This is our second annual simultaneous screening of the “Society of the Spectacle” (1973) & the Super Bowl (live). There will be a halftime show with Anna Oxygen performing, and videos from Heather Bursch (”The Singer Not the Song”) and Javier Morales & John Michael Boling (”The Church of the Future”). French fare and American snacks will be available all day.

Heather Bursch’s three-channel video installation, “The Singer Not the Song,” will be exhibited from February 4 until February 25.

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“In big parades and monster rallies, in sports events, and in war, all of which nowadays are captured by camera and sound recording, the masses are brought face to face with themselves.”[1]

Ten of the top twenty television network telecasts of all time are Super Bowls. During any given “average minute” of any given Super Bowl from the past 13 years, more than 80 million Americans (that’s better than one in four) would have been watching.[2] These Nielsen statistics, so important to advertisers, only begin to measure the event’s cultural impact. Over a third of all Americans see some of the Super Bowl; others experience an unusually quiet Sunday evening – with light traffic on the roads and few people to be seen – which is regularly punctuated by the shouts of fans from public bars or private dens; and many more witness the cultural milieu surrounding the event through newspapers, television, advertisements, the internet, office betting pools, and the popular music industry.

The Super Bowl, of course, is more than just a football game. It is the culmination of a series of suspenseful games, where the drama builds over the course of weeks as television commentators and action-packed montages articulate a narrative that personalizes the conflicts, triumphs, and failures of the actors involved (players, coaches, family members, fans, etc.) These parallel, overlapping, and conflicting storylines promise to be brought to conclusion on Super Bowl Sunday in a spectacular show incorporating many forms of entertainment – fireworks, marching bands, musical performances, competing commercials, awards ceremonies – which have little to do with ‘the game’ itself. The production of the event extends beyond both the stadium and television, as the general public itself organizes a multitude of smaller gatherings, complete with ritualized food, drink, and decoration.

Just months after the first Super Bowl was played in 1967, Guy Debord published The Society of the Spectacle. Perhaps nothing better illustrates the society, in which experience has become mediated by images, than the massive Super Bowl show. Appearances abound to such a degree that one would have difficulty locating a center, because there is no center apart from images. Corporate logos compete for position on the televisual field; cameras switch instantaneously; sport, advertisement, politics, and entertainment blend seamlessly into one another, with the crowd constantly playing the supporting role.

While Debord writes of isolation, alienation, and separation, however, the Super Bowl is a kind of massive gathering, and consistently the most massive gathering of this kind. These two realities are not incompatible. More and more frequently, “the masses” are incorporated into the very images we consume, producing the effect of a social body: we laugh with the “laugh track,” we cheer with the fans in the stadium, we witness history with those in the crowd, and we observe pol