Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Culture Jamming


Today marks the final ishotkatemoss workshop for the spring at The School of Visual Arts (SVA). There has been a great deal of wonderful interaction with students at both Parsons The New School for Design and SVA and we will be featuring, as we did last year in the Desire & Disgust series, many of the student submissions to the ishotkatemoss collage over the coming weeks.

Was it by chance the today that iskm founder, Zev Jonas, finished a book by John Higgs titled "The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds”? For long time followers of this blog, you will be aware that Zev is greatly influenced by two brits (Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond) both individually and collectively - going by various monikers including The KLF, The K Foundation, The Timelords, The Justified Ancients of Mummu and The JAMs.

During the course of reading this fascinating book, Zev highlighted a passage that he thought was worth appropriating here on the iskm blog … not only for the workshop students, but for all blog readers and contributors to this project:

“… A more useful model would be to view them [The JAMs] as what the Situationists called détournements.
   The Situationists were a group of thinkers and critics who were active in the Fifties and Sixties, mainly in France. At the heart of their thinking was the concept of the spectacle. The spectacle can be thought of as the overwhelming representation of all that is real. In the simplest possible terms it can be understood as being mass media, but that simple definition should really be expanded to include our entire culture and our social relations. The spectacle is both the end result of, and the justification for, our consumerist society.
   The spectacle draws our attentions away from what is real to what is merely representation. The Situationists saw in our culture a shift in our focus from being to having, and then from having to appearing to have. This is a process that the users of Facebook will probably grasp immediately. This absorption in the image of things, they felt, was the cause of our modern alienation. The Situationists were not keen on the spectacle, yet it is the central idea at the heart of their self-referential reality tunnel. (1)
   The thinking behind Situationist détournements goes like this: every day we are bombarded by adverts, images, songs or videos. They are part of the spectacle of the system, distractions that keep us numb and alienated. Importantly, we get these whether we want them or not, for it is almost impossible to live in the modern world and not be subject to this bombardment. They are a form of psychic pollution, one which is forced on us by capitalists. As we cannot escape from this onslaught, the Situationists argued, our only honourable response is to fuck with it. 
   Détournement, then, involves taking the cultural images that are forced on us and using them for our own ends. It involves changing the text or context of an image in order to subvert its meaning. The Situationists altered cultural images in the pages of their pamphlets, perhaps by taking a newspaper advert for the consumer product and replacing the text with quotes from Satre about alienation. These days it is more frequently seen in the graffiti, or across the internet on Tumblr blogs and social networks like Facebook, where it is known as ‘culture jamming’ …”

Ladies and gentlemen ... following on the heels of the Dadaists, the Situationists, Discordians, and of course The K Foundation, amongst others ... we give you ishotkatemoss détournement:
Observe. Slow. Down. Shoot. Submit. Culture JAM.

(1) The book defines a 'self-referential reality' tunnel as: "... a philosophy, religion or ideology that was complete or satisfying and which fully explained all of the details of the world, assuming that you did not question its central tenet. This central tenet was an idea - often an appealing one - for which there was a distinct lack of evidence, such as the idea that there was a judgemental patriarchal creator God, or that a property-less communal utopia would be the final stage of society."

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