The culture jammers tried to subvert the big brand names. But the smart
advertisers now use guerrilla tactics themselves, according to James Harkin
In a recent newspaper interview, Kalle Lasn was interrogated about
Adbusters, the Canadian anti-advertising magazine that he founded.
"Culture-jamming," a term I have popularized by articles in The New
York Times and Adbusters, might best be defined as media hacking,
information warfare, terror-art, and guerrilla semiotics, all in one.
Billboard bandits, pirate TV and radio broadcasters, media hoaxers, and
other vernacular media wrenchers who intrude on the intruders,
investing ads, newscasts, and other media artifacts with subversive
meanings are all culture- jammers." Mark Dery
Damn the Networks! Victory to the Imagination!
Yogi in Craig Baldwin's "Spectres of the Spectrum"
A Complete Manual of Billboard Subversion and Destruction
"When our work is done, advertising and billboards will fly beside the
soviet flag in the museum of dead totalitarian experiments"
In the beginning was the Ad. The Ad was brought to the consumer by the Advertiser. Desire, self worth, self image, ambition, hope; all find their genesis in the Ad. Through the Ad and the intent of the Advertiser we form our ideas and learn the myths that make us into what we are as a people. That this method of self definition displaced the earlier methods is beyond debate. It is now clear that the Ad holds the most esteemed position in our cosmology.
ReadFriday, October 05, 2001 12:20 PM
subject: Activism After September 11
Dear Friends,
This essay was published today in The Nation. It's
an attempt to discuss what the atrocities of September 11 might mean to
those of us who are publicly critical of corporate power and the
current global economic model. There are no easy answers to this
question so the essay is more of a meditation on symbolism and tone
than a political roadmap.
Take care,
Naomi
Working Papers for The Next 5 Minutes
Conference, Exhibition and TV Program on Tactical Television
Amsterdam, October, 1992
Edited by Amsterdam Cultural Studies
(Jeroen van Bergeijk, Geke van Dijk, Karel Koch, Bas Raijmakers)
The Next Five Minutes is a conference, exhibition and tv program that wants to leave behind the rigid dichotomy between the mainstream, commercial and national tv on one hand and marginal independent tv on the other. Although these differences may still be important, N5M wants to focus on tv-makers crossing the borders of tv-making and going into the spaces that the tv-world still has to offer.
That guerrilla video is now the subject of historical reflection is
probably a sign of its demise. There has been a recent flurry of
archival and publishing activity centering on experiments made in the
'70s. In 1997, the Chicago-based Video Data Bank released Surveying the
First Decade, a compilation of work from the early days of video, and
Oxford University Press published Deirdre Boyle's Subject to Change:
Guerrilla Television Revisited, the definitive study of the video
movements of the late 1960s and '70s. These reflections on the utopian
impulse in early video provide an opportunity to think about the
present state of media in this country, in particular those movements
that have attempted to create electronic space for non-commercial views
that run counter to the mainstream.
The question that I would like to examine with you concerns the role that the new media can play in the fostering of democracy. We can discern roughly two opposite answers to that question. On one side there are those enthusiasts who argue that they provide us with the technology that will finally make it possible to realize the ideal of direct democracy under modern conditions, on the other side those detractors who see them as contributing to a further privatization of politics and as replacing rational debate by the instant expression of private prejucides, turning what ought to be public decisions into private consumer-like choices.
ReadReflections on Public Space, Light and Conflict
There is an unshakable belief in the idea that what defines the mass
media is that they produce or constitute, in all their different ways,
a public. So while there is agreement on the fact that not every public
sphere is a communication medium, many people tend to think that every
communication medium constitutes a public sphere - the most recent and
prominent candidate being, of course, the Internet. But is this claim
as to the public quality of all media, hegemonic as it may be today,
really tenable?
"World War III will be a guerilla information war, with no division between military and civilian participation." -- motto of Tactical Media Crew, borrowed from Marshall McLuhan
ReadConscious of the growing involvement of artists in political protest through their art and the utilisation of conventional and digital media technologies, RealTime's editors approached media theorist McKenzie Wark to comment on where he sees Tactical Media fitting in the bigger picture of power and media.
ReadAt the turning of the year 1992 I received the program and manifesto for the Next 5 Minutes Conference in Paradiso. As professional collector of documents by and about social movements for the International Institute of Social History, the list of videos to be shown caught my attention immediately. This was an excellent opportunity to realize something for which I had been trying already for some time, to make an international sample collection of products from the movement of new independent video makers.
ReadDICTIONARY OF WAR is a collaborative platform for creating 100 concepts
on the issue of war, to be invented, arranged and presented by
scientists, artists, theorists and activists at four public, two-day
events in Frankfurt, Munich, Graz and Berlin. The aim is to create key
concepts that either play a significant role in current discussions of
war, have so far been neglected, or have yet to be created.
One of the biggest promises of the Internet was the transformation of political activism. No longer would change come about solely through the actions of large organizations, claimed the Web's early enthusiasts. Now, they claimed, individuals could rouse the concern of their fellow citizens for a particular cause through Web sites, e-mail, and online petitions. Those who normally shunned demonstrations and limited their participation in the public sphere could be contacted personally in their e-mail box, and all that would be necessary for them to do to show their support would be to click a button or fill in a field. Soon, pundits predicted, there would be a revolution in grassroots participation in the political process.
ReadSynopsis
"...afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the
shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an
Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right
thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if it's
owner fails to control it".
Ah, the oil industry. While most people are resigned to the knowledge
that large petroleum manufacturers are at least partly to blame when it
comes to destroying Third World infrastructures, propping up meritless
dictators, or encouraging blind consumerism in the face of an
environmentally poisoned and diseased future ? the question I often ask
is 'What about the music'?
And while they are fiendishly scarce, the oil industry, like many other
bastions of capitalism, indeed produced a number of privately pressed,
in-house motivational musicals, and several squeaked out on LP (for
employees only, of course). They're known as industrial shows: lavish
stage productions that serve to entertain, educate, and encourage
employees to do their job with gusto.
They wanted the Germs; they got 'em. - Darby Crash
The use of the symbolic abstraction of fear as an exchangeable sign has
always been a helpful means to justify and manifest the most perverse
needs of authority invested in the expansion of militarized orders and
the erasure of individual autonomy. But in the United States after the
9/11 attacks, fear reigns supreme as a fundamental unit of exchange
across the entire political, economic, and military spectrum.
In light of the current FBI/Patriot Act investigations against Critical
Art Ensemble (CAE), it is worthwhile to point out two moments from the
history of the US government?s involvement in biowarfare. The first
concerns the specific issue of access to knowledge, education, and
resources in the life sciences. The second concerns the general
backdrop of US biodefense ideology. All of this information has been
confirmed by several sources, and has been in the public domain for
some time (see the references below).
Needless to say, this is not meant to be a comprehensive ?history? of
biowarfare. Instead, it is a perspective on biowarfare from the vantage
point of US involvement. What is evident is that the US government?s
involvement in biowarfare raises far more substantial questions than
the investigation of dissenting artists.
Precarisation is the norm, temp work, low salaries, unemployment. Barbed wire, uniforms and camps that protect fortress-europe, excluding and persecuting thousands of women, men and children. Police and armies are in the streets, with their cameras and helicopters. Control is everywhere, terrorist laws are used to legitimize repression. The media keeps the lid on the pot that is starting to boil over. At the same time it is doing its best to convince us to keep up consumption. The serpent is eating its own tail. Our brothers and sisters in the south are paying the bill; and we pay too. Animals becoming extinct show the way to the future generations. And at the same time, the banks are throwing our billions out the window...