The afterlife of the ideas of Guy Debord and the Situationist International is quite striking. Economics, politics, and everyday life is still permeated with the sort of spectacle that he described in his classical works, and the concept of "spectacle" has almost become normalized, emerging as part and parcel of both theoretical and popular media discourse. Moreover, Situationist texts are experiencing an interesting afterlife in the proliferation of 'zines and Web sites, some of which embody Situationist practice. The past decade has been marked by a profusion of cultural activism which uses inexpensive new communications technology to proliferate radical social critique and cultural activism. Many of these 'zines pay homage to Debord and the Situationists, as do a profusion of Web sites that contain their texts and diverse commentary. Situationist ideas are thus an important part of contemporary cultural theory and activism, and may continue to inspire cultural and political opposition as the "Society of the Spectacle" enters Cyberspace and new realms of culture and experience.

In this article, we will accordingly update Debord's ideas in forumulating what we see as the emergence of a new stage of the spectacle. We will first delineate Debord's now classic analysis, indicate how it still is relevant for analyzing contemporary society, and then offer Baudrillard's critique that the concept of spectacle has been superseded by a new regime of simulation in the advent of a new postmodern stage of history. We acknowledge the insights and importance of this Baudrillardian analysis, but argue that simulation and spectacle are interconnected in the current forms of society and culture. We then offer an analysis of what we theorize as the new stage of "the interactive spectacle" that provides both new forms of seduction and domination, and new possibilities for resistance and democratization. At stake are formulating categories adequate to representing the transformations of contemporary society and devising a politics adequate to its challenges and novelties.

Paraphrasing Marx's opening to _Capital_, Debord said: "In the modern conditions of production, life announces itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles" (#1). The society of the spectacle is still a commodity society, ultimately rooted in production, but reorganized at a higher and more abstract level. "Spectacle" is a complex term which "unifies and explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena" (#10). In one sense, it refers to a media and consumer society, organized around the consumption of images, commodities, and spectacles, but the concept also refers to the vast institutional and technical apparatus of contemporary capitalism, to all the means and methods power employs, outside of direct force, to relegate subjects passive to societal manipulation and to obscure the nature and effects of capitalism's power and deprivations.

Under this broader definition, the education system and the institutions of representative democracy, as well as the endless inventions of consumer gadgets, sports, media culture, and urban and suburban architecture and design are all integral components of the spectacular society. Schooling, for example, involves sports, fraternity and sorority rituals, bands and parades, and various public assemblies that indoctrinate individuals into dominant ideologies. The standard techniques of education which involve rote learning and mechanical memorization of facts presented by droning teachers, to be regurgitated through multiple choice exams, is very effective for killing creativity and choking the spirit and joy of learning. Currently, the use of video technologies in the classroom can reinforce this passivity and creates a spectacularization and commodification of education, with TV "news" punctuated with ads by corporate sponsors, such as the Whittle Corporation's Channel One which is made available in thousands of schools across the U.S. Of course, contemporary politics is also saturated with spectacles, ranging from daily "photo opportunities," to highly orchestrated special events which dramatize state power, to TV ads and image management for predetermined candidates.

For Debord, the spectacle is a tool of pacification and depoliticization; it is a "permanent opium war" (#44) which stupefies social subjects and distracts them from the most urgent task of real life -- recovering the full range of their human powers through revolutionary change. The concept of the spectacle is integrally connected in Debord's formulation to the concept of separation, for in passively consuming spectacles, one is separated from actively producing one's life. Capitalist society separates workers from the product of their labor, art from life, and spheres of production from consumption, which involve spectators passively observing the products of social life (#25 and #26). The Situationist project in turn involved an overcoming of all forms of separation, in which individuals would directly produce their own life and modes of self-activity and collective practice.

The spectacular society spreads its narcotics mainly through the cultural mechanisms of leisure and consumption, services and entertainment, ruled by the dictates of advertising and a commercialized media culture. This structural shift to a society of the spectacle involves a commodification of previously non-colonized sectors of social life and the extension of bureaucratic control to the realms of leisure, desire, and everyday life. Parallel to the Frankfurt School conception of a "totally administered" or "one dimensional" society (Adorno and Horkheimer 1972; Marcuse 1964), Debord states that "The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life" (#42). Here exploitation is raised to a psychological level; basic physical privation is augmented by "enriched privation" of pseudo-needs; alienation is generalized, made comfortable, and alienated consumption becomes "a duty supplementary to alienated production" (#42).

The shift to a "bureaucratic society of controlled consumption" (Lefebvre 1971 and 1991) organized around the production of spectacles can be seen as the exploitation of use value and needs as a means of advancing profit and gaining ideological control over individuals. Unlike early capitalism, where the structural exigencies lay in the forceful exploitation of labor and nature, and in defining the worker strictly as a producer, the society of the spectacle defines the worker as a consumer and attempts to constitute the worker's desires and needs, first creating then exploiting them. In this sense, Debord claims that use value was resurrected as a referent of production: "In the inverted reality of the spectacle, use value (which was implicitly contained in exchange value) must now be explicitly proclaimed precisely because its factual reality is eroded by the overdeveloped commodity economy and because counterfeit life requires a pseudo-justification" (#48). It is not that exchange value no longer dominates, but that use value is now deployed in an ideological way that exploits the needs of the new consumer self.

The spectacle not only expands the profits and power of the capitalist class, but also helps to resolve a legitimation crisis of capitalism. Rather then vent anger against exploitation and injustice, the working class is distracted and mollified by new cultural productions, social services, and wage increases. In consumer capitalism, the working classes abandon the union hall for the shopping mall and celebrate the system that fuels the desires that it ultimately cannot satisfy. But the advanced abstraction of the spectacle brings in its wake a new stage of deprivation. Marx spoke of the degradation of being into having, where creative praxis is reduced to the mere possession of an object, rather than its imaginative transformation, and where need for the other is reduced to greed of the self. Debord speaks of a further reduction, the transformation of having into appearing, where the material object gives way to its semiotic representation and draws "its immediate prestige and ultimate function" (#17) as image -- in which look, style, and possession function as signs of social prestige. The production of objects simpliciter gives way to "a growing multitude of image-objects" (#15) whose immediate reality is their symbolic function as image. Within this abstract system, it is the appearance of the commodity that is more decisive than its actual "use value" and the symbolic packaging of commodities -- be they cars or presidents -- generates an image industry and new commodity aesthetics (see Haug 1986).

While spectacles like Roman bread and circuses have long distracted the masses and celebrated state power, the society of the spectacle has more immediate origins in 19th century capitalist society organized around commodity spectacles and consumption. As Walter Benjamin argued (1973, discussed in Buck-Morss 1989), the commodity-phantasmagoria of the spectacle began in the Paris Arcades in the 19th century which put on display all the radiant commodities of the day. Department stores soon appeared in Paris and elsewhere which exhibited commodities as a spectacle and soon became coveted temples of consumption. Sears catalogues offered customers entrance to commodity paradise and companies began using images and advertising to market their wares, creating a society where images offered fantasies of happiness, luxury, and transcendence (see Ewen and Ewen 1983).

By the 1920s, advertising had become a major social force and films were celebrating affluence and consumer life-styles, but the depression of the 1930s and World War Two prevented the consumer society from developing. After the war, however, the consumer society took off in the United States as returning soldiers came back with money in pocket to start families and to buy the all the new products offered and promoted on radio and television. Life in the suburbs was centered on consumption and new shopping malls gathered together a diversity of department stores and specialty shops in an environment scientifically designed -- right down to subliminal messages in the Muzak -- to promote consumption. The 1950s was thus era of the rise of the society of consumption in the United States and by the 1960s the U.S. began to appear in France with new "drugstores," shopping malls, and a proliferation of consumer goods and services. It is this era that is thus theorized in Debord's and the Situationist International classic analysis of the society of the spectacle.

It appears in the society of the spectacle that a life of luxury and happiness is open to all, that anyone can buy the sparkling objects on display and consume the spectacles of entertainment and information. But in reality only those with sufficient wealth can fully enjoy the benefits of this society, whose opulence is extracted out of the lives and dreams of the exploited. The poor souls who can't afford to live out their commodity fantasies in full are motivated to work harder and harder, until they are trapped in the squirrel cage of working and spending, spending and working -- and increasingly borrowing money at high interest rates. Indeed, consumer credit card debt has sky-rocketed 47% in recent years, as credit cards are easier to get and interest payment rises; the average debt per household is now over $3,000, up from barely over $1,000 per household in 1985 (_New York Times_, December 28, 1995: C1). [9]

Where the image and realm of appearance determine and overtake reality, life is no longer lived directly and actively. The spectacle involves a form of social relations in which individuals passively consume commodity spectacles and services, without active and creative involvement. The popular MTV animated series _Beavis and Butt-Head_ provides contemporary examples of such passivity, as the two characters sit in front of television watching music videos and are usually only incited to action by something they watch on television. Their entire vocabulary and mapping of the world derives from the media and they describe media bites as "cool" or "sucks" according to whether the images do or do not conform to dominant forms of sex and violence (see Kellner 1995).

Media spectacles are financed by advertisers who in turn pass along costs to the consumers, who are doubly exploited in work and consumption. Consumers pay for the spectacles of entertainment, subsidized by advertising, in the form of higher costs for products. Moreover, the entertainment and information offered is a function of what the culture industries think will sell and that on the whole advances its own interests, producing more desires for its goods and way of life.

The correlative to the Spectacle is thus the Spectator, the passive viewer and consumer of a social system predicated on submission and conformity. In contrast to the stupor of consumption, Debord and the Situationists champion active, creative, and imaginative practice, in which individuals create their own "situations," their own passionate existential events, fully participating in the production of everyday life, their own individuality, and, ultimately, a new society. Thus, to the passivity of the spectator they counterpoise the activity of the radical subject which constructs its own everyday life against the demands of the spectacle (to buy, consume, conform, etc.). The concept of the spectacle therefore involves a distinction between passivity and activity and consumption and production, condemning passive consumption of spectacle as an alienation from human potentiality for creativity and imagination.

The concept also involves distinctions between the artificial and the real, and the abstract and the concrete. Unlike real human needs for creativity and community, commodity needs and spectacles are artificial, with capitalism endlessly multiplying needs for the latest gadget or product line, while creating a fantasy world of imagined self-realization and happiness. In place of concrete events and relations with others, the spectacle substitutes abstract images, commodity fantasies, and relations with technology. The spectacle escalates abstraction to the point where one no longer lives in the world per se -- "inhaling and exhaling all the powers of nature" (Marx) -- but in an abstract image of the world. "Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation" (Debord #1), which Debord describes as the "philosophization of reality": "The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality" (#19). By this he means, spectacle and image constitute an ersatz reality, an ideal world of meanings and values to be consumed by the commodity self. The realization of philosophy, as conceived by Marx, entailed the abolition of "philosophy" -- i.e. of an abstract ideology constituted above and against the concrete conditions of social existence -- and the synthesis of theory and practice. For Marx, revolutionary struggle seeks to realize the ideals of the Enlightenment, creating equality, freedom, individuality, and democracy as the form of social life, thus actualizing Western culture's highest philosophical ideals.

The philosophization of reality, on the other hand, separates thought from action as it idealizes and hypostatizes the world of the spectacle. It converts direct experience into a specular and glittering universe of images and signs, where instead of constituting their own lives, individuals contemplate the glossy surfaces of the commodity world and adopt the psychology of a commodity self that defines itself through consumption and image, look, and style, as derived from the world of the spectacle. Spectators of the spectacle also project themselves into a phantasmagoric fantasy world of stars, celebrities, and stories, in which individuals compensate for unlived lives by identifying with sports heros and events, movie and television celebrities, and the life-styles and scandals of the rich and infamous.

Individuals in the society of spectacle constitute themselves in terms of celebrity image, look, and style. Media celebrities are the icons and role models, the stuff of dreams who the dreamers of the spectacle emulate and adulate. But these are precisely the ideals of a consumer society whose models promote the accumulation of capital by defining personality in terms of image, forcing one into the clutches and cliches of the fashion, cosmetic, and style industries. Mesmerized by the spectacle, subjects move farther from their immediate emotional reality and desires, and closer to the domination of bureaucratically controlled consumption: "the more [one] contemplates the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires ... his own gestures are no longer his but those of another who represents them to him" (Debord #30). The world of the spectacle thus becomes the "real" world of excitement, pleasure, and meaning, whereas everyday life is devalued and insignificant by contrast. Within the abstract society of the spectacle, the image thus becomes the highest form of commodity reification: "The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image" (#34).

Debord emphasizes the super-reification of image-objects as a massive unreality, an inversion of reality and illusion. The spectacle is "the autonomous movement of the non-living" (#2). The actual class divisions of society, for example, are abolished in the spectacle and replaced with signs of unified consumption which address everyone equally as consumers. But, like Feuerbach and Marx, Debord saw not simply the blurring of illusion and reality, but the authentication of illusion as more real than the real itself. "Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is affirmation of appearance and affirmation of all human life, namely social life, as mere appearance" (#10). The universalization of the commodity form is to be seen as the reduction of reality to appearance, its subsumption to the commodity form, its subsequent commodification.

Along these lines, there is a remarkable congruence with Baudrillard's key themes, specifically his notions of simulations, implosion, hyperreality, and the proliferation of signs and images in postmodern culture. But Debord was more a good Hegelian-Marxist than a proto-Baudrillardian. Like Marx, as much as Debord emphasized the commodification of reality, he also emphasized the reality of commodification and the ability of individuals to see through its illusions and fantasies. Despite the pronounced emphasis on the artificiality of the spectacle, Debord refused to abandon the attempt to interpret and change social reality. Debord peered into the shadows of a reified unreality, but drew back to report and critique what he had seen; there is an implosion of opposites, but the separate poles retain their contradictory identity; illusion overtakes reality, but reality can be recuperated for Debord through a critical hermeneutics that sees through appearances, illusions, and fantasies to the realities being masked and covered over. In addition, Debord urged radical practice, the construction of situations, to overcome the passivity of the spectator.

New Stage of the Interactive Spectacle

Thus, we believe that Debord's analysis of the spectacle continues to be relevant, even more so than during the period in which he formulated the term. We also find Debord's epistemology and politics superior to Baudrillard's, but believe that their categories can be articulated, and thus are not antithetical. In this section, we will argue that we are in a new stage of spectacle, which we call "the interactive spectacle," that involves an implosion of subject and object, and the creation of new cultural spaces and forms and new subjects. The stage of the spectacle described by Debord, congruent with Sartre's analysis of the fate of subjectivity in the present age, [10] was that of the consumption of spectacles in which individual subjects were positioned to be compliant and pliant spectators and consumers of mass consumer society and media. In this early stage theorized by Debord and later Baudrillard, the subject sat more or less passively in front of a movie or television screen, or was a slightly less passive spectacular of sporting events or commodity spectacles in stores or malls. In this stage, there was domination of the subject by the object, and categories of passivity, serality, separation, and alienation accurately described the contours of this stage (though the subject was always more active than extreme versions of manipulation theory in the Frankfurt School and Situationist International would indicate, but not as active as later advocates of the "active audience" within British cultural studies and elsewhere would maintain in the 1980s (see the critique of the latter in Kellner 1995 and of the Situationist concepts in Best and Kellner 1997, Chapter Three).

In the stage of spectacle theorized and criticized by the Frankfurt School, Sartre, the Situationist International, early Baudrillard, and others, the media and technology were powerful control mechanisms keeping individuals passive and serialized, watching and consuming, rather than acting and doing. The subject of this new stage of spectacle, by contrast, is more active and new technologies like the computer, multimedia, and virtual reality devices are more interactive. Thus, we would argue that the categories of the transformation of the subject, of implosion of the difference between subject and object, of the creation of new technosubjects and culture is more appropriate to describe this contemporary stage of the spectacle (see our analysis in Best and Kellner, forthcoming). Thus, not manipulation or domination but transformation, mutation, and alteration of the human species itself is at stake in the contemporary moment with the outcome unclear and the future open.

We offer, however, a few speculative thoughts on a condition still unfolding before us. The interaction between subject and object, between individuals and technology, celebrated by some cybertheorists like Turkle and others, exaggerates the interactivity and the break with previous forms of culture. Whereas we are ready to concede a more interactive dimension to the current stage of the spectacle and a more active role for the subject, we see something of a collapse of the distinction between subject and object occuring that has disturbing implications. While we would not go as far as Baudrillard in postulating the triumph of the object in contemporary postmodern culture (see the discussion in Kellner 1989b: 153ff), and believe it is still important to theorize and promote agency, it does appear that there is an eclipse of the subject and growing power of the object in the new cyberspectacles of the present.

For one thing, there is a structuring of the protocols of interaction by computer programs, a monitoring and manipulation of communication and interaction in mainstream media shows, like talk radio and television, or websites and television programs that solicit viewer opinions through fax, telephone, or email. We are thinking here of supposedly interactive mainstream media such as cnn call-in programs or discussion programs that solicit viewers to send in email or fax comments for instant dissemination; msnbc television and websites that contains an interactive component; and websites of media corporations that allow interaction, and discussion. While these are interesting developments in the history of the media, they do not necessarily constitute a democratizing, empowering, or genuinely interactive culture and are continuous in some ways with the media spectacles of the previous stage, although they integrate the consumer and audience in more interesting ways into the spectacle.

In an attempt to further control the benighted couch potatoes of consumer capitalism, for instance, the entertainment industry has invented "interactive TV" -- an oxymoron if there ever was one -- which allows the view to be their own director, to call their own shots, to edit their own videos, or even to project their own image onto the screen (especially enticing with porn videos) to "interact" with the programmed dialogue. Thus, we can now go into the TV, becoming a part of it as it has become a part of us. With every passing day, people become more and more like characters in David Cronenberg's film _Videodrome_, or like the "Television Man" satirized by the Talking Heads:

I'm looking and I'm dreaming for the first time

I'm inside and I'm outside at the same time

And everything is real

Do I like the way I feel? ...

Television made me what I am ...

(I'm a) television man.

Further, Internet technology enables ordinary individuals to make their everyday life a spectacle, with live sex on the Internet (usually for a fee) and even a live birth via Internet on June 16, 1998. Moreover, camcorders, or "Webcams," record and sent live over the Internet the daily lives of new webstars like JenniCam who receives over 60,000 hits a day to watch her go through mundane activities. Or AnaCam can been seen "on her couch (she has no bed), looking bored, eating a pizza, having kinky sex with her boyfriend -- sometimes all at the same time" (_Newsweek_, June 1, 1998: 64). All over the world, individuals are up webcam sites, often charging individuals fees for access (_The Toronto Star_, July 23, 1998: G2). Hence, whereas Truman Burbank, in the summer 1998 hit film _The Truman Show_, discovered to his horror that his life was being televised, many individuals in cyberworld choose to make televisual spectacles of their everyday life.

Virtual reality devices promise to take individuals into an even higher and more powerful realm of spectacle interaction in which one thinks that one really is interacting with the environment projected by the device, be it a war game or pornographic fantasy. So far VR devices have been limited to games like "Dactyl Nightmare," where one dons a "head-mounted display" to fight other characters and avoid destruction by virtual large winged creatures in a Darwinian battle for survival, or one enters a high tech virtual "movie ride," often based on film characters like _RoboCop_. Some of these experiences might constitute a new level of multi-sensorium spectacles, something like the "feelies" envisioned by Huxley in _Brave New World_.

Of course, such "virtual" and "interactive" technology merely seduce the viewer into an even deeper tie to the spectacle and there is no media substitute for getting off one's ass, for interactive citizenship and democracy, for actually living one's life in the real world. Indeed, advocates of the superiority of cyberworlds denigrate the body as mere "meat" and "real life" ("R L") as a boring intrusion into the pleasures of the media and computer worlds of cyberspace. We would avoid, however, both demonizing cyberspace as a fallen realm of alienation and dehumanization as many of its technophobic philosophical critics (i.e. Virilio, Borgmann, Simpson, etc.), just as we would avoid celebrating it as a new realm of emancipation, democracy, and creative activity.

We would distinguish therefore between a genuine interactive spectacle and pseudo-interaction. Using Debord's conception of the construction of situations, we would suggest that a creatively interactive spectacle is one that the individual herself has created, whether it be one's website, computer-mediated space such as chat room, or discussion group. In these self or group-constructed environments, individuals themselves create both form and content, using the site and technology to advance their own interests and projects, to express their own views and to interact in the ways that they themselves decide. In pseudo-spectacle, by contrast, one is limited by the structures and power of the usually corporate forces that themselves construct the spectacle in which one is merely a part. Such pseudo-interactive spectacle would include talk radio or television, in which calls are carefully monitored and the institutions can cut off or censor individuals at will; the use of email or fax material in corporate interactive sites which choose which material they publicize, or websites or Internet discussion forums monitored and controlled by corporations or their delegates.

Of course, such distinctions are ideal types, since each individual is constructed in some way or another by the social environment in which one lives and even in the most controlled and structured interaction there is more participation and involvement than in passively consuming television or film images in the solitude of one's own subjectivity. One is never totally free of social influence, all technological-mediated communication is structured to some extent by computer protocols, codes, and programs, and thus both form and content of the construction of all and any situation is socially mediated.

Consequently, this form of interactive spectacle is highly ambiguous. On one hand, it can be a more creative and active invovlement with media and culture than television or film watching. While the form of technological-mediated interaction is always structured, limited, coded, and predtermined, especially in interaction with big media corporations, new computer technology allows for creation of alternative cultural spaces that can attack and subvert the established culture. In this new cultural space, one can express views previously excluded from mainstream media and so the new cultural forums have many more voices and individuals participating than during the era of Big Mainstream Media in which giant corporations controlled both the form and content of what could be spoken and shown. Cyberdemocracy and technopolitics is too recent a phenomenon to adequately appraise its possibilities, limitations, and effects, but it provides the possibilitity of the sort of subversive politics and the use of the tools of the spectacle against the capitalist spectacle that Debord promoted. Hence, in the Age of the Internet and new technologies, the ideas of the Situationist International continue to be of use in comprehending existing society and culture and challenge us into inventing ways to subvert and transform the capitalist spectacle.

Notes

1. See the discussions in Poster 1975 on the new forms of Marxian theory in post-War France. Many discussions of Debord and Situationism downplay the Marxian and Hegelian roots of their project; for example, Marcus 1989 and Plant 1992 exaggerate the avant-gardist aesthetic roots of the Situationist project and downplay the Marxian elements.

2. Curiously, although Debord's own notion of the construction of situations seems close to Sartre, the Situationists had a dim view of the illuminary who was the dominant intellectual figure of the time. In "Interview with an Imbecile," which takes to task, deservedly, Sartre's 1964 comments on communism in a _Nouvel Observateur_ interview, the Situationists conclude: "The thinker we have been talking about is Sartre; and anyone who still wants to seriously discuss the value (philosophical or political or literary--one can't separate the aspects of this hodgepordge) of such a nullity, so puffed up by the various authorities that are so satisfied with him, immediately himself loses the right to be accepted as an interlocutor by those who refuse to renounce the potential consciousness of our time" (in Knabb 1981: 181). This, we believe, is sour grapes that smacks of the Stalinism that they denounce in Sartre; instead, we believe the kinship between their conceptions of the construction of situations should be perceived.

3. On postmodern art, see Best and Kellner 1997, Chapter 3.

4. Council communism rooted itself in the tradition of Soviets, or workers councils (German: Räte) rather than parties. They opposed the bureaucratization of the Soviet Union and all Marxist-Leninist parties which they thought were hopelessly hierarchical and bureaucratic. In opposition to bureaucratic communism, they championed workers self-activity and self-organization; see the texts of Karl Korsch collected in Kellner 1977 and the discussion in Boggs 1984.

5. Debord's criticism that media communication "is essentially unilateral" (#24) was taken over directly by Baudrillard (1981: 169ff.); Baudrillard's stress on image and semiurgy, the proliferation of signs and images, comes from Debord (#18 and #34); and his notions of "map" and "territory" derive from Debord who wrote: "The spectacle is the map of this new world, a map which covers precisely its territory" (#31).

6. _Wired_, the publication of choice for the digerati who write about information/computer culture and those who consume it, has a monthly feature which under the rubric "Fetish" presents the latest products to satisfy its consumers' technolust. According to _Newsweek_ (January 8, 1996: 54-55), the latest lifestyle fetish is designer paint, such as from Stewart, which costs up to $110 a gallon and comes in hundreds of different shades.

7. See Cliff Gromer, "It's a Wrap." _Popular Mechanics_, June 1998: 112-115.

8. "A 190-foot obelisk, from which lasers flash, is the equivalent of the traditional Las Vegas neon sign (Promoters claim that only two man-made objects can be seen from outer space: The Great Wall of China and Luxor's laser light). The entire Luxor setup is animated and computerized. A light show in front of the hotel focuses on a 60-foot screen of weather. As the sun goes down, the shimmering and luminescent face of King Tut appears in the air, projectd against a screen of raindrops from the fountains in front of the sphinx. Through the translucent face of the pharaoh, you can read a distant sign down the strip 'Prime Rib Buffet.'

Even the great beam and its reach skyward, consuming $1 million worth of electricity annually, suggest wider urban applications. Its designer, Zachary Taylor, foresees using this technology for forming 'a new kind of skyline created by lasers'". Phil Patton, "Now Playing in the Virtual World," _Popular Science_, April 1994: 82.