Culture Jamming

Culture jamming, broadly defined, involves activist resistance to and rearticulation of cultural practices and media messages deemed detrimental in order to educate citizens and transform social practices. Adopting the practice of “detournement” (a French word meaning “turnabout”), culture jammers hoax corporate practices and products or spoof mass-media messages in a way that unveils hidden agendas or counteracts meaning in order to negate their impact or success. Jamming takes various forms, such as “subvertising” (parodies of advertising messages), product “reengineering,” billboard resignification or “liberation,” and public performance or protest. The latter is exemplified by the performance art collective Ant Farm, whose 1975 “Media Burn,” a public event in which numerous television sets were simultaneously destroyed in order to critique the ubiquity of television in America, is widely credited as the first modern example of culture jamming.

The first modern example of culture jamming is thought to be collective art group Ant Farm's 1975 performance piece “Media Burn.” The group created a pyramid of television sets, set it ablaze, and drove a car through the stack to critique the omnipresence of TV in the United States.

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The target of most jammers is cultural practices and media messages that support global capitalism, conspicuous consumption, and ecologically dangerous practices, but many culture jammers target racism and sexism as well. Barbara Kruger, for example, is a contemporary artist who uses multiple media elements to examine the links between gender and consumption. In one of her works, the slogan “Your Body Is a Battleground” was superimposed over media images in order to critique how the media and advertising perpetuate stereotypical representations of female beauty. More recently, culture jamming has been aimed at political parties and politicians, such as the group “Billionaires for Bush” which employs irony, spectacle, and counter-images to advance its critique of citizen-spectators while [Page 52]agitating for political change. Cultural jammers have become increasingly sophisticated in their use of new media to both jam messages and disseminate their protests. Although jammers have mounted provocative and widely publicized campaigns against such major global corporations as Nike and Coca-Cola, more recently a number of critics have questioned the efficacies of culture jamming and its ability to effect cultural transformation.

The roots of the term jamming can be found in the historical practice of factory workers in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, who, as a means of protesting working conditions or wages, would throw their wooden clogs, or sabots, into the machinery, thereby jamming, or clogging, the works in an act of sabotage. A more recent root of the word comes from amateur citizens' band (CB) radio operators who would illegally “jam” transmissions of fellow CBers, radio signals, and the audio tracks of television broadcasts.

Historically developed out of a critique of advertising, particularly advertising's depiction of women and minorities, organizations such as Adbusters, the internationally well-known Vancouver-based magazine, reinterpret brands to undermine meaning. For example, “Joe Camel” becomes “Joe Chemo,” hooked up to an intravenous feed, or images of impossibly thin female fashion models are “skulled” to link them to disordered eating behaviors. One Manhattan-based feminist collective, the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO), formed in 1989 in response to the increasingly sexist messages in media and culture. The BLO, in one highly publicized prank, purchased hundreds of best-selling Barbies and G.I. Joes, switched their voice boxes, and returned them to the stores, where they were purchased over one Christmas season by unsuspecting shoppers. When unwrapped and activated, the G.I. Joes girlishly exclaimed, “Math class is tough,” “I love shopping,” and “Let's plan our dream wedding,” while Barbies gutturally intoned, “Eat Lead, Cobra” or “Vengeance is mine!”

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