Advertising meets activism
Culture jammers subvert the media to get the word out
On any day of the week, drive or walk under the Krog Street bridge on the way to Cabbagetown and you can catch the latest form of political activism. Currently, simple photocopied signs demanding “Racism, Sexism, Classism Must Go,” and “Resist Empire” can be found beneath the bridge.
Turn the corner onto Wylie Street and you can see more homemade, stenciled signs, these imploring citizens to “Smoke” or warning passersby that it’s a “Cell Phone Free” zone. Agendas both obvious and obscure are asserted in cryptic “advertisements” accompanied by images of the Morton Salt Girl, a Star Wars storm trooper, rabbits titled “heinous” or a crisp rendering of a gas mask accompanied by the numbers “25.”
Some of the work appears where you might expect it, decorating the walls of East Atlanta and Little Five Points. But it’s also in places you might not expect, like Atlanta highway overpasses and inside Buckhead bars. These and other examples of “culture jamming” are appearing on walls, telephone poles and bathrooms near you.
Culture jammers commonly mimic the tactics of huge corporations whose global presence has transformed their brand logos into universal icons, like the Nike swoosh, Ronald McDonald, Coke, Starbucks and the Gap. But the term precedes the rise of global corporate culture. According to Mark Dery, director of digital journalism at NYU and author of The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, the “jamming” term originated with the CB radio phenomenon of airwave hackers interrupting CB communications and radio broadcasts with noise and profanity. But the term “culture jamming” was first used in 1984 by the band Negativland to describe a form of media sabotage they practiced in their music, of sampling copyrighted material for critical intent.
Using the same public space as high-dollar advertisers, culture jammers attack the imagery and language of corporate culture. It incorporates everything from the mock-advertisements in Cabbagetown to street theater performances by groups like phonebashing.com who assault cell phone users on London streets and stomp their phones to smithereens. Jammers run the gamut from sharp-shooting cultural critics — often-skilled graphic designers who can seamlessly manipulate corporate logos — to laddish neo-punks adding the word “sucks” to billboard facades.
To help the cause, publications like the influential Vancouver-based magazine Adbusters (adbusters.org) and the Melbourne website www.cleansurface.org advocate culture jamming as “the new social activist movement” and publish the work of these grassroots corporate critics.
In Atlanta, one of the most visible jammers is the “Yuppie Ghetto” guy. His slick, authentic-looking signs mimic the developer advertisements that increasingly pollute the Atlanta landscape. Fed up with what Yuppie Ghetto saw as the encroaching banalification of Little Five Points and surrounding environs with McCondos and McTownhomes, this enterprising jammer began placing his subversive signs advertising “Yuppie Ghetto: Over-Priced Shitoles, Pretentious Living! Lofty Lofts and Condos” on stakes and light poles along Moreland Avenue at Freedom Parkway and Ponce de Leon.
“So much is going on with our culture that people just accept and it just doesn’t look like there’s much you can do,” says the Yuppie Ghetto jammer, who asked not to be identified. “There’s a lot of great things about this city, but on the flip side, there’s a lot of prefab terrible construction, just slapping shit up ... But I’m not going to leave. Instead I’m going to be a warrior.”
Jamming doesn’t always have to be slick — part of its appeal is clearly a rude-boy, low-tech response to the calculated schemes of corporate demographers and Madison Avenue advertisers.
Dr. Blade’s stylish “twentyfive” (twentyfive.org) stencils, which grace the Wylie Street wall, are executed in a Cabinet of Dr. Caligari-meets-Soviet constructivist style and feature gas masks, crows and skyscrapers. The significance of the logo, in which the numerals 2 and 5 are presented as graphic echoes of each other, is described on Dr. Blade’s website as “an illustrated metaphor for the concept of looking at yourself and your environment and re-examining what you see.” Dr. Blade is frustrated by the fact that “way too many people do what they are told or take what they are given by the mass media because it’s easy,” and he’s out to challenge that mindset.
Capturing the attention of the sleepwalking consumer is no simple task. The average American is inundated daily with corporate messages shilled via billboards, TV, radio and the Internet. But there are countless permutations of culture jamming on the Atlanta front, from the From the Heart scribe who inserts art rants into copies of Creative Loafing in an attempt to “fight the power” from the alternative press up, to those engaged in more sophisticated corporate assaults.
Inspired by Adbusters to meddle in the marketing strategies of corporate culture, Atlantans Franklin Lopez, Michael McReynolds and Thomas Worth began manipulating and distributing fake Kroger Plus Cards in July 2002. The trio created a perfect duplicate of the card, titled the “Privacy Plus” card, complete with bar code, which anyone could download from the group’s website (submediatv.com). Since the faux-card’s inception, Lopez says 400 people have downloaded the card.
What distinguishes culture jamming is not only its often playful, anarchical spirit, but the way it uses the element of surprise. Culture jamming can seem to suddenly just drop from the heavens in a form of what Dery calls “guerrilla media activism.” Unlike more traditional forms of protest such as marches and political speeches, it is culture jamming’s ability to suddenly appear out of nowhere and then disappear just as quickly that distinguishes it. Take the anti-war banners hung over Atlanta highway overpasses this past winter, put up by anonymous jammers. The banners greeted drivers during their morning commute to work but were gone before the first morning coffee break.
The war in Iraq inspired numerous Atlantans to take their first stab at culture jamming as an expression of public activism. This past winter, Adiclere Hunter worked with a group of 35 activists to unfurl anti-war banners across Atlanta highway overpasses around the city with slogans like “No War,” “No Blood for Oil,” and “War is Not a Family Value.” Artist Allison Rentz, also inspired by Adbusters and its ilk, uses her alter-ego, a plastic-wrapped bimbo called I Miss a Merry K UH, at anti-war protests as a multifaceted critique of sexism, war, corporate domination and other issues tailored to the day.
While some culture jammers, like Rentz and Hunter, are overtly political, others are simply happy in that CB jammers tradition to interrupt the usual flow of information with a peel of symbolic Bronx cheers. They offer idiosyncratic visual alternatives to the branding of American life with Hilfiger logos and beer ad jingles. Cooper Sanchez, for instance, says of his plywood and painted monkey heads that adorn telephone poles in intown neighborhoods, “I’m not trying to make a statement. I’m trying to make people laugh.”
“That’s what’s interesting about the culture jamming going on in Atlanta,” asserts Sanchez. “Is the sense of humor it has.”
One of the pre-eminent local jammers for the stealth and skill of his mock ads is Jeff Demetriou, mastermind behind the fictitious corporation Slumber Inc. (slumberinc.com). Slumber Inc.’s visually sophisticated mock advertisements distributed as fliers and posters throughout Atlanta, encourage young women to get breast implants if they want to find a mate (“Breast implants increase your lifespan by 10 to 20 years”), advertise fictitious raves or adopt the aesthetics of an Abercrombie and Fitch ad to shill a brand of all-American cologne called “Patriotism.” Demetriou likes to get outside the expected irony-hip Little Five and East Atlanta crowd by addressing the slumbering populace at its source in Buckhead and Midtown, where he distributes his glossy, professionally printed cards at venues like Phipps Plaza and Eatzi’s.
“That’s kind of the point of Slumber Inc.,” says Demetriou. “It’s supposed to kind of function as this corporate conglomerate that’s said, ‘To hell with the innuendo and the metaphor and analogies,’ and just comes out and says, ‘If you don’t have breast implants, you’re ugly.’”
But just as all spontaneous, renegade forms of expression are hijacked by corporate culture, jamming is now being appropriated by corporations in its efforts to sell product.
Nissan recently inaugurated a new ad campaign aimed at the youth market in which the company’s own advertising will be “pirated” with graffiti-style words and images to give the impression the ads have been manipulated by culture jammers. The campaign, which conjures up visions of business-suited executives playing air guitar and getting “wiggy,” only betrays the clunkiness and absurdity of corporate America when it tries to plunder a subculture that continues to innovate and meddle in new ways.