“Alice in Wonderland or Who is Guy Debord? presents the Disney favourite as you have never heard it before: entertaining, amusing and utterly subversive.“ –Mark Webber, British Film Institute
-IFP New York’s “Pick of the Week” / New York premiere at Art in General, February 4, 2005
Alice in Wonderland or Who is Guy Debord?
Digital Video/ 2003/ 23:20
Synopsis:
Alice, unhappy with her prim, proper existence in Victorian England, travels through time into an age that allegorically resembles our own. There, she encounters elitist tea-partiers, rapping flowers, and a philosopher cat, before she is consumed by an assaulting music video. Her only hope for understanding this foreign world of spectacle is to somehow find Guy Debord.
Project Context:
Alice in Wonderland, or Who Is Guy Debord? was created as part of the Electrodist project, a collective endeavor which has the aim of introducing critical elements into the mainstream marketplace through the alteration of consumer media products. Utilizing DVD decryption freeware and common DVD authoring programs, the video is placed as a special feature within the existing and publicly accessible Disney Alice in Wonderland DVDs, and then redistributed by Electrodist into various video rental systems for consumer access. All original material and menu access structures are kept intact in the modified discs, so the addition of Alice in Wonderland or Who is Guy Debord? has a parasitic relationship to the DVD product. This parasitic approach to product replacement, anticipates a moment in an adult consumer’s viewing experience when Alice in Wonderland or Who is Guy Debord? renders the meaning of the whole product ambiguous. Within the confusion as to the legitimacy of the détourned video, there exists a critical distance that is necessarily applied to the whole DVD. The video, within this context, is an attempt to provoke adult consumers, within the safe space of their own living rooms, into thinking critically about the object of their consumption, its creators, and its viewing context.
Watch this video as a Quicktime Movie
(Quicktime 7 required)
