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...

Published on 25 January 2011 at 09:39 by TOBIAS

Culture Jamming, Digital Added Value and the Metaphysical Vacuum


The various options to gain influence on the mediated humans in virtual reality and computer games are good opportunities for the trend scouts of the entertainment industry: They are already waiting inside the Virtual Reality to meet their potential customers online. So called In-Game-Advertisement for Diet Coke and other brands and 'real' money transactions on eBay to buy virtual sneakers to wear in 'Second Life' are already a fact.

 

This is the old dream of capitalism coming true: The product has not to be manufactured, its pure image is requested by the hyper-consumers. So the code itself has begun to create added value. And that is exactly what the battlefield of the 21st century should be about: Let's Clash The Codes!


This postulation could also derive from the well known Italian author Umberto Eco, who wrote the essay 'Semiotic Guerilla Warfare' in the Seventies and described a 'semiotic guerilla' which is 'prowling from house to house and develops a critical interpretation of media content'. This would mean that the audience could be teached to understand media propaganda and to read the advertisement messages in their way. But is this really that simple?

 

Advertisement in public space can be simplified as an excitement of carnal desire, which the western philosophers like Platon, Fourier or Huxley claimed as the source of distress, hate and calamity. Their solution was to organise an instantaneous satisfaction in human societies. In our erotic overcharged advertisement culture this carnal desire is encouraged in an outrageous way, but the satisfaction shall be solved in privacy.

 

The vienna based author and cognition scientist Thomas Raab even goes a step further, by describing the overwhelming effects of the Debordian spectacle as an evolutionary deficit: 'Esthetic experiences for nearly everyone' are, according to Raab, 'the last chance for secular countries to add profit to the metaphysical vacuum which resulted in the raised knowledge of natural science in the human society.' So the integrated spectacle (of mass media and event culture) would be a twisted version of the mammalian game of protecting itself from hypothetical hazard by simulating affects in a safe environment.

 

The human evolutionary deficit is, in conformity with Raab, used to raise profits in a way that neither the consumer nor the producer can control, even if they are aware of those mechanisms. Culture Jamming is a resistance to that status quo.

Profile

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.

Culture Jamming

Contact