Published on 18 May 2011 at 12:07 by Mia Turouse

The documentary provides a two year research in european Culture Jamming. From the roots in the beginning of the 20th century: Marcel Duchamp or the french avantgarde group Situationist International to postmodern info-war. Modern Culture Jamming is distributing viral information like fake media campaigns to jam the mass media.

 

For instance he website 'voteauction.com' by the media actionist Hans Bernhard which faked a trading platform for american votes. The claim 'Bringing Capitalism And Democracy Closer Together' was set up to provoke heavy reactions. The website was shut down by Domainbank Inc. FBI and CIA started researching and CNN produced an issue of 'Burden Of Proof - Democracy Is On The Block'. His project 'Google Will Eat Itself' is classical internet art, which short-linked the virtual money transactions of Google. The aim of GWEI is to buy Google from Google's money and distribute it to the internet community...

 

A big media hoax by italian artists 01.org was staged in Vienna at Karlsplatz. In the name of Nike they occupied the Karlsplatz and stated to rename it in Nikeplatz and to built a giant 'Swoosh'-monument. The citizens of vienna were angry and outraged. Nike started a legal battle about 78.000 Euro.

 

'Political Videogames' are programmed by Paolo Pedercini of molleindustria.it. Molleindustria's games are about gender, modern labour market, precarious working conditions and industrial production. The games 'Tuboflex' and 'Mc Donald's Videogame' are postmodern educational games with a clear message. Molleindustria want to start a serious discussion about the political implications of videogames.

 

Culture Jamming is the dawn of a new era of activism, media-hacking and info war...

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Culture Jamming

David Schwertgen

The term Culture Jamming has been coined by the US-American avantgarde-band Negativland. To jam - which describes techniques to limit the effectiveness of an opponent's communication or detection equipment in a military context - was to Negativland to take existing communication codes and reload them with new meaning. However, this cultural technique is not new, the first known example is Marcel Duchamps 'Mona Lisa', the picture of the Gioconda on which Duchamp has painted a moustache and wrote 'Elle a chaud au cul - She has a hot ass' on the lower side of the picture. Culture Jamming is a natural instinct of people to take objects and put them together to make something different out of them: To mix symbols of everyday life and make some creative work out of it, to recharge them with new meanings and to re-appropriate them. It's somehow like the collages of the historical Dada movement, but using contemporary materials from different directions: Not only visual material, but radiowaves, sounds and stories. The basic idea is: Objects are there and you should be able to use them without asking for permission, because they are Public Domain: Symbols, Ideas, Music, Slogans, Logos etc.

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