From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Culture jamming is a tactic in which an activist attempts to disrupt or subvert mainstream cultural institutions or corporate advertising. 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 the street parties and protests organised by Reclaim the Streets. 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 sometimes confused with artistic appropriation, which is done for art's sake, and vandalism, in which destruction or defacement is the primary goal. Although the end result is not always easily distinguishable from these activities, the intent behind culture jamming is very different from that of artists and vandals. The lines are not always clear-cut; some activities, notably street art, will fall into two or even all three categories.
[edit] Origins
Coined by the collage band Negativland on its release 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.
One can attempt to trace the roots of culture jamming in medieval carnival, which Mikhail Bakhtin interpretated as a subversion of the social hierarchy (in Rabelais and his World). More recent 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 1960s. 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.
The Canadian magazine Adbusters began to promote aspects of culture jamming after the American author and cultural critic Mark Dery introduced editor Kalle Lasn to the term through a series of articles he wrote for Adbusters. Dery's New York Times article on culture jamming, "The Merry Pranksters And the Art of the Hoax" [1] 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" [2], a seminal essay that remains the most exhaustive historical, sociopolitical, and philosophical theorization of culture jamming to date. Naomi Klein's book "No Logo" focuses on the work of Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada in the chapter on Culture Jamming.
[edit] List of culture jamming organizations or people
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Dery, Mark (1993). Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs. Open Magazine Pamphlet Series: NJ. [1]
- King, Donovan (2004). University of Calgary. Optative Theatre: A Critical Theory for Challenging Oppression and Spectacle. [2]
- Klein, Naomi (2000). No Logo. London: Flamingo.
- Kyoto Journal: Culture Jammer's Guide to Enlightenment. [3]
- Lasn, Kalle (1999) Culture Jam. New York: Eagle Brook.
- Tietchen, T. “Language out of Language: Excavating the Roots of Culture Jamming and Postmodern Activism from William S. Burroughs' Nova Trilogy.” Discourse: Berkeley Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture. 23, Part 3 (2001): 107-130.
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