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cultural resistance

cultural resistance. tactical media. cultural roots of alternative media. important sources of influence: Dada, Europe, 1915-1925 Situationist International, 1950s, 1960s, France … combined radical politics with provocative new uses of media, performance and language

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cultural resistance

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  1. cultural resistance tactical media

  2. cultural roots of alternative media important sources of influence: • Dada, Europe, 1915-1925 • Situationist International, 1950s, 1960s, France … combined radical politics with provocative new uses of media, performance and language … appropriation and adaptation of popular media technologies and content to confront and intervene in mainstream culture and politics

  3. Dada an international roster of artists and writers; the word deliberately chosen for its absurd, childish quality, that meant nothing outraged by: • the slaughter of World War I • dehumanization associated with industrial mass production • and, the associated the rise of mass consumerism they wanted to shock, to reveal the demonic vacuum at the heart of a self destroying civilization

  4. … questions, techniques, and themes how to reimagine artistic practice in the age of media and technological warfare merging new media technologies (photography, cinema, and mass produced typography and printing) with high-art forms (painting, sculpture, and theatre) … chance, randomness, and accident comprised a central theme in the Dada aesthetic, reflecting the senselessness that had come to dominate modern life ‘gratuitous gesture’; central tactic – using art to disrupt the commonplace and compel new ways of seeing reality

  5. Situationist International Guy Debord and other artists and writers in Franceformed the SI in Paris … in response to pervasive consumer culture, colonial powers, and the ideological ‘spectacle’ generated by global systems of mass communication blend tactics of Dada, Surrealism and the approach of post-Stalinist Marxism in political economy

  6. … critique … an all encompassing spectacle, in politics, education, leisure and private life generated a new form of alienation; eliminated the possibility of resistance, and reduced people to mere spectators the only way to confront and destroy the power of the spectacle was for people to construct their own alternative, disruptive situations in everyday life … no separation of art from everyday life and experience tactic: detournement; using collage and montage to create new works from found materials, subverting the original meanings of the borrowed elements

  7. culture jamming “Cultural jamming is an artistic ‘terrorism’ directed against the information society in which we live” (Dery 1990) … captures and subverts the images and ideas of mainstream media culture to make a critical point turns corporate power against itself by co-opting, hacking, mocking, and re-contexualizing meanings

  8. street art early culture jamming projects reconfigured commercial images and public spaces – billboards, advertising … Billboard Liberation Front (BLF), San Francisco, 1977, late night ‘corrections’ to the typefaces and images of outdoor advertising - subvertising http://www.billboardliberation.com/

  9. Adbusters non-profit Canadian magazine, 1989, couples parodies of marketing, advertising, and popular media with critiques of consumer culture and political commentary polemical calls to media activism: ‘Buy Nothing Today’; ‘Black Spot’ line of anti-brand shoes https://www.adbusters.org/

  10. SCP Surveillance Camera Players … culture jamming‘counter-surveillance’ projects have emerged as political response to the use of closed-circuit television (CCTV) and surveillance cameras on public spaces … staged performances of original and classical plays for the benefit of whoever might be watching … maps of walking tours in New York and other cities that show where cameras are located, so that strollers can avoid them

  11. online Internet suits to the cut-paste, collage-style, hit-and-run tactics favored by media designers and artists making art with a point ‘Nike Media Adventure’; the designer Jonah Peretti responded to a marketing Nike’s campaign that intended to associate the brand with freedom and creativity invitation to customize our own running shoes by ordering pairs inscribed with our choice of words; Paretti ordered shoes bearing the word ‘sweatshops’ Peretti’s meme spread across a large portion of Anglo-American popular culture both online and off http://ccce.com.washington.edu/projects/cultureJamming.html

  12. … and reverse jamming … culture jamming ‘mines’ mainstream culture to reveal and criticize its fundamental inequalities and hypocrisies however, mainstream culture is doing the same; continually borrow, refashion, and reinterpret images, symbols and practices … culture jammers hack the elements of mainstream culture, while marketers and media interests troll subcultures for new ‘memes’ that can sell products, fashions, ideas ‘cross-appropriation’

  13. lesson I • small interventions can make a big difference in popular perception deliberate and strategic creation and circulation of elemental cultural notions – memes – that oppose or invert the status quo is a rhetorical and symbolic strategy with considerable power, well suited to the fragmentation and rapid turnover of ideas, images and discourse in the new media context

  14. lesson II • emotional and affective influence of culture jamming projects humor, irony, fun, play: means of, weapons for, exposing social, political and economic problems, attracting adherents, moving them to action

  15. lesson III • the degree to which activist art and technology collectives have taken center stage in political and cultural opposition and organizing using new media use of new media technologies as the platform both for making/performing/instantiating new works and for reaching interested publics http://rtmark.com/

  16. culture jamming as a genre features: • irony, which subverts the purposes and objectives of corporate capitalism and consumerism • small scale (few members, low-budget efforts) • interventionist quality; intervene in cultural and political practices and representations to point out contradictions and hypocrisy • subcultural literacy; depends on familiarity with the conventions and clichés of market economics and corporate capitalism

  17. tactical media culture jamming more broadly is often associated with tactical media a strategy which emphasizes rapid response and intervention, mobility and flexibility

  18. Bailey, O. G., Cammaerts, B. and Carpentier, N. (2008) Understanding Alternative Media. Berkshire: Open University Press – chapter 10 • Bruner, M. L. (2005). Carnivalesque Protest and the Humorless State, in Text & Performance Quarterly, 25(2), 136-155 • Couldry, N. (2001a) “The Umbrella Man: Crossing a Landscape of Speech and Silence”, in European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 131-153 • Downing, J. (2000) Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements. CA: Sage chapter 4 • Lievrouw, L. (2011) Alternative and Activist Media. Cambridge: Polity Press

  19. workshop reading text: Garcia, D. and Lovink, G. (1997) The ABC of tactical media

  20. thank you for your attention

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