Marc Dery – Culture Jamming

• Hacking, slashing, sniping in the Empire of Signs

• In other words, what shape does an engaged politics assume in an empire of signs?

• The answer lies, perhaps, in the "semiological guerrilla warfare" imagined by Umberto Eco

semiotics—the study of signs

• disassembles the arbitrary relationship between word and meaning

• If there is no natural relationship between a word and its meaning, words, objects, people, places, can be made to represent or mean whatever the person/institution in charge wants them to.

Saussure’s Sign

• Language does not construct the material reality in which we live, but it conditions and even determines the significance of that world for us.

• Image and representation have become our prominent way of interacting and engaging with the world

In an empire of signs, signs and symbols serve to confuse and distract, lulling us into a submissive trance - we do not question the relationships created between people/things/objects and the meanings attached to them by the media.

Subvertising

• Subversive advertising• production and dissemination of anti-ads

The original definition of “semiotic disobedience” focused on acts of sabotage, where commercial messages were “jammed” or scrambled, imposing oppositional meanings by manipulating text and images.

Signs and symbols create unconscious reflexes and point us in a particular direction, we are forced to interpret images everyday.

Building on early sabotage techniques, today increasingly affordable and powerful digital technologies create a DIY production ethic. Self-taught “pro-sumers” are now empowered to manipulate icons and optics to make their point.

Culture Jamming aims subvert the original signs associated with corporate culture

Adbusters

Uncooling

Kieron Dwyer

Culture Jamming:

• Hacktivism• Billboard liberation• Electronic Civil Disobedience• Slashing – textual poaching – uncovering and

developing sub-textual messages (fanvids)• jamming in which tales told for mass

consumption are reworked• Media hoaxing (yesmen) -

http://theyesmen.org/hijinks/vivoleum

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLQ4mmuJ8hM&feature=related (subvertisements on the street)

• Blog collection of jammed ads:• http://subvertise-antidot.blogspot.com/

Feminist Fatale

• http://www.feministfatale.com/2010/02/culture-jammin-ladies-take-a-stand/

GoDaddy’s commercials

• Watch this video and come up with some ideas for how to subvert godaddy’s signs and representations. In other words, how would you go about created a culture jammed ad in response to Go Daddy?

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhFMD6ybP2E

Bubble subvertising

• Come up with possible captions to be inserted as a bubble comment into the following image: