Walter Benjamin and Branden Joseph on Media as Resistance

Walter Benjamin on film, 1936:

"Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and our furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst the prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling."

Branden Joseph on the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, 2002:

"Yet, in its time the EPI mobilized the conflictual, deterritorialized forces of electronic media toward the explosion of a newly developing postinstitutional prison-world ... amongst the far-flung debris of which some, at least, would find it possible - less calmly, perhaps, but no less adventurously - to go traveling."

Works Cited
Branden Joseph, "My Mind Split Open": Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable," Grey Room 08       (Summer 2002), p. 98.
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations, Ed.                 Hannah Arendt, (New York: Schocken Books, 1968) p. 236.

Photo: Fred W. McDarrah, The Velvet Underground at The Dom, April 1, 1966.