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Media Consumer as Culture-Jamming Producer
DIY media and social agency: 1975-2008.
Today, DIY (Do It Yourself) media can refer to everything for creating your own greeting cards to re-mixing the nightly news and posting it to UTube. One form of DIY media has always been caught up in the work of cultural critique. It has explored ways that turning media consumers into media producers might count as a form of monitorial citizenship and constitute a form of "social action."
Mark Dery, a member of New York University's Journalism faculty, drew the broader public's attention to extreme media practices that are now known as "Culture Jamming." He popularized the term in his 1993 essay:
"Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs."
Dery opens his essay with a description of an infamous act of culture jamming: Ant Farm's destruction of a pyramid of blazing television sets via a flying automobile.
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Here is Dery's description of what lies behind such an act:
"The term 'cultural jamming' was first used by the collage band Negativland to describe billboard alteration and other forms of media sabotage. On Jamcon '84, a mock-serious bandmember observes, 'As awareness of how the media environment we occupy affects and directs our inner life grows, some resist...The skillfully reworked billboard...directs the public viewer to a consideration of the original corporate strategy. The studio for the cultural jammer is the world at large.'
Part artistic terrorists, part vernacular critics, culture jammers, like Eco's' 'communications guerrillas,' introduce noise into the signal as it passes from transmitter to receiver, encouraging idiosyncratic, unintended interpretations. Intruding on the intruders, they invest ads, newscasts, and other media artifacts with subversive meanings; simultaneously, they decrypt them, rendering their seductions impotent. Jammers offer irrefutable evidence that the right has no copyright on war waged with incantations and simulations. And, like Ewen's cultural cryptographers, they refuse the role of passive shoppers, renewing the notion of a public discourse.
Jamming is part of a historical continuum that includes Russian samizdat (underground publishing in defiance of official censorship); the anti-fascist photomontages of John Heartfield; Situationist detournement (defined by Greil Marcus, in Lipstick Traces, as "the theft of aesthetic artifacts from their contexts and their diversion into Lipsticlkcontexts of one's own devise"); the underground journalism of '60s radicals such as Paul Krassner, Jerry Rubin, and Abbie Hoffman; Yippie street theater such as the celebrated attempt to levitate the Pentagon; parody religions such as the Dallas-based Church of the Subgenius; workplace sabotage of the sort documented by Processed World, a magazine for disaffected data entry drones; the ecopolitical monkeywrenching of Earth First!; the random acts of Artaudian cruelty that radical theorist Hakim Bey calls "poetic terrorism" ("weird dancing in all-night computer banking lobbies...bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks"); the insurgent use of the "cut-up" collage technique proposed by William Burroughs in "Electronic Revolution" ("The control of the mass media depends on laying down lines of association...Cut/up techniques could swamp the mass media with total illusion"); and subcultural bricolage (the refunctioning, by societal "outsiders," of symbols associated with the dominant culture, as in the appropriation of corporate attire and Vogue model poses by poor, gay, and largely nonwhite drag queens)."
Read Dery's entire essay here: Empire of the Signs
One of the most persistent and visible efforts of culture jamming today is the ongoing work of Adbusters.
Adbusters Magazine uses graphic design as a tool for jamming commercial advertising culture. Their blackspot label jams designer label consumerism.
link to magazine blackspot philosophy
Kalle Lasn, editor of the Magazine, is also author of Culture Jam: How to Reverse America's Suicidal Consumer Binge--and why we must (New York: Quill, 2000. Lasn has used media design to explore the power of "meta-memes"--media messages designed to function at two levels of logic at the same time--refusing to allow the "dominant" meaning to have its way. In an interview, Lasn describes how his theory of signs and meaning informs his practical approaches to media design:
"Culture Jams and Meme Warfare: Kalle Lasn, Adbusters, and media activism
Tactics in Global Activism for the 21st Century" Link to article