position in a sequence, and the frame — verbal and temporal — through which we are invited to receive them.

This is détournement at its most precise: not parody, not pastiche, not simple recontextualisation for ironic effect, but the production of a genuinely new critical object from materials that were, in their original lives, working in the opposite direction — naturalising power, celebrating victory, or simply processing atrocity as news.

Why It Matters

What Marker demonstrates is that the images produced by and for power are not owned by power. They can be seized, repositioned, made to contradict themselves. The coup footage that the junta produced to project legitimacy becomes, in A Grin Without a Cat, testimony to what legitimacy was destroyed. The mechanism of that reversal is purely cinematic — sequence, juxtaposition, voice, time — and it requires no special effects, no original shooting, no reconstruction. Only intelligence, political clarity, and an understanding of how images work.

That is what détournement, at its best, does.

NOTES - ON WORD PLAY

• Le fond de l’air est rouge – title of a 1977 essay film. The literal translation is “the back of the air is red,” but idiomatically, it means “the essence of the air is red,” the implication being that the socialist movement didn’t actually exist. The English-subtitled film is called A Grin Without a Cat, a reference to the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland.

AND/BUT:

This is certainly the case in A Grin Without a Cat, originally called Le Fond de l’air est rouge, which means approximately “the depth (or ground, or base, or heart) of the air is red.” The film’s French title evokes the Marxist convictions that surge through Marker’s career, and also the blood that has been spilled for revolutionary causes; the English title, nodding to Lewis Carroll, metaphorically echoes Marker’s contention that when international socialism lost the Soviet Union and the Communist Party as focal points, the forces of reform veered into limited, uncoordinated struggles, becoming like a spearhead without a spear.

Recalling his last conversation with the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, on the eve of Portugal’s leftist uprising in 1974, he writes that revolution “was in the air, and had to be, like the grin of the Cheshire Cat.” Althusser “would always see that grin,” Marker continues. “And he wouldn’t (nor would anyone) ever see the Cat.”

ASK STUDENTS TO TALK ABOUT OTHER THINGS WHERE THEY HAVE SEEN AN EXAMPLE OF (SOME OF) THIS

STRESS THAT THE SOCIAL MEDIA ASPECT IN THE WORKSHOP IS IN TERMS OF WHAT SOURCES STUDENTS MAY USE

ANALYSE DETOURNEMENT IN YOUR FILM

Sources - original footage here is ONLY SOUND/ words/music

Some of the sound is already detourned cos sampled - eg Charli XCX - watch some of Vroom, show the source image clips

Some is AI/ loop which was fed with words but these were dropped in the end - WHY DID YOU DROP THEM?

Ask students to think/guess/answer

Throughout we can do this as a discussion - why did i do x y z ? Guess… why might you? etc

How does digital detournement differ if at all from analogue? How does AI differ from pre AI digital?

Social media as a massive apparatus of detournement

Some media coming out of this condition - DESKTOP CINEMA

Before that TABULAR CINEMA - eg Farocki

Marker?

Hoberman complimented Marker's "genius for poetic aphorism", and concluded, "More impressionistic than analytical, A Grin Without a Cat is a grand immersion. Is it a tract without a thesis?"[3] In Cineaste, David Sterritt described Marker as a "committed Marxist and ... a sophisticated skeptic" while characterizing A Grin Without a Cat as "a film without a dogma". Sterritt wrote: "In sum, A Grin Without a Cat is not a lesson in history but a lesson in how history is dismembered and remembered by every generation in its own faulty way. The film is like a dream gradually coming into focus, or rather, a dream having its last bursts of energy as it gives way to newer but equally skewed patterns of cognition, imagination, and wishful fantasy."[1]

Old examples of comic detournement and breaking 4th wall — Woody Allen

DEFINE SOME GROUND RULES OF THE RESPONSES TO THE VIDEO - TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR TECHNIQUE/ FOR CONTENT/ RE AI / AND QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER RE AI

[USE SOME OF YOUR APPROPRIATION MATERIAL FOR THIS FROM GSMITHS?]

Is AI detournement, and is detournement (even) possible after (and with) AI?

These are exactly the right questions to be asking right now, and they pull in opposite directions.

The Case That AI Is Détournement

On the surface, AI image and video generation looks like détournement's logical endpoint. It is trained on the entire visual and textual output of human culture — absorbing, digesting, and recombining it at a scale no individual artist could approach. Every output is in some sense a reworking of existing material. Nothing is made from scratch. The model has no originary vision, only the capacity to recombine what it has consumed.

There is also a democratic or democratising argument: AI tools put the capacity to rework, remix, and reframe cultural material in the hands of anyone. The technical barriers that once separated a Chris Marker from someone with a political idea and no editing skills are dissolved.

And some artists are genuinely using AI as a détournement tool — feeding corporate imagery, propaganda, or mass media back into models and prompting them to generate mutations, contradictions, distortions of the source. Treating the model itself as a found object to be rerouted.

The Case That AI Is the Opposite of Détournement

But Debord would almost certainly have seen AI as the spectacle's most advanced form yet — not its subversion.

Détournement depends on a specific kind of intentional violence against source material. You take something, you understand what it is doing and why, and you redirect it with political and critical consciousness. The meaning of the act comes from that understanding — from the gap between what the material was and what you have made it become. Marker knows exactly what the junta footage was produced to do. That knowledge is what makes his intervention legible and powerful.

AI has no such understanding. It does not know what an image means, what power produced it, what it was designed to naturalise or conceal. It recombines without comprehension. Its outputs may look like détournement — strange juxtapositions, unexpected combinations — but they are generated by pattern matching across a training set, not by political intelligence working on specific material with specific intent. The resemblance is formal, not substantial.

There is also the question of who owns and operates these tools. The major AI systems are products of some of the most capitalised corporations in human history. They are trained on material scraped without consent, optimised for engagement and commercial utility, and governed by terms of service that ultimately serve their owners' interests. Using them uncritically is not hijacking the spectacle — it is renting the spectacle's most sophisticated production facility and calling the output radical.

The Deeper Problem: Is Détournement Still Possible At All?

This is where the question gets genuinely difficult, and it applies before and beyond AI.

Détournement was theorised in a media environment where the spectacle was relatively legible — there were identifiable images, identifiable sources, identifiable power structures producing them. You could grab a Coca-Cola advertisement and invert it because everyone understood what a Coca-Cola advertisement was and what it was doing.

The contemporary media environment is far more fluid, self-aware, and absorptive. Capitalism has learned to pre-emptively détourne itself — to ironise its own products, to incorporate critique as content, to turn subversion into a brand value. Adbusters becomes an aesthetic. The Yes Men's tactics become a TV format. The meme, which is structurally a form of détournement, is now the primary language of advertising. The spectacle has developed antibodies.

In this environment, the critical gap that détournement depends on — between what something was and what you have made it — is constantly being closed from the other side. The machinery of platform capitalism is extraordinarily good at absorbing, neutralising, and monetising acts of rerouting. Your subversive video becomes content. Content generates engagement. Engagement generates data and revenue for the platform. The détournement has been détourned.

[ie being interrupted by (more or less brutal interruptions) when one is eg trying to think about detournment or watch a film is possibly a more serious form of the destruction of critique?]

What This Means for Practice

None of this means the attempt is worthless — but it does mean the conditions of the practice have changed fundamentally, and that changes what is required of it.

If détournement is still possible, it probably requires: a sharper specificity of target and intent; a more sophisticated understanding of platform logic and how it absorbs critique; a willingness to work outside or against platform distribution rather than through it; and a genuine political intelligence that AI, whatever else it can do, cannot supply.

AI can be a tool within a détournement practice — for generating material to be worked on, for producing elements that are then consciously rerouted, for simulating the visual languages of power in ways that can be turned against them. But it cannot be the author of détournement, because détournement is precisely the exercise of critical consciousness against the given — and critical consciousness is the one thing AI does not have and cannot fake, whatever its outputs look like.

The question Boom, labubu! implicitly poses — and that this workshop is really asking — is whether that critical consciousness can still find forms adequate to the present. That is an open question. But it is the right one to be working on.

========

HYPOTHETICAL FILMS:

PLATFORM-REFLEXIVE RECONTEXTUALISATION

This lecture explores critical video in the age of social media, presenting 2 or 3 recent works and discussing my approach and ideas.

Topics include platform capitalism and popular pedagogy, the cost-of-living crisis and higher education in the UK, and the possibilities for international cooperation in a networked age.

My work constructs speculative fictions using image, music and text to recontextualize and reimagine mainstream media. Zero budget visual and musical responses to present conditions rework available social media in a spirit of critical inquiry and play.

My recent research and video practice has begun to engage with cultural and social relations between people in UK, China and the far east. Challenging dominant ideas that position us as rivals or enemies, I prefer to imagine us as comrades and potential collaborators.

From my music video ‘You make me feel so (1917)’ in 2017 to ‘Boom, labubu!’ in 2025, recent films have told new stories and initiated new dialogues between east and west. Together critical western artists and workers can collaborate across borders and imagine other forms of freedom.

本尼迪克特·司墨的讲座探讨社交媒体时代的影像创作，本次讲座将呈现两至三件其近期作品，并阐述其创作方法与理念。影像内容涵盖了社交媒体平台的资本化与大众教育、英国生活成本危机和当下的高等教育现状主题，以及网络时代国际性合作的各种可能性。司墨运用影像、音乐与文本构建思辨性虚构叙事，重构主流媒体的语境并重新想象其形态。用零预算的视觉表达，并结合音乐创作来探究社会问题与游乐精神，作品本身对当下社会现状作出回应，并重新诠释现有社交媒体素材。

其近期研究与影像实践开始关注英国、中国及远东地区人群间的文化社会关系。司墨的研究挑战将人类定位为对手或敌人的主流观念，更倾向将大众视为同志与潜在的合作伙伴。从2017年音乐视频《你让我感觉如此（1917）》到2025年作品《轰！拉布布！》（You make me feel so (1917)；Boom, labubu! 2025），其近期影片持续探索和书写东西方新型叙事，开启跨文化对话。东西方艺术家与劳动者可以跨越国界协作，共同构想当下创作的多元形态。

HYPOTHETICAL FILMS

First I want to talk about my previous work a little then discuss two

of what I am calling HYPOTHETICAL FILMs :

You Make Me Feel So (1917) and Boom, Labubu!

Hypothetical films I define as pitches for unmakeable movies that remake what has been made

The two examples are from 2018 and 2025, both geopolitical pop videos anticipating the present moment of war in the west and perhaps beyond:

But first some history

(including a key prototype work from 2009 - Olympicfield)

STRUCTURE OF TALK

A history of looting as social context and aesthetic strategy in the context of capitalist crisis and (expanding) looting or ‘non-reproduction’ . Non-repro is imposed as a solution from above on a population below in a short and long term crisis of austerity - from the Thatcher era and immediate aftermath in the 90s - riots - regeneration - the sell off of council and state properties for reproduction of the working class; privatisation and financaialistion) to the present great inflation and cost of living crisis via a period of hope and ‘creative economy’. In UK the cost of living crisis coincides with a crisis of the education sector and the reproduction of a critical working class population

History

THE OCCUPATION (2001)

THE LONDON PARTICULAR (2003)

Crisis in the uk – Thatcher – restructuring of the urban and its population/s.

Regeneration and gentrification: the transfer of wealth from poor to rich – land and capital – real estate property looting as responses to crisis

Displacement - the loss of means of re/production (most visibly of housing and the systems of life) for the working class

A class analysis of theft and looting, and of ‘accumulation by disposession’ or ‘primitive accumulation’ in a specific phase of capitalism

2008 crisis

Olympicfield –

The olympics as large scale land grab, engendering debt issues

OLYMPICFIELD (2009)

Continuing theme of enclosures and capital as alien invasion displacing populations

Begins techniques of found footage or

recontextualisation and recombination (inversion!) aka detournement

Godard situationists etc - modernist and surrealist forms of montage; Brecht and co

2008 crisis

Bang! (2012) - with Matthew Noel-Tod – allegories of riots and regen

species comminism

second class citizens - humans and other animals

DEAD THE END ENDS (2017)

Technique of appropriation, of found footage as a form of looting from below

DTE does recontextualisation and détournement on grand scale using platform-era forms inc the meme and gif as basic units of narrative - scene and thematics -

expanding montage and mise en scene thru superimposition, aggregation or juxtaposition of image and layered or collided chunks of sound & found musical motifs

Music and sound design were always important in my films

Petit mal Antifamily etc -

This becomes central in music video projects in the last ten years

YOU MAKE ME FEEL SO 1917 (2018)

2017/18 - anniversary of russian revolution

revolutionary defeatism

militarism and race/ war

N/S Korea and Trump

binaries

(inc east/west; gender; class etc)

BOOM LABUBU! (2025)

Parasocial-ist (sur)realism

The plot

Labubu - advent of chinese soft power - phenomenal arrival of china on world stage of cultural power

Platform critical - platform reflexive popularism

Social media critiques – of circulation (capital)

looting returning in the form of platform and cloud capitalist monopoly

Sabotage, recontextualisation, allegory – reference back to labour

Again, the question of international solidarity against race/war and militarism

the crisis spreads as far as my work place - HE UK

culture of stans and stars, insta etc - Charli and co

Marx’s inversion of subject and predicate;

labubu as hobgoblin haunting the capitalist spectacle

QUESTIONS AND PROPOSITIONS

Can we model a vision of solidarity thru reinhabiting and recombining these parasocial relations

(ie Dua and Charli and the commitments and contradictions they perform) ?

Rather than a simple first person mode of narrating our own so called individuated lives

maybe through these materialist archetypes (material girl /boy assemblages) we can rehearse and stage or project new class race and gender relations that challenge the rule of the border and the categories of capital

So the pop video recombination becomes a tool of recomposing labour - if only in imagination - and in code before and in between movements of practical contestation and of international solidarity

The video is at once more and more ambitious and more and more modest – dwindling from larger critical ambitions and discursive abstraction and mapping to ‘cheering up’ the global comrades amid intensifying genocide and militarism.

But fairy tale, hypothetical recontextualised fragment or meme like montage of distractions is also a way of mapping the development and (apparent) im/possibilities of collective action through disintegrated spectacle.

Like Singing in the Rain in the 1950s or Demy and Varda and Godard in the ‘60s (nouvelle vague) where the political & social becomes more explicit in a form of consoling morale enhancing mass entertainment in austerity , platform reflexive recombination and dramatization might be a way to find hope and open up unspoken possibilities in the present.

The possibility of refunctioning the network effects and ponzi style dynamics of the labubu as platform capitalist commodity economy is the secret of Boom, labubu! and its inversion of the capital and market sanctioned labubu boom

KEY TERMS

GENTRIFICATION

中产阶级化

Zhōngchǎn jiējí huà

REAL ESTATE

房地产

Fángdìchǎn

LOOTING

抢劫

Qiǎngjié

PROPERTY

财产

Cáichǎn

MONOPOLY AND MONOPSONY

Lǒngduàn hé lǒngduàn

垄断和垄断

TRANSFER OF WEALTH

财富转移

Cáifù zhuǎnyí

TRANSFER OF WEALTH FROM RICH TO POOR

财富从富人向穷人转移

Cáifù cóng fù rén xiàng qióngrén zhuàn yí

ACCUMULATION BY DISPOSSESSION

通过剥夺积累

Tōngguò bōduó jīlěi

REFUNCTION

功能恢复

Gōngnéng huīfù

RECONTEXTUALISE

重新语境化

Chóngxīn yǔ jìng huà

PLATFORM CAPITALISM

平台资本主义

Píngtái zīběn zhǔyì

MONOPOLY

垄断

Lǒngduàn

MONOPSONY

买方垄断

Mǎifāng lǒngduàn

LOOTING FROM BELOW

自下而上的掠夺

Zì xià ér shàng de lüèduó

REAPPROPRIATION

重新拨款

Chóngxīn bōkuǎn

RECONTEXTUlSATION AS REAPPROPRIATION

重新语境化即重新挪用

Chóngxīn yǔ jìng huà jí chóngxīn nuóyòng

COLLABORATION

合作

Hézuò

PARASOCIAL ANTHEM

准社会

Zhǔn shèhuì

SAMIZDAT

地下出版物

Dìxià chūbǎn wù

REBUS

谜语

Míyǔ

YOU MAKE ME FEEL SO 1917

트Generation, aka 트G, was a trans-communist italo-k-pop outfit in the 20-teens. Their commitment to revolutionary defeatism has never been more topical. 'Revolutionary defeatism is a concept made most prominent by Vladimir Lenin in World War I. It is based on the Marxist idea of class struggle. Arguing that the proletariat could not win or gain in a capitalist war, Lenin declared its true enemy is the imperialist leaders who sent their lower classes into battle. Workers would gain more from their own nations' defeats, he argued, if the war could be turned into civil war and then international revolution.' Let's make it real tho, 2022.

K-pop project: 트Generation

[Transgeneration]*

“... let's make it real tho”

Revolutionary defeatism as a pop song to learn and sing.

Starting from the present virtual state of exception (2017-18 -> ?), this music video project considers whether kpop has latent kommunist potential.

Anticipating the revolt of Korean women against still dominant gender/class & race binaries, the video reaches across the demilitarized zone (DMZ) as it follows the psychedelic journey of 2 young lovers on a magic memory foam mattress soaring beyond race, class and gender.

With the help of a cameo from the great Harisu, Korea’s first transgender pop star, the denouement pits trans love against conscripted (terf?) war.

You Make Me Feel So (1917) is a trans-kommunist anti-militarist anthem from the era of Trump 1.0 and BLM. As we segue to proxy and trade wars maybe it’s getting more (un)timely?

동무: Dongmo: Friend/comrade

K-pop = Kommunist pop with 동무- character-istics

동무may be ultimately of Sino-Korean origin, from

동모 同謀, dongmo, “planning together; complotting; collusion”). 동무 (dongmu) was originally a non-ideological, neutral word for "friend" once used all over the Korean Peninsula, but North Koreans later adopted it as the equivalent of the Communist term of address "comrade".

Music, concept, video – B. Seymour.

Research, discussion, translation, vocals – Soohyun Choi