What is Culture Jamming?

Cultural critic Mark Dery has defined "culture jamming" as "media hacking, information warfare, terror-art, and guerilla semiotics, all in one." And he's defined "culture jammers" as "Billboard bandits, pirate TV and radio broadcasters, media hoaxers, and other vernacular media wrenchers who intrude on the intruders, investing ads, newscasts, and other media artifacts with subversive meanings."

Dery has further stated that culture jamming began with 1975's "Media Burn" event staged by Ant Farm, a performance art/architect collective, best known for their Texas landmark, The Cadillac Ranch. Media Burn was basically a performance art installation consisting of a wall of burning television sets smashed apart by a 1959 Cadillac.

Mark Dery has been often credited with popularizing the culture jamming phenomenon with his widely acclaimed 1993 essay.

The term "Culture Jamming"

The term "culture jamming" itself was coined in 1984 by San Francisco Bay Area experimental sound collage artists known collectively as Negativland. According to a Negativland member, the term was based on the concept of "radio jamming" or the usually deliberate transmission of radio signals to disrupt specific broadcasts, a tactic that originated during the Cold War.

Negativland

In 1979, the group Negativland began with Concord, California high school students Mark Hosler and Richard Lyons. They gained notoriety in 1987 with their first media hoax (or act of culture jamming) after they sent out a phony press release to mainstream media outlets claiming that Negativland's single "Christianity is Stupid" had inspired David Brom, a real-life axe murderer, to kill his family. The story wound up running in mainstream newspapers, television news shows, and magazines.

When asked why they perpetuated this hoax, Negativland members stated that their object was to point out the "herd mentality" of mass media as well as the blatant lack of fact verification that could've easily uncovered the veracity of Negativland's fake press release.

Other members of Negativland throughout the years have included Don Joyce, David Wills, and Peter Conheim.

U2 vs Negativland

The group's next major cultural stir was their 1991 "U2" single that freely sampled rock supergroup U2's song "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and mixed the samples with sound-bites from mainstream deejay Casey Kasem and a kazoo band. Negativland's object in this stunt was to demonstrate their distain for copyright laws.

Unfortunately for them, Island Records and their lawyers didn't get the joke and launched a massive legal barrage at the performance artists, which resulted in all band members agreeing to destroy the single and recall copies as well as pay for damages.

After the lawsuit, when U2 band member "The Edge" was scheduled to be interviewed on anarchist deejay R.U. Sirius's radio show, Sirius did a switcheroo. He had Edge interviewed by Negativland members Mark Hosler and Don Joyce, who specifically asked the rocker about U2's own free use of sampling during their "Zoo TV Tour." Edge, of course, was taken by surprise and couldn't really respond to the accusations.

Negativland Today

After the U2 incident, the group still encountered legal threats and warnings from the likes of corporations like Pepsico and Geffen Records and even by the lawyers for convicted axe murderer David Brom. Fortunately, none of these threats turned into lawsuits.

As of 2007, Negativland has helped craft a sampling license for Creative Commons, and they are currently hosting the weekly radio show "Over the Edge" on Berkeley's KPFA-FM.

SOURCES:

http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?66+Law+&+Contemp.+Probs.+239+(WinterSpring+2003)#H1N2

http://www.epitonic.com/index.jsp?refer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.epitonic.com%2Fartists%2Fnegativland.html

"Negativland", Richard Gehr and Ira Robbins, Trouser Press, URL: (http://www.trouserpress.com/entry.php?a=negativland)

"Double Negative", Hank Shteamer, Huffington Post, URL: (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hank-shteamer/double-negative-negativl_b_59075.html)

"Head Games", Mike Wolf, Time Out New York, URL: (http://www.timeout.com/newyork/article/9292/head-games)