Culture Jam

Culture jamming (sometimes also guerrilla communication) is a form of protest used by many anti-consumerist social movements to disrupt or subvert media culture and its mainstream cultural institutions, including corporate advertising. It is often described as a way of drawing attention to the methods through which mass society and media institutions shape public perception. Culture jamming employs techniques originally associated with the Letterist International and later with the Situationist International, including détournement. It uses the language and rhetoric of mainstream culture to critique the social institutions that produce that culture. Tactics include editing company logos to critique the companies, products, or concepts they represent, or using fashion statements that deliberately clash with current fashion trends. Culture jamming often uses mass media to produce ironic or satirical commentary about mass media itself, commonly by adopting the communication methods of the original medium. Culture jamming is also a form of subvertising. Culture jamming is generally intended to highlight and challenge political assumptions within commercial culture, and has been discussed as a response to socially imposed conformity. Prominent examples include the alteration of billboard advertising by the Billboard Liberation Front and works by contemporary artists such as Ron English. Culture jamming may also involve street parties and protests. While it often focuses on subverting or critiquing political and advertising messages, some proponents emphasize forms that bring together artists, designers, scholars, and activists to create works that go beyond criticism of the status quo. In addition to these political and cultural aims, researchers have noted that pleasure and humor can play an important role in sustaining participation. Analysts have argued that fun can connect individual acts of subversion to a broader, imagined protest community, helping separate actions appear as part of a shared project. This affective style has been interpreted as both drawing on and resisting the dominant emotion regime of late capitalism, with emotional engagement functioning as both a tactic and an aim.