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Culture jamming |
Culture jamming is an individualistic turning away from all forms of herd mentality – including that of movements – and by that definition, culture jamming is generally not treated as a movement. Culture jamming is not defined by any specific political position or message, nor even by any specific cultural position or message. The common thread is mainly an urge to poke fun at the homogeneous nature of popular culture, often by means of guerrilla communication (communication unsanctioned or opposed by government or other powers-that-be).
Culture jamming could be defined as an art movement, although this too may be insufficient to cover the full spectrum of activities identified as culture jamming. Culture jamming has been characterized as a form of public activism which is generally in opposition to commercialism, and the vectors of corporate image. However, this also is too narrow a definition to cover all culture jamming activities (that definition more closely fits Subvertising). Some culture jamming takes aim at these power structures because they are part of the dominant culture, but any other aspects of the dominant culture are also fair game for culture jamming.
Culture jamming sometimes entails transforming mass media to produce ironic or satirical commentary about itself, using the original medium's communication method.
Aims of culture jammers may include:
Culture jammers' intent may differ from (but may overlap with) that of artistic appropriation (which is done for art's sake) and vandalism (in which destruction or defacement is the primary goal), although its results are not always so easily distinguishable. Some street art and other actions fall into two or even all three categories.
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Coined by the collage band Negativland on its release JamCon '84, the phrase "culture jamming" comes from the idea of radio jamming: that public frequencies can be pirated and subverted for independent communication, or to disrupt dominant frequencies.
One can attempt to trace the roots of culture jamming in medieval carnival, which Mikhail Bakhtin interpretated as a subversion of the social hierarchy (in Rabelais and his World). More recent precursors might include: the media-savvy agit-prop of the anti-Nazi photomonteur John Heartfield, the sociopolitical street theater and staged media events of '60s radicals such as Abbie Hoffman, the German concept of Spaßguerilla, and in the Situationist International (SI) of the 1960s. The SI first compared its own activities to radio jamming in 1968, when it proposed the use of guerrilla communication within mass media to sow confusion within the dominant culture.
The Canadian magazine Adbusters began to promote aspects of culture jamming after the American author and cultural critic Mark Dery introduced editor Kalle Lasn to the term through a series of articles he wrote for Adbusters. Dery's New York Times article on culture jamming, "The Merry Pranksters And the Art of the Hoax" 1 was the first mention, in the mainstream media, of the phenomenon; Dery later expanded on this article in his 1993 Open Magazine pamphlet, "Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs" 2, a seminal essay that remains the most exhaustive historical, sociopolitical, and philosophical theorization of culture jamming to date.
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