Culture Jammers

Coined by the sound collage band Negativland on their album Jamcon ′84, the term culture jamming derives from the Citizens' Band (CB) radio slang for illegally interrupting radio broadcasts with noises and electronic disturbances. Culture jammers similarly introduce or unveil such “noise”in capitalist culture itself. Culture jammers could be individual artists, activists, loosely-knit organizations, and even registered corporations unified in their utilization of consumer culture's discourse to illustrate its concomitant ideological failures and distortions. With works ranging from the mildly parodic to the overtly revolutionary, culture jammers appropriate existing hegemonic practices, languages, and aesthetics in order to interrupt the flow of mass media culture and introduce an assessment from within the very discourse that is being critiqued. Umberto Eco famously defines culture jammers as activists engaged in semiological guerrilla warfare, which is engendered through the multifarious techniques of adbusting or subvertising, hacktivism, e-mail forwards, audio mixes, billboard liberations, performance art, media hoaxes, parody religions, activist “monkeywrenching,”and even urban gardening.

These media activists can trace their roots back to the American Great Depression and the New York–based magazine The Ballyhoo, which analyzed the language of advertisements and actively encouraged its readers to “Become a Toucher Upper”and join in [Page 415]critiquing advertisements' false promises by artistically intervening in the ads themselves. However, it was the antics of the Situationist International movement of the late 1950s and 1960s and Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle that gave a theoretical impetus to the practice of culture jamming in the notion of détournement. Imagined as a way in which to intervene in the spectacle of consumer culture and the mass media, détournement is a “turnabout”or diversion of the language and practices of the original media into a critique of itself. Kalle Lasn, the founder of Adbusters Media Foundation, the self-proclaimed home of culture jamming, argues that détournement allows for a “jolt”or perceptual shift that can eventually lead to a revolutionary change in cultural perspective and a more active citizenry that is no longer defined by a passive reception of media.

Adbusters Media Foundation's magazine, Adbusters, is one of the most visible and often criticized examples of culture jammers at work. It is infamous for its subvertisements, such as the emaciated and dying “Joe Chemo”détourn of Camel cigarettes' mascot Joe Camel, and the promotion of Buy Nothing Day and TV-Turnoff Week. However, culture jamming is not limited to adbusting. A few of the sundry approaches to this form of media activism are exhibited by the following culture jammers: The San Francisco–based Billboard Liberation Front works to reconfigure billboards in order to ultimately reach the goal of a personal billboard for every citizen; ®™ark, a registered corporation, and The Yes Men perpetrate a variety of media hoaxes in order to force an awareness of corporate responsibility for environmental and human costs;and Jonah Peretti, a former MIT student, instigated an e-mail phenomenon recording his attempt to have Nike shoes personalized with the word sweatshop. Others include the Guerrilla Girls, anonymous women who appear in various actions and printed pieces while in gorilla masks and under the names of deceased female artists in order to critique misogyny in the art world and in culture at large;Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, a New York–based non-profit organization that seeks to take back public “commons”through “gospel choir”performances of anti-shopping songs and revivals at big-box stores;the “organic culture jammers”of guerrilla gardening, who use plants as a political statement in the face of urban clutter;and Billionaires for Bush, a street theater group who don tuxedos and evening gowns as a commentary on who they believe to be George W. Bush's true constituency.

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