the free space of the commodity

"In the free space of the commodity, I digitally took apart moving image sequences and re-animated them into an encoded montage to create a metaphor of experience where the viewer feels like a fiber optic cable has been hard-wired into their consciousness—a look where the image is simultaneously visible and invisible. My hope was to create a work that re-presented information as a kind of subliminal narrative that critiqued the currently popular technotopian rhetoric."

—Les LeVeque

"The free space of the commodity presents a story of consumption and exclusion as information overload in the organism of advanced consumer capitalism. Against a backdrop of a day of Headline News (compressed into 60 seconds), the narrative is visually fragmented—an encoded montage portraying the bourgeois protagonist's consumption habits while he speaks, in Morse Code, about his predicament. Meanwhile, the invisible, and virtually inauidible, antagonist is denied access, removed from the freeway and arrested."

—Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Michigan: Black and Red Books, 1977)

This title is also available on Les LeVeque Videoworks: Volume 1.