Strider     Magazine
 

No 3

 

Bridging the gap 

 
December 2001 

Need a vacation

CULTURE JAMMING

ANYONE can graffiti on a wall, but Culture Jamming is an ART-FORM.

by Joel Bounds

 
In the twenty first century the battle against Corporate and government authority worldwide is being taken up by activists, artists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and the unemployed who are reviving the art of culture jamming to change the flow of information within current media forms.

Culture Jamming is the manipulation and sabotage of advertising and other media forms as a statement of civil protest. In the 1980's a collage band from England known as Negativeland were one of the first groups to use the term “Culture Jamming” on the Negativeland track titled Jamcon’84 in which a band member states.

“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 culture jammer is the world at large”

During this period they also launched several on media hoaxes, the most publicised of which resulted in Negativeland and their label being sued by Irish rock group U2.

Negativeland released an album called U2, featuring an image of the U.S.U2 spy plane on the cover causing confusion  to consumers and record retailers as Negativeland released their U2 album just prior to a release of the Irish group’s album.

In the 90's and 2000 the Internet has became an important tool of  culture jamming. Jammer and computer programmer Joe Matheny  famously spammed the White House website with a bunch of e-mail frogs.   Also Adem Blisset one of the designers of the now infamous S11.org web-site redirected all Internet users from the Nike website to the Melbourne's S11 website during the S11 protects. The S11 website jumped from 57 hits an hour to 66,000 an hour http://.www.S11.org received around 900,000 hits in the 19 hour long prank.  

Along side ‘cyber culture jamming’ is ‘street culture jamming’ with Australia's BUGA UP (Billboard-Utilizing Graffitists Against Unhealthy Products) staging hit and run protests, scrawling graffiti on cigarette and alcohol advertising campaigns.

Culture Jamming today has taken on many different forms and writers such as Naomi Klein (author of the best selling "No Logo") and Kalle Lasn (author of Culture jam: The un-cooling of America and the founder of Ad busters) have both featured culture jamming in their books.

Now with events surrounding the September 11th   attack on the world trade center culture jammer's have focused on a NO WAR campaign trying to convince the U.S and it’s allies that attacks on Afghanistan are not the right solution. But only time will tell if culture jammer's are able to change the mindsets of the public and the government that represent them.