CULTURE JAMMING

HOW TO BOX w SHADOWS?

Eco:

Semiological Guerrilla Warfare

“The receiver of the message has a residual freedom...to READ it in a different way...I am proposing an action to urge the audience to control the message and its multiple possibilities of interpretation.”

Radical politics of VISUAL LITERACY

The project of reconstructing meaning requires VISUALLY LITERATE GHOSTBUSTERS.

CULTURE JAMMING : directed against an intrusive, instrumental technoculture whose mode is the manufacture of consent through

the manipulation of symbols.

“The carefully 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.”

Artistic terrorists

Cjs introduce NOISE into the signals as it passes from sender to receiver, encourageing ideosyncratic , unintened interpretations.

Intruding o n the intruders...they invest ads, newscasts, other media with SUBVERSIVE MEANINGS, decrypting them, rendering their seductions meaningless.

Cjs are GROUCHO MARXISTS

Fun to be had in the playful demolition of oppressive ideologies.

“creative crime”

GUERRILLA SEMIOTICS

analytical techniques like those of scholars to decipher the signs and symbols that constitute a culture's “System of signification.”

non-verbal as well as verbal modes of communication, including images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and complex associations of all these...

BARTHES set out to examine the normally hidden set of rules, codes, and conventions though which menings particular to specific social groups (those in power) are rendered UNIVERSAL and “given” for the whole of society.

Cjs have much in common with the semioticians' attempts to read between the lines. -- -but no desire to jump into academic analysis --- more action driven.

JAMMERS ARE ATTEMPTING TO RCLAIM THE PUBLIC SPACE CEDED TO THE CHIMERAS OF HOLLYWOOD AND MADISON AVE., to restore a sense of equilibrium to a society sickened by the vertiginous whirl of TV (and IMAGE) culture

THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY

CONTROL OF PRODUCTION AND ACCESS

VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES

SPACE FOR INFORMATION VIRUSES

THE CULTURAL JAMMER INSISTS ON CHOICE:not the dizzying proliferation of consumer options, in which a ploiyphony of brand names onceals the essential monophony of the advertiser's song, but a true plurality, in whicih the unvocal worldview promulgated by corporate media yields to a multivocal polyvalent one.

EXAMPLES OF ACTIONS:

Outlaw computer hacking

bricolage

“slashing” --- from Pornographic Kirk /Spock ---

textual poaching

transmission jamming

pirate TV

camcorder countersurveillance

media activism

street theater

Media watch projects (Paper tiger TV)

Deep Dish TV http://www.deepdishtv.org/