Culture jamming
Encyclopedia
Culture jamming, coined in 1984, denotes a tactic used by many anti-consumerist
social movement
s to disrupt or subvert mainstream
cultural institutions, including corporate advertising. Guerrilla semiotics and night discourse are sometimes used synonymously with the term culture jamming.
Culture jamming is often seen as a form of subvertising
. Many culture jams are intended to expose apparently questionable political assumptions behind commercial culture. Common tactics include re-figuring logos, fashion statements, and product images as a means to challenge the idea of "what's cool" along with assumptions about the personal freedoms of consumption.
Culture jamming sometimes entails transforming mass media
to produce ironic or satirical commentary about itself, using the original medium's communication method. Culture jamming is usually employed in opposition to a perceived appropriation of public space, or as a reaction against social conformity
. Prominent examples of culture jamming include the adulteration of billboard advertising by the BLF
and Ron English and the street parties and protests organised by Reclaim the Streets
. While most culture jamming focuses on subverting or critiquing political or advertising messages, some practitioners focus on a more positive, musically inspired form of jamming that brings together artists, scholars and activists to create new forms of cultural production that transcend rather than merely criticize or negate the status quo.
band Negativland
, with the release of their album JamCon '84. The phrase "culture jamming" comes from the idea of radio jamming
: that public frequencies can be pirated and subverted for independent communication, or to disrupt dominant frequencies. In one of the tracks of the album, they declared:
, although the term was coined by Negativland, culture jamming can be traced as far back as the 1950s. One particularly influential group that was active in Europe was the Situationist International and was led by Guy Debord
. Their main argument was based on the idea that in the past humans dealt with life and the consumer market directly. They argued that this spontaneous way of life was slowly deteriorating as a direct result of the new "modern" way of life. Situationists saw everything from television to radio as a threat.
The cultural critic Mark Dery
traces the origins of culture jamming to medieval carnival, which Mikhail Bakhtin
interpreted, in Rabelais and his World, as an officially sanctioned subversion of the social hierarchy. Modern precursors might include: the media-savvy agit-prop of the anti-Nazi photomonteur John Heartfield
, the sociopolitical street theater and staged media events of '60s radicals such as Abbie Hoffman
, the German
concept of Spaßguerilla, and in the Situationist International (SI) of the 1950s and '60s. The SI first compared its own activities to radio jamming
in 1968, when it proposed the use of guerrilla communication
within mass media
to sow confusion within the dominant culture.
Mark Dery
's New York Times article on culture jamming, The Merry Pranksters And the Art of the Hoax was the first mention, in the mainstream media, of the phenomenon; Dery later expanded on this article in his 1993 Open Magazine pamphlet, Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs, a seminal essay that remains the most exhaustive historical, sociopolitical, and philosophical theorization of culture jamming to date. Adbusters
, a Canadian publication espousing an environmentalist critique of consumerism, began promoting aspects of culture jamming after Dery introduced editor Kalle Lasn
to the term through a series of articles he wrote for the magazine. In her critique of consumerism, "No Logo
", the Canadian cultural commentator and political activist Naomi Klein
examines culture jamming in a chapter that cites Dery and focuses on the work of Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada
.
. Activists that utilize this tactic are counting on their meme
to pull on the emotional strings of people and evoke some type of reaction. The reactions that most cultural jammers are hoping to evoke are behavioral change and political action. There are four emotions that activists often want viewers to feel. These emotions – shock, shame, fear, and anger, are believed to be the catalysts for social change.
The basic unit in which a message is transmitted in culture jamming is the meme
. Memes are condensed images that stimulate visual, verbal, musical, or behavioral associations that people can easily imitate and transmit to others. The term meme was first popularized by geneticist Richard Dawkins but later used by cultural critics such as Douglas Rushkoff that claimed memes were a type of media virus. Memes are seen as genes that can jump from outlet to outlet and replicate themselves or mutate upon transmission just like a virus. Culture jammers will often use common memes to such as the McDonald's golden arches or Nike swoosh to engage people and force them to think about their eating habits or fashion sense. In one example, jammer Jonah Perreti used the Nike symbol to stir debate on sweatshop child labor and consumer freedom. Perreti made public exchanges between himself and Nike over a disagreement. Perreti had requested custom Nikes with the word "sweatshop" placed in the Nike symbol. Nike naturally disagreed. Once this story was made public over Perreti's website it spread world wide and sparked conversation and dialogue about Nike's use of sweatshops. Jammers can also organize and participate in mass campaigns. Examples of cultural jamming like Perreti's are more along the lines of tactics that radical consumer social movements would use. These movements push people to question the taken-for-granted assumption that consuming is natural and good and aim to disrupt the naturalization of consumer culture; they also seek to create systems of production and consumption that are more humane and less dominated by global corporate hypercapitalism.
Past mass events and ideas have included "Buy Nothing Day", "Digital Detox Week", virtual sit-ins and protests over the Internet, producing ‘subvertisements’ and placing them in public spaces, and creating and enacting ‘placejamming’ projects
where public spaces are reclaimed and nature is re-introduced into urban
places.
The most effective form of jamming is to use an already widely recognizable meme to transmit the message. Once viewers are forced to take a second look at the mimicked popular meme they are forced out of their comfort zone. Viewers are presented with another way to view the meme and forced to think about the implications presented by the jammer. More often than not, when this is used as a tactic the jammer is going for shock value. For example, to make consumers aware of the negative body image that big name apparel brands are causing, a subvertisement of Calvin Klein's 'Obsession' was created and played world wide. It depicted a young woman with an eating disorder throwing up into a toilet.
Another way that social consumer movements hope to utilize culture jamming effectively is by employing a metameme. A metameme is a two-level message that punctures a specific commercial image, but does so in a way that challenges some larger aspect of the political culture of corporate domination. An example would be the "true cost" campaign set in motion by Adbusters. "True Cost" forced consumers to compare the human labor cost and conditions and environmental drawbacks of products to the sales costs. Another example would be the "Truth" campaigns that frequented television in the past years that exposed the deception tobacco companies used to sell their products.
or with acts of vandalism
which have destruction or defacement as their primary goal. Although the end result is not always easily distinguishable from these activities, the intent of those participating in culture jamming differs from that of people whose intent is either artistic or merely destructive. The lines are not always clear-cut; some activities, notably street art
, will fall into two or even all three categories.
Recently there have been arguments against the validity and effectiveness of culture jamming. Some argue that culture jamming is easily co-opted and commodified by the market, which tends to "defuse" its potential for consumer resistance. Others posit that the culture jamming strategy of rhetorical sabotage, used by Adbusters, is easily incorporated and appropriated by clever advertising agencies, and thus is not a very powerful means of social change. Yet other critics argue that without moving beyond mere critique to offering an alternative cultural, social and/or political economic vision, jams quickly lose their power and resonance.
Anti-consumerism
Anti-consumerism refers to the socio-political movement against the equating of personal happiness with consumption and the purchase of material possessions...
social movement
Social movement
Social movements are a type of group action. They are large informal groupings of individuals or organizations focused on specific political or social issues, in other words, on carrying out, resisting or undoing a social change....
s to disrupt or subvert mainstream
Mainstream
Mainstream is, generally, the common current thought of the majority. However, the mainstream is far from cohesive; rather the concept is often considered a cultural construct....
cultural institutions, including corporate advertising. Guerrilla semiotics and night discourse are sometimes used synonymously with the term culture jamming.
Culture jamming is often seen as a form of subvertising
Subvertising
Subvertising is a portmanteau of subvert and advertising. It refers to the practice of making spoofs or parodies of corporate and political advertisements. Subvertisements may take the form of a new image or an alteration to an existing image or icon, often in a satirical manner...
. Many culture jams are intended to expose apparently questionable political assumptions behind commercial culture. Common tactics include re-figuring logos, fashion statements, and product images as a means to challenge the idea of "what's cool" along with assumptions about the personal freedoms of consumption.
Culture jamming sometimes entails transforming mass media
Mass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
to produce ironic or satirical commentary about itself, using the original medium's communication method. Culture jamming is usually employed in opposition to a perceived appropriation of public space, or as a reaction against social conformity
Conformity
Conformity is the process by which an individual's attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors are influenced by other people.Conformity may also refer to:*Conformity: A Tale, a novel by Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna...
. Prominent examples of culture jamming include the adulteration of billboard advertising by the BLF
Billboard Liberation Front
The Billboard Liberation Front practices culture jamming by altering billboards by changing key words to radically alter the message, often to an anti-corporate message. It started in San Francisco in 1977.-External links:* * * at Bombing science***...
and Ron English and the street parties and protests organised by Reclaim the Streets
Reclaim the Streets
Reclaim The Streets is a collective with a shared ideal of community ownership of public spaces. Participants characterize the collective as a resistance movement opposed to the dominance of corporate forces in globalization, and to the car as the dominant mode of transport.-Protests:Reclaim The...
. While most culture jamming focuses on subverting or critiquing political or advertising messages, some practitioners focus on a more positive, musically inspired form of jamming that brings together artists, scholars and activists to create new forms of cultural production that transcend rather than merely criticize or negate the status quo.
1984 Coinage
The term was coined in 1984 by the sound collageSound collage
In music, montage or sound collage is a technique where sound objects or compositions, including songs, are created from collage, also known as montage, the use of portions of previous recordings or scores...
band Negativland
Negativland
Negativland is an experimental music and sound collage band which originated in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1970s. They took their name from a Neu! song, while their record label is named after another Neu! song...
, with the release of their album JamCon '84. The phrase "culture jamming" comes from the idea of radio jamming
Radio jamming
Radio jamming is the transmission of radio signals that disrupt communications by decreasing the signal to noise ratio. Unintentional jamming occurs when an operator transmits on a busy frequency without first checking whether it is in use, or without being able to hear stations using the frequency...
: that public frequencies can be pirated and subverted for independent communication, or to disrupt dominant frequencies. In one of the tracks of the album, they declared:
Origins and preceding influences
According to Vince CarducciVince Carducci
Vince Carducci is a cultural critic and social researcher. His essays, feature articles and reviews on the arts and culture have appeared in numerous publications since the mid 1980s, including Art and Australia, Art in America, BrandChannel.com, the Journal of Consumer Culture, Logos and Sculpture...
, although the term was coined by Negativland, culture jamming can be traced as far back as the 1950s. One particularly influential group that was active in Europe was the Situationist International and was led by Guy Debord
Guy Debord
Guy Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International . He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.-Early Life:Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931...
. Their main argument was based on the idea that in the past humans dealt with life and the consumer market directly. They argued that this spontaneous way of life was slowly deteriorating as a direct result of the new "modern" way of life. Situationists saw everything from television to radio as a threat.
The cultural critic Mark Dery
Mark Dery
Mark Dery is an American author, lecturer and cultural critic. He writes about "media, the visual landscape, fringe trends, and unpopular culture" From 2001 to 2009, he taught media criticism and literary journalism in the Department of Journalism at New York University...
traces the origins of culture jamming to medieval carnival, which Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language...
interpreted, in Rabelais and his World, as an officially sanctioned subversion of the social hierarchy. Modern precursors might include: the media-savvy agit-prop of the anti-Nazi photomonteur John Heartfield
John Heartfield
John Heartfield is the anglicized name of the German photomontage artist Helmut Herzfeld...
, the sociopolitical street theater and staged media events of '60s radicals such as Abbie Hoffman
Abbie Hoffman
Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman was a political and social activist who co-founded the Youth International Party ....
, the German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
concept of Spaßguerilla, and in the Situationist International (SI) of the 1950s and '60s. The SI first compared its own activities to radio jamming
Radio jamming
Radio jamming is the transmission of radio signals that disrupt communications by decreasing the signal to noise ratio. Unintentional jamming occurs when an operator transmits on a busy frequency without first checking whether it is in use, or without being able to hear stations using the frequency...
in 1968, when it proposed the use of guerrilla communication
Guerrilla communication
Guerrilla communication and communication guerrilla refer to an attempt to provoke subversive effects through interventions in the process of communication....
within mass media
Mass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
to sow confusion within the dominant culture.
Mark Dery
Mark Dery
Mark Dery is an American author, lecturer and cultural critic. He writes about "media, the visual landscape, fringe trends, and unpopular culture" From 2001 to 2009, he taught media criticism and literary journalism in the Department of Journalism at New York University...
's New York Times article on culture jamming, The Merry Pranksters And the Art of the Hoax was the first mention, in the mainstream media, of the phenomenon; Dery later expanded on this article in his 1993 Open Magazine pamphlet, Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs, a seminal essay that remains the most exhaustive historical, sociopolitical, and philosophical theorization of culture jamming to date. Adbusters
AdBusters
The Adbusters Media Foundation is a Canadian-based not-for-profit, anti-consumerist, pro-environment organization founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz in Vancouver, British Columbia...
, a Canadian publication espousing an environmentalist critique of consumerism, began promoting aspects of culture jamming after Dery introduced editor Kalle Lasn
Kalle Lasn
Kalle Lasn is an Estonian Canadian author, magazine editor and activist. Near the end of World War II his family fled Estonia and Lasn spent his childhood in a German refugee camp. He was then resettled in Australia. In the 1960s, he founded a market research company in Tokyo, and in 1970, moved...
to the term through a series of articles he wrote for the magazine. In her critique of consumerism, "No Logo
No Logo
No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies is a book by Canadian author Naomi Klein. First published by Knopf Canada in January 2000, shortly after the 1999 WTO Ministerial Conference protests in Seattle had generated media attention around such issues, it became one of the most influential books...
", the Canadian cultural commentator and political activist Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein is a Canadian author and social activist known for her political analyses and criticism of corporate globalization.-Family:...
examines culture jamming in a chapter that cites Dery and focuses on the work of Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada
Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada
Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada is a Cuban-American contemporary artist. He was born in Cuba and grew up in the United States. He became a founding member of the culture jamming movement in New York City in the early 1990s, first with the group Artfux and later with the group Cicada Corps of Artists...
.
Tactics
Culture jamming is a form of disruption that plays on the emotions of viewers and bystanders. Jammers want to disrupt the unconscious thought process that takes place when most consumers view a popular advertising and bring about a détournementDetournement
A détournement is a technique developed in the 1950s by the Letterist International, and consist in "turning expressions of the capitalist system against itself." Détournement was prominently used to set up subversive political pranks, an influential tactic called situationist prank that was...
. Activists that utilize this tactic are counting on their meme
Meme
A meme is "an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena...
to pull on the emotional strings of people and evoke some type of reaction. The reactions that most cultural jammers are hoping to evoke are behavioral change and political action. There are four emotions that activists often want viewers to feel. These emotions – shock, shame, fear, and anger, are believed to be the catalysts for social change.
The basic unit in which a message is transmitted in culture jamming is the meme
Meme
A meme is "an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena...
. Memes are condensed images that stimulate visual, verbal, musical, or behavioral associations that people can easily imitate and transmit to others. The term meme was first popularized by geneticist Richard Dawkins but later used by cultural critics such as Douglas Rushkoff that claimed memes were a type of media virus. Memes are seen as genes that can jump from outlet to outlet and replicate themselves or mutate upon transmission just like a virus. Culture jammers will often use common memes to such as the McDonald's golden arches or Nike swoosh to engage people and force them to think about their eating habits or fashion sense. In one example, jammer Jonah Perreti used the Nike symbol to stir debate on sweatshop child labor and consumer freedom. Perreti made public exchanges between himself and Nike over a disagreement. Perreti had requested custom Nikes with the word "sweatshop" placed in the Nike symbol. Nike naturally disagreed. Once this story was made public over Perreti's website it spread world wide and sparked conversation and dialogue about Nike's use of sweatshops. Jammers can also organize and participate in mass campaigns. Examples of cultural jamming like Perreti's are more along the lines of tactics that radical consumer social movements would use. These movements push people to question the taken-for-granted assumption that consuming is natural and good and aim to disrupt the naturalization of consumer culture; they also seek to create systems of production and consumption that are more humane and less dominated by global corporate hypercapitalism.
Past mass events and ideas have included "Buy Nothing Day", "Digital Detox Week", virtual sit-ins and protests over the Internet, producing ‘subvertisements’ and placing them in public spaces, and creating and enacting ‘placejamming’ projects
where public spaces are reclaimed and nature is re-introduced into urban
places.
The most effective form of jamming is to use an already widely recognizable meme to transmit the message. Once viewers are forced to take a second look at the mimicked popular meme they are forced out of their comfort zone. Viewers are presented with another way to view the meme and forced to think about the implications presented by the jammer. More often than not, when this is used as a tactic the jammer is going for shock value. For example, to make consumers aware of the negative body image that big name apparel brands are causing, a subvertisement of Calvin Klein's 'Obsession' was created and played world wide. It depicted a young woman with an eating disorder throwing up into a toilet.
Another way that social consumer movements hope to utilize culture jamming effectively is by employing a metameme. A metameme is a two-level message that punctures a specific commercial image, but does so in a way that challenges some larger aspect of the political culture of corporate domination. An example would be the "true cost" campaign set in motion by Adbusters. "True Cost" forced consumers to compare the human labor cost and conditions and environmental drawbacks of products to the sales costs. Another example would be the "Truth" campaigns that frequented television in the past years that exposed the deception tobacco companies used to sell their products.
Criticism
Culture jamming is sometimes confused with artistic appropriationAppropriation (art)
Appropriation is a fundamental aspect in the history of the arts . Appropriation can be understood as "the use of borrowed elements in the creation of a new work."...
or with acts of vandalism
Vandalism
Vandalism is the behaviour attributed originally to the Vandals, by the Romans, in respect of culture: ruthless destruction or spoiling of anything beautiful or venerable...
which have destruction or defacement as their primary goal. Although the end result is not always easily distinguishable from these activities, the intent of those participating in culture jamming differs from that of people whose intent is either artistic or merely destructive. The lines are not always clear-cut; some activities, notably street art
Street art
Street art is any art developed in public spaces — that is, "in the streets" — though the term usually refers to unsanctioned art, as opposed to government sponsored initiatives...
, will fall into two or even all three categories.
Recently there have been arguments against the validity and effectiveness of culture jamming. Some argue that culture jamming is easily co-opted and commodified by the market, which tends to "defuse" its potential for consumer resistance. Others posit that the culture jamming strategy of rhetorical sabotage, used by Adbusters, is easily incorporated and appropriated by clever advertising agencies, and thus is not a very powerful means of social change. Yet other critics argue that without moving beyond mere critique to offering an alternative cultural, social and/or political economic vision, jams quickly lose their power and resonance.
List of culture jamming organizations or people
- 3kStatic3kStatic3kStatic is an electronica music group founded in 1999.The German radical newspaper Die Terz described their 2004 album, Perversion: for Profit, as 'working within the system to defeat the system...'...
- Abbie HoffmanAbbie HoffmanAbbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman was a political and social activist who co-founded the Youth International Party ....
- AboveAbove (artist)ABOVE has been creating public art since 1995. Above is an international street artist who keeps his identity concealed. Above is known for his multi-layer/full color social and political stencils, spinning wooden "arrow mobile" installations, and large mural "word play" paintings. Above started...
- Alan AbelAlan AbelAlan Abel is an American prankster, hoaxter, writer, mockumentary filmmaker, and jazz percussionist famous for several hoaxes that became media circuses.- Education and early career :...
- AdbustersAdBustersThe Adbusters Media Foundation is a Canadian-based not-for-profit, anti-consumerist, pro-environment organization founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz in Vancouver, British Columbia...
- Anomie BelleAnomie BelleAnomie Belle is an American musician and activist. Originally a classical violinist and songwriter from Portland, Anomie began performing and recording her own music as a child. She has since worked as a musician and producer in Madrid, Glasgow, Amsterdam, New York, Buenos Aires, and London...
- Anonymous (group)Anonymous (group)Anonymous is an international hacking group, spread through the Internet, initiating active civil disobedience, while attempting to maintain anonymity. Originating in 2003 on the imageboard 4chan, the term refers to the concept of many online community users simultaneously existing as an anarchic,...
- André the Giant Has a PosseAndré the Giant Has a PosseAndre the Giant Has a Posse is a street art and viral marketing campaign based on a design by Shepard Fairey created in 1989 in Providence, Rhode Island. Distributed by the skater community, the stickers featuring an image of André the Giant began showing up in many cities across the U.S.A...
- Anti-Pearlman Permanent Poster LeagueAnti-Pearlman Permanent Poster LeagueThe Anti-Permanent Pearlman Poster League of the East was an early example of grass-roots political satire performed to generate media coverage...
- BanksyBanksyBanksy is a pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, film director, and painter.His satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine irreverent dark humour with graffiti done in a distinctive stencilling technique...
- Barbie Liberation OrganizationBarbie Liberation OrganizationThe Barbie Liberation Organization or BLO, sponsored by RTMark, are a group of artists and activists involved in culture jamming. They gained notoriety in 1993 by switching the voice boxes on talking G.I. Joes and Barbie dolls...
- Benjamin LayBenjamin LayBenjamin Lay was a Quaker philanthropist and abolitionist.-Life and beliefs:Lay was born in Colchester, England. In 1710, he moved to Barbados as a merchant, but his abolition principles, fueled by his Quaker radicalism, became obnoxious to the people who lived there so he moved to Abington,...
- Billboard Liberation FrontBillboard Liberation FrontThe Billboard Liberation Front practices culture jamming by altering billboards by changing key words to radically alter the message, often to an anti-corporate message. It started in San Francisco in 1977.-External links:* * * at Bombing science***...
- Billionaires for BushBillionaires for BushBillionaires for Bush is a culture jamming political street theater organization that satirically purports to support George W. Bush for those activities which are perceived to benefit corporations and the super-wealthy...
- Billionaires for WealthcareBillionaires for WealthcareBillionaires for Wealthcare are a political Guerrilla theatre and culture jamming group that is satirically opposed to U.S. President Barack Obama's attempts at healthcare reform in the United States...
- BoratBoratBorat Sagdiyev is a satirical fictional character invented and performed by English comedian Sacha Baron Cohen...
- Brass EyeBrass EyeBrass Eye is a UK television series of satirical spoof documentaries. A series of six aired on Channel 4 in 1997, and a further episode in 2001....
- The Bubble ProjectThe Bubble ProjectThe Bubble Project, as proclaimed by its manifesto, aims to counteract corporate marketing and advertisement messages in public spaces.The project was conceived by Ji Lee, an artist and art director who originally printed 15,000 stickers that look like speech bubbles used in comic strips...
- BUGAUP
- Burning ManBurning ManBurning Man is a week-long annual event held in the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada, in the United States. The event starts on the Monday before the American Labor Day holiday, and ends on the holiday itself. It takes its name from the ritual burning of a large wooden effigy on Saturday evening...
- Cacophony SocietyCacophony SocietyThe Cacophony Society is “a randomly gathered network of free spirits united in the pursuit of experiences beyond the pale of mainstream society.” It was started in 1986 by surviving members of the now defunct Suicide Club of San Francisco....
- ChumbawambaChumbawambaChumbawamba is a British musical group who have, over a career spanning nearly three decades, played punk rock, pop-influenced music, world music, and folk music...
- Church of the SubGeniusChurch of the SubGeniusThe Church of the SubGenius is a "parody religion" organization that satirizes religion, conspiracy theories, unidentified flying objects, and popular culture. Originally based in Dallas, Texas, the Church of the SubGenius gained prominence in the 1980s and 1990s and maintains an active presence on...
- CrassCrassCrass are an English punk rock band that was formed in 1977, which promoted anarchism as a political ideology, way of living, and as a resistance movement. Crass popularised the seminal anarcho-punk movement of the punk subculture, and advocated direct action, animal rights, and environmentalism...
- Critical MassCritical MassCritical Mass is a cycling event typically held on the last Friday of every month in over 300 cities around the world. The ride was originally founded in 1992 in San Francisco. The purpose of Critical Mass is not usually formalized beyond the direct action of meeting at a set location and time and...
- CutupCutupCutup is a group of London based artists, whose work mainly revolves around the manipulation of billboard advertisements. Their first works consisted of removing a billboard, painstakingly cutting it up into roughly 4000 small rectangles, each one in essence a pixel, and then reassembling the...
- Dan WilsonMeadow HouseMeadow House is the nom de plume of English musician, instrument builder and composer, Dan Wilson. Meadow House came to prominence after airplay on London's radio station, Resonance FM. His debut album was released on the Alcohol Records record label in 2006. He was the winner of the 2007 ...
- Guy DebordGuy DebordGuy Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International . He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.-Early Life:Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931...
- Emergency Broadcast NetworkEmergency Broadcast NetworkEmergency Broadcast Network is the name of a multimedia performance group formed in 1991 that took its name from the Emergency Broadcast System. The founders were Rhode Island School of Design graduates Joshua Pearson, Gardner Post and Brian Kane . Kane left EBN in 1992...
- Evan Coyne MaloneyEvan Coyne MaloneyEvan Coyne Maloney , is an American documentary filmmaker, the editor of the website Brain Terminal and a video blogger. He graduated from Bucknell University in 1994 with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration....
- The Evolution Control CommitteeThe Evolution Control CommitteeThe Evolution Control Committee is an experimental music band based in Columbus, Ohio. The ECC was founded by Mark Gunderson in Columbus, in 1987. It typically uses uncleared and illegal samples from various sources as a form of protest against copyright law...
- Francis E. DecFrancis E. DecFrancis E. Dec was a U.S. lawyer from Hempstead Village, New York, disbarred for fraud in 1959, and later known for the bizarre socio-political tracts of conspiracy theories he mass-mailed to the media...
- Guerilla Girls
- Graffiti Research LabGraffiti Research LabGraffiti Research Lab, founded by Evan Roth and James Powderly during their fellowships at the Eyebeam OpenLab, is an art group dedicated to outfitting graffiti writers, artists and protesters with open source technologies for urban communication. The members of the group experiment in a lab and in...
- Improv EverywhereImprov EverywhereImprov Everywhere is a comedic performance art group based in New York City, formed in 2001 by Charlie Todd. Its slogan is "We Cause Scenes."The group carries out pranks, which they call "missions", in public places...
- Improv in TorontoImprov TorontoImprov in Toronto is an urban pranking group that resides in Toronto. Formed in 2008, Improv Toronto is a group inspired by New York City's Improv Everywhere, and is a member of the ....
- Infringement FestivalInfringement FestivalThe infringement Festival is an international, interdisciplinary critical arts festival that features theatre, music, film, culture jamming, street performance and visual arts, with an emphasis on activist art and work that challenges the commodification of culture.Conceptualized by theatre...
- Jeff WassmannJeff WassmannJeff Wassmann is an American artist and writer, currently living in Melbourne, Australia. Wassmann's work incorporates assemblage, photography, web-based new media and aspects of culture jamming.- Early life :...
- Jello BiafraJello BiafraJello Biafra is an American musician, spoken word artist and leading figure of the Green Party of the United States. Biafra first gained attention as the lead singer and songwriter for San Francisco punk rock band Dead Kennedys...
- Joey SkaggsJoey SkaggsJoey Skaggs is an American prankster who has organized numerous successful media pranks, hoaxes, and other presentations. He is considered one of the originators of the phenomenon known as culture jamming. Skaggs used Kim Yung Soo, Joe Bones, Joseph Bonuso, Giuseppe Scaggioli, Dr. Joseph Gregor,...
- John LydonJohn LydonJohn Joseph Lydon , also known by the former stage name Johnny Rotten, is a singer-songwriter and television presenter, best known as the lead singer of punk rock band the Sex Pistols from 1975 until 1978, and again for various revivals during the 1990s and 2000s...
- John FeknerJohn FeknerJohn Fekner is an innovative artist who created hundreds of environmental and conceptual outdoor works consisting of stenciled words, symbols, dates and icons spray painted in New York, Sweden, Canada, England and Germany in the 70s and 80s...
- Jorge Rodriguez-GeradaJorge Rodriguez-GeradaJorge Rodriguez-Gerada is a Cuban-American contemporary artist. He was born in Cuba and grew up in the United States. He became a founding member of the culture jamming movement in New York City in the early 1990s, first with the group Artfux and later with the group Cicada Corps of Artists...
- The KLFThe KLFThe KLF were one of the seminal bands of the British acid house movement during the late 1980s and early 1990s....
and the K FoundationK FoundationThe K Foundation was an art foundation set up by Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty in 1993, following their 'retirement' from the music industry. The Foundation served as an artistic outlet for the duo's post-retirement KLF income... - Kalle LasnKalle LasnKalle Lasn is an Estonian Canadian author, magazine editor and activist. Near the end of World War II his family fled Estonia and Lasn spent his childhood in a German refugee camp. He was then resettled in Australia. In the 1960s, he founded a market research company in Tokyo, and in 1970, moved...
- Mark LeVineMark LeVineMark LeVine is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. He is also a musician. He received his B.A. in comparative religion and biblical studies from Hunter College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University's Department of Middle Eastern Studies...
- LowriderLowrider]A lowrider is a style of car originated by Chicano communities that sits lower to the ground than most other cars. Many lowriders have their suspension systems modified so that their ride can change height at the flip of a switch...
- Lumber CartelLumber CartelThe Lumber Cartel was a facetious conspiracy theory popularized on USENET that claimed anti-spammers were secretly paid agents of lumber companies.In November 1997, a participant on news.admin.net-abuse.email posted an essay to the newsgroup...
- Luther Blissett ProjectLuther Blissett (nom de plume)Luther Blissett is a multiple-use name, an "open reputation" informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and activists all over Europe and the Americas since 1994...
- Mark DiceMark DiceMark Dice is an author, pop culture critic, and political activist based in San Diego, California.Dice and his supporters have been reported to "flood the airwaves of call-in radio and television shows," a practice called phone mobbing, to promote these ideas. His first book, a 450-page manifesto...
- M.I.A.M.I.A. (artist)Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam , better known by her stage name M.I.A. , is an English singer-songwriter, rapper, record producer, painter and director of Sri Lankan Tamil descent. Her compositions combine elements of hip hop, electronica, dance, alternative and world music. M.I.A...
- Michael MooreMichael MooreMichael Francis Moore is an American filmmaker, author, social critic and activist. He is the director and producer of Fahrenheit 9/11, which is the highest-grossing documentary of all time. His films Bowling for Columbine and Sicko also place in the top ten highest-grossing documentaries...
- MolleindustriaMolleindustriaMolleindustria is an Italian guerrilla semiotics and culture jamming website that produces flash videogames based on provocative left-wing socio-political points of view, like on topics like labour market flexibility and Queer theory, in explicitly opposition with the mainstream video game industry...
- MonochromMonochrommonochrom is an international art-technology-philosophy group, founded in 1993. Its offices are located at Museumsquartier/Vienna ....
- NegativlandNegativlandNegativland is an experimental music and sound collage band which originated in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1970s. They took their name from a Neu! song, while their record label is named after another Neu! song...
- NewmindspaceNewmindspaceNewmindspace is a New York- and Toronto-based urban arts collective founded in 2005 by Lori Kufner and Kevin Bracken. The pair organizes free, monthly events in cities throughout North America...
- Nikolas SchillerNikolas SchillerNikolas Schiller is an American blogger, a prominent digital map artist in the blogosphere, a vegetarian, and a civil rights activist who lives in Washington, DC...
- Norm MagnussonNorm MagnussonNorm Magnusson is a New York-based artist and political activist.Founder, in 1991, of the art movement funism, he began his career creating allegorical animal paintings with pointed social commentaries...
- NsumiNsumiNsumi or Nsumi Collective, is a contemporary art collective based in New York City.Members of Nsumi claim that the group spawns art collectives and experimental groups through a gift economy consulting project, workshops, art exhibitions and performances, zines, academic research, and public...
- Over the Edge (radio)Over the Edge (radio)Over the Edge is a sound collage radio program hosted and produced in the United States by Don Joyce.Joyce is also a member of the pioneering sound collage band Negativland, members of which frequently make guest appearances on Over the Edge. A series of Over the Edge episodes have been released...
- Poster BoyPoster Boy (street artist)Poster Boy is a New York City based street artist named Henry Matyjewicz whose only utensil is a razor. He is known for satiric collage-like works created by cutting out sections of the self-adhesive advertisement posters in the platforms of New York City subway stations, and pasting them back in...
- Public Image Ltd.Public Image Ltd.Public Image Ltd are an English post-punk band formed by vocalist John Lydon , guitarist Keith Levene and bassist Jah Wobble, with frequent subsequent personnel changes. Lydon is the sole constant member of the band....
- Publixtheatre CaravanPublixtheatre CaravanThe Publixtheatre Caravan is the English name for a travelling project of the Volxtheater Favoriten, a Vienna-based international theatrical troupe that has been creating site-specific theatrical interventions in public space as well as stage-based performances since 1994...
- ®™ark
- Ron English
- Reject False Icons
- RegurgitatorRegurgitatorRegurgitator are an Australian rock band from Brisbane, currently consisting of Quan Yeomans , Ben Ely and Peter Kostic . The band formed in 1994, its original line-up consisting of Yeomans, Ely and drummer Martin Lee...
- Rémi GaillardRémi GaillardRémi Gaillard is a French humourist.Gaillard gained attention in the French media after performing a well-documented series of pranks, including a famous appearance disguised as a Lorient football player in the 2002 Coupe de France final match, during which he took part in the winners'...
- Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop ShoppingReverend Billy and the Church of Stop ShoppingThe Church of Life After Shopping is an activist performance group based in New York City, led by Reverend Billy, the stage name of Bill Talen...
- Sal RandolphSal RandolphSal Randolph is an American artist and theorist who works with issues of gift-giving, money, alternate economies, and social architecture. She founded the non-curated sound-exchange web project Opsound, which functions through the use of music released exclusively under a copyleft license...
- Schwa (art)Schwa (art)Schwa is the underground conceptual artwork of Bill Barker . Barker draws deceptively simple black and white stick figures and oblong alien ships. However the artwork is not about the aliens: it is about how people react to the presence of the aliens and Barker uses them as a metaphor for foreign...
- Shepard FaireyShepard FaireyFrank Shepard Fairey is an American contemporary graphic designer, and illustrator who emerged from the skateboarding scene. He first became known for his "André the Giant Has a Posse" sticker campaign, in which he appropriated images from the comedic supermarket tabloid Weekly World News. His...
- SnogSnogSnog is a band formed by Australian musician David Thrussell, along with fellow art school friends, Tim McGrath and Julia Bourke, in 1989. The band's music is a fusion of many different styles, including industrial, techno, ambient, experimental, funk and even some of the social commentary of...
- Space HijackersSpace HijackersThe Space Hijackers is a group originating in the United Kingdom that defines itself as "an international band of anarchitects who battle to save our streets, towns and cities from the evils of urban planners, architects, multinationals and other hoodlums"...
- Stay Free!Stay Free!Stay Free! is a non-profit magazine about the politics of culture based in Brooklyn, New York. Founded by Carrie McLaren in 1992 while working at Matador Records, it tends to focus on "the perversions of media and consumer culture." Each issue has a theme, such as pranks, copyright, or marketing...
- Stephen ColbertStephen ColbertStephen Tyrone Colbert is an American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor. He is the host of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, a satirical news show in which Colbert portrays a caricatured version of conservative political pundits.Colbert originally studied to be an...
- StreetWarsStreetWarsStreetWars is a three week long water gun "assassination" tournament that travels to cities around the world. Created by Franz Aliquo and Liao Yutai, the tournament is based on the college and high school game Assassin....
- The Yes MenThe Yes MenThe Yes Men are a culture jamming activist duo and network of supporters created by Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos. Through actions of tactical media, The Yes Men primarily aim to raise awareness about what they consider problematic social issues. To date, the duo has produced two films: The Yes Men...
- Yippies
- YomangoYomangoYomango is a shoplifting movement that originated in Barcelona in 2002. It is billed as an anti-consumer lifestyle....
- Whirl-MartWhirl-MartWhirl-Mart is a culture jamming ritual aimed at retail superstores and described by participants as "art and action."An event consists of a group of supposed shoppers who congregate at a large superstore and slowly push empty shopping carts silently through store aisles...
- Zippies
- 0100101110101101.ORG
See also
- Crimethinc
- Merry PrankstersMerry PrankstersThe Merry Pranksters were a group of people who formed around American author Ken Kesey in 1964 and sometimes lived communally at his homes in California and Oregon...
- HappeningHappeningA happening is a performance, event or situation meant to be considered art, usually as performance art. Happenings take place anywhere , are often multi-disciplinary, with a nonlinear narrative and the active participation of the audience...
- The Firesign TheatreThe Firesign TheatreThe Firesign Theatre is an American comedy troupe consisting of Phil Austin, Peter Bergman, David Ossman and Philip Proctor. Their brand of surrealistic humor is best known through their record albums, which acquired a cult following in the late 1960s and early '70s.The troupe began as live radio...
- Anti-consumerismAnti-consumerismAnti-consumerism refers to the socio-political movement against the equating of personal happiness with consumption and the purchase of material possessions...
- ArtivistArtivistArtivist is a portmanteau word combining "art" and "activist". Frank Berganza states..."When one pushes for change, , by utilizing their creative ability to communicate in ways of their artistic activity, that is known as Artivism". Artivism developed in recent years while the anti-globalization...
- Broadcast signal intrusionBroadcast signal intrusionBroadcast signal intrusion is a term given to the act of hijacking broadcast signals of radio and television stations. Hijacking incidents have involved local TV and radio stations as well as cable and national networks.- Method of intrusion :...
- DétournementDetournementA détournement is a technique developed in the 1950s by the Letterist International, and consist in "turning expressions of the capitalist system against itself." Détournement was prominently used to set up subversive political pranks, an influential tactic called situationist prank that was...
- FlashmobFlashMobFlashMob is a band formed in Nashville, Tennessee featuring Meghan Kabir. The band signed a record deal with Warner Brothers in spring 2010....
- Little Red SongbookLittle Red Songbookthumb|180px|right|The Little Red SongbookSince the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the IWW, songs have played a big part in spreading the message of the One Big Union...
- Operation MindfuckOperation MindfuckOperation Mindfuck or OM is an important practice in the Discordian religion. The concept was developed by Kerry Thornley and Robert Anton Wilson in 1968 and given its name by Wilson and Robert Shea in The Illuminatus! Trilogy...
- Scratch videoScratch VideoScratch video was a British video art movement that emerged in the early-mid 1980s. It was characterised by the use of found footage, fast-cutting and multi-layered rhythms...
- Situationist International
- Steal This BookSteal This Book-Advice on dissidence:The book includes advice on such topics as growing cannabis, starting a pirate radio station, living in a commune, stealing food, shoplifting, stealing credit cards, preparing a legal defense, making pipe bombs, and obtaining a free buffalo from the Department of the Interior...
- SubvertisingSubvertisingSubvertising is a portmanteau of subvert and advertising. It refers to the practice of making spoofs or parodies of corporate and political advertisements. Subvertisements may take the form of a new image or an alteration to an existing image or icon, often in a satirical manner...