WThe Adbusters Media Foundation is a Canadian-based not-for-profit, pro-environment organization founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz in Vancouver, British Columbia. Adbusters describes itself as "a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age."
WAndre the Giant Has a Posse is a street art campaign based on a design by Shepard Fairey created in 1989 while Shepard attended the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island. Distributed by the skater community and graffiti artists, the stickers featuring an image of André the Giant began showing up in many cities across the United States. At the time, Fairey declared the campaign to be "an experiment in phenomenology". Over time, the artwork has been reused in a number of ways and has become worldwide. Fairey also altered the work stylistically and semantically into OBEY Giant.
WThe Anti-Permanent Pearlman Poster League of the East (APPPLE) was an early (1979-1984) example of grass-roots political satire performed to generate media coverage. It employed tactics now known as culture jamming and guerilla communication that have been widely popularized by Billionaires for Bush, Greene Dragon, Code Pink, and other organizations.
WArtivism is a portmanteau word combining art and activism.
WBanksy is a pseudonymous England-based street artist, political activist, and film director whose real name and identity remain unconfirmed and the subject of speculation. Active since the 1990s, his satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine dark humour with graffiti executed in a distinctive stenciling technique. His works of political and social commentary have appeared on streets, walls, and bridges throughout the world. Banksy's work grew out of the Bristol underground scene, which involved collaborations between artists and musicians. Banksy says that he was inspired by 3D, a graffiti artist and founding member of the musical group Massive Attack.
WThe Billboard Liberation Front practices culture jamming via altering billboards by changing key words to radically alter the message, often to an anti-corporate message. It started in San Francisco in 1977.
WBillboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions, or B.U.G.A.U.P. is an Australian subvertising artistic movement. It practices billboard hijacking using détournement or modification with graffiti of such billboard advertising that promotes something that is deemed unhealthy.
WBleepsgr is the pseudonym used by V.(M.) Kakouris, who is a Greek artist. He creates political street art, paintings and installations; he is associated with the artivism movement. Much of his street art is in Athens, but his paintings are also to be found in other parts of Greece, and more widely in Europe.
WBorf was a graffiti campaign seen in and around Washington, D.C. during 2004 and 2005, carried out by John Tsombikos while studying at the Corcoran College of Art and Design. This four letter word was ubiquitous around the Northwest quadrant of Washington, and ranged from simple tagging to complete sentences to two-color stencils to the massive defacement on an overhead exit sign from the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge to Constitution Avenue. Tsombikos was arrested on July 13, 2005 after tips led police to his latest tag.
WTwo oil paintings depicting the then-Taoiseach of Ireland Brian Cowen in the nude were briefly displayed in Dublin art galleries in March 2009. The response of the media, politicians and the Garda Síochána led to a sustained controversy referred to by some as Portraitgate.
WThe bust of Edward Snowden, called Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument 2.0 by its creators, was an ephemeral, illegally installed public sculpture of Edward Snowden, an American whistleblower who leaked classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) and was charged with federal crimes as a result. The bronze-like bust was placed in Fort Greene Park in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, New York City, on April 6, 2015. It was attached to a Doric column on the perimeter of the park's Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument, a memorial and crypt which honors and inters the more than 11,500 American prisoners of war who died in the American Revolution while housed on British prison ships.
WThe Chaser's War on Everything is an Australian television satirical comedy series broadcast on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) television station ABC1. It has won an Australian Film Institute Award for Best Television Comedy Series. The cast perform sketches mocking social and political issues, and often feature comedic publicity stunts. The series is produced by The Chaser, an Australian satirical group consisting of Chris Taylor, Julian Morrow, Craig Reucassel, Andrew Hansen, and Chas Licciardello. Fellow Chaser members Dominic Knight and Charles Firth are not part of the regular on-screen cast. However, Knight is a writer, and Firth compiled roving reports for the show from the United States, until he left the group to start a satirical newspaper in mid-2007.
WCHASOS was a satirical art activism project, launched 2011 by Andreas Heusser. It consisted in creation of the fictitious charity organization "Christian Humanitarian Asylum Self-Aid Organization Switzerland" (CHASOS) and several actions performed by its president, pastor Wilfried Stocher.
WChumbawamba were an English rock band that formed in 1982 and disbanded in 2012. The band drew on genres such as punk rock, pop, and folk. Their anarcho-communist political leanings led them to have an irreverent attitude toward authority, and to espouse a variety of political and social causes including animal rights and pacifism and later regarding class struggle, Marxism, feminism, gay liberation, pop culture, and anti-fascism.
WThe Church of Euthanasia is a religious organization, founded by Chris Korda and Robert Kimberk in Boston, Massachusetts in 1992.
WThe Church of the SubGenius is a parody religion that satirizes better-known belief systems. It teaches a complex philosophy that focuses on J. R. "Bob" Dobbs, purportedly a salesman from the 1950s, who is revered as a prophet by the Church. SubGenius leaders have developed detailed narratives about Dobbs and his relationship to various gods and conspiracies. Their central deity, Jehovah 1, is accompanied by other gods drawn from ancient myth and popular fiction. SubGenius literature describes a grand conspiracy that seeks to brainwash the world and oppress Dobbs's followers. In its narratives, the Church presents a blend of cultural references in an elaborate remix of the sources.
WA Circle line party is a type of subway party occasionally held on the Circle line of the London Underground.
WThe Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army is an anti-authoritarian left-wing activist group that uses clowning and non-violent tactics to act against corporate globalisation, war, and on other issues. The group originated circa 2003 in the United Kingdom.
WKarl Rove: Courage and Consequence is a grassroots funded compilation of rock songs released on March 3, 2010 in anticipation of Karl Rove's similarly titled memoir. The subtitle of the record is The Unabridged Audio. It was conceived as "an anticipatory sonic recollection of the gross misdeeds attributable to Rove over the past decade".
WCritical Art Ensemble (CAE) is a collective of five tactical media practitioners of various specializations including computer graphics and web design, film/video, photography, text art, book art, and performance. For CAE, tactical media is situational, ephemeral, and self-terminating. It encourages the use of any media that will engage a particular socio-political context in order to create molecular interventions and semiotic shocks that collectively could diminish the rising intensity of authoritarian culture.
WCzech Dream is a 2004 documentary film directed by two Czech film directors, Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda. It recorded a large-scale hoax perpetrated by Klusák and Remunda on the Czech public, culminating in the opening event of a fake hypermarket in the Letňany neighborhood of Prague. The film was their graduation project for film school.
WEncyclopedia Dramatica is an online community centered around a wiki that acts as a "troll archive". It first opened under the domain name encyclopediadramatica.com on December 10, 2004.
WThe Evolution Control Committee is an experimental music band based in Columbus, Ohio. The ECC was founded by Mark Gunderson in Columbus, in 1986. They create music that falls within the borders of the sound collage genre, as it typically uses uncleared and illegal samples from various sources as a form of protest against copyright law. The ECC also produces numerous audio experiments, such as the disfiguring of compact discs in live performance, known as "CDestruction", and has produced a few video works as well, ranging from re-edited 50's corporate shorts to Teddy Ruxpin reciting the works of William S. Burroughs. Other activities include culture jamming.
WThe terms Google bombing and Googlewashing refer to the practice of causing a website to rank highly in web search engine results for irrelevant, unrelated or off-topic search terms by linking heavily. In contrast, search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of improving the search engine listings of web pages for relevant search terms.
WJohannes Grenzfurthner is an Austrian artist, filmmaker, writer, actor, curator, theatre director, performer and lecturer. Grenzfurthner is the founder, conceiver and artistic director of monochrom, an international art and theory group. Most of his artworks are labelled monochrom.
WLena Alekseevna Hades is a Russian artist, writer and art theorist of Jewish origin.
W#class was a month-long series of events at Winkleman Gallery in New York that took place between February 20 to March 20, 2010 organized by artists William Powhida and Jennifer Dalton. The exhibition combined social media and networking with a physical gallery space.
WAndreas Heusser is a Swiss conceptual artist and curator, based in Zurich and Johannesburg.
WIn internet slang, a troll is a person who posts inflammatory, insincere, digressive, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, with the intent of provoking readers into displaying emotional responses, or manipulating others' perception. This is typically for the troll's amusement, or to achieve a specific result such as disrupting a rival's online activities or manipulating a political process. Even so, Internet trolling can also be defined as purposefully causing confusion or harm to other users online, for no reason at all.
WMark Jenkins is an American artist who makes sculptural street installations. Jenkins' practice of street art is to use the "street as a stage" where his sculptures interact with the surrounding environment including passersby who unknowingly become actors. His installations often draw the attention of the police. His work has been described as whimsical, macabre, shocking and situationist. Jenkins cites Juan Muñoz as his initial inspiration.
WK Foundation Burn a Million Quid was a performance art action on 23 August 1994 in which the K Foundation burned cash in the amount of one million pounds sterling in a disused boathouse on the Ardfin Estate on the Scottish island of Jura. The money represented the bulk of the K Foundation's funds, earned by Drummond and Cauty as The KLF, one of the United Kingdom's most successful pop groups of the early 1990s.
WDon Leicht was a visual artist who has worked as a painter and sculptor in the Bronx, New York City for over forty years. Leicht has had one person exhibitions in New York, Sweden and (Germany) and is an early figure in the New York City downtown scene in the 1970s, and in the subsequent Street Art and Graffiti movements.
WThe Max Headroom signal hijacking occurred on the night of November 22, 1987, when the television broadcasts of two stations in Chicago, Illinois, United States, were hijacked in an act of broadcast piracy by a video of an unidentified person wearing a Max Headroom mask and costume, accompanied by distorted audio and with a corrugated metal panel swiveling in the background to mimic Max Headroom's geometric background effect.
Wmonochrom is an international art-technology-philosophy group, publishing house and film production company. monochrom was founded in 1993, and defines itself as "an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science and political activism". Its main office is located at Museumsquartier/Vienna.
WNegativland is an American experimental music band which originated in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1970s. They took their name from a Neu! track, while their record label is named after another Neu! track. The core of the band consists of Mark Hosler, David Wills, Peter Conheim and Jon Leidecker.
WNo Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies is a book by the Canadian author Naomi Klein. First published by Knopf Canada and Picador in December 1999, shortly after the 1999 WTO Ministerial Conference protests in Seattle had generated media attention around such issues, it became one of the most influential books about the alter-globalization movement and an international bestseller.
WThe Occupy movement was an international left-wing populist socio-political movement that expressed opposition to social and economic inequality and to the lack of "real democracy" around the world. It aimed primarily to advance social and economic justice and new forms of democracy. The movement has had many different scopes, since local groups often had different focuses, but its prime concerns included how large corporations control the world in a way that disproportionately benefits a minority, undermines democracy and causes instability.
WOLAF was a satirical art activism project launched in 2010 by Andreas Heusser, Christoph Nüssli and Christoph Oeschger to subvert the Swiss right-wing populist party's campaign on the deportation initiative. The project consisted of the creation of the "Organization to solve the foreigner question" and series of actions and pranks performed by the fictitious representatives, Dr. Alois B. Stocher and his assistant George Klein.
WPenis Satan, also called East Van Satan, was an unauthorized statue erected on September 9, 2014, in Vancouver, Canada. A life-size representation of a red devil with a large erect penis, making the sign of the horns hand gesture, the statue was erected in Clark Drive Plaza, an abandoned concrete amphitheater on the west side of Clark Drive at Grandview Highway North. It was made of mixed materials, including a modified mannequin, and was placed on an empty pedestal that previously displayed a three-foot-tall Christopher Columbus statue. Vancouver commuters were able to see the statue from the Expo Line Skytrain, near the East Van Cross, which is located on the opposite side of the tracks.
WA pillow fight flash mob is a social phenomenon of flash mobbing and shares many characteristics of a culture jam.
WProvo was a Dutch counterculture movement in the mid-1960s that focused on provoking violent responses from authorities using non-violent bait. It was preceded by the nozem movement and followed by the hippie movement. Provo was founded, on 25 May 1965, by Robert Jasper Grootveld, an anti-smoking activist, and the anarchists Roel van Duijn and Rob Stolk. The term was used for the movement as a whole and for individual members. Provo was officially disbanded on 13 May 1967.
WPussy Riot is a Russian feminist protest punk rock and performance art group based in Moscow. Founded in August 2011, it has had a variable membership of approximately 11 women ranging in age from about 20 to 33. The group staged unauthorized provocative guerrilla performances in public places, performances that were filmed as music videos and posted on the Internet. The group's lyrical themes included feminism, LGBT rights, opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his policies, and Putin's links to the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church.
WReverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping is a radical performance community based in New York City. The Stop Shopping Choir is accompanied by a comic preacher, Reverend Billy, portrayed by performer William (Billy) Talen. The philosophy of the Church of Stop Shopping surrounds the imminent "Shopocalypse", which assumes the end of humanity will come about through manic consumerism.
WThe Southern Television broadcast interruption was a broadcast signal intrusion that occurred on 26 November 1977 in parts of southern England in the United Kingdom. The audio of a Southern Television broadcast was replaced by a voice claiming to represent the 'Ashtar Galactic Command', delivering a message instructing humanity to abandon its weapons so it could participate in a 'future awakening' and 'achieve a higher state of evolution'. After six minutes, the broadcast returned to its scheduled programme.
WThe Space Hijackers was a group originating in the United Kingdom and active between 1999 and 2014 that defined itself as "an international band of anarchitects who battle to save our streets, towns and cities from the evils of urban planners, architects, multinationals and other hoodlums". Time Out magazine described the group as "an inventive and subversive group of London ‘Anarchitects’ who specialise in reclaiming public spaces – usually without permission."
WThe Spassguerilla was a grouping within the student protest movement of the 1960s in Germany that agitated for social change, in particular for a more libertarian, less authoritarian, and less materialistic society, using tactics characterized by disrespectful humour and provocative and disruptive actions of a minimally violent nature. Events organized by the groups included such actions as attacking politicians or the police with custard pies. One of the main proponents was Fritz Teufel, sometimes referred to as the political clown of the Extraparliamentary Opposition. The lack of respect for traditional, "bourgeois," "repressive" forms of authority and ritual, countered by irony and humour, was typified by Fritz Teufel's reply when told to stand for the judge at a trial: "If it helps the search for the truth".
WWill St Leger is a street artist/artivist, Radio DJ and gay rights activist living in Dublin, Ireland.
WStop Tony Meow is a browser extension which replaces photos of former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott with images of cats and kittens on websites. Initially created for Google Chrome, the extension was expanded to Safari and Firefox later in 2014. The extension was created by developers and designers Dan Nolan, Ben Taylor and Matt Kelsh.
WA subway party is a celebration that occurs on a mass transit system. Generally, people meet at a predetermined station in their city's mass transit system, wait until their numbers have achieved critical mass, and board the train. From there, revelers may engage in many different activities, from playing music and dancing to exchanging gifts.
WThe Tape-beatles are a multi-media group that formed in Iowa City in December 1986. Its members have included Lloyd Dunn, John Heck, Ralph Johnson, Paul Neff, and Linda Morgan Brown. Beginning with analog tape recorders, and later expanding to include digital technology and film media, the group has used collage techniques to create works that challenge the notion of intellectual property. Their works make extensive use of materials appropriated from various sources through a process they call "Plagiarism®". The Tape-beatles' body of work consists mainly of noise music and audio art recordings, expanded and performed cinema performances, videos, printed publications, as well as works in other media. They produce and release work under an umbrella organization called Public Works Productions.
WThe Decapitator, or The East London Decapitator. is an anonymous England-based culture-jamming street artist, known for his gruesome and grisly beheadings of models in advertisements around London.
WThis timeline of social nudity shows the varying degrees of acceptance given to the naked human body by diverse cultures throughout history. The events listed here demonstrate how various societies have shifted between strict and lax clothing standards, how nudity has played a part in social movements and protest, and how the nude human body is accepted in the public sphere.
WVeterans of Future Wars (VFW) was a satirical political organization initially created as a prank by Princeton University students in 1936. The group was conceived as a parody of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the movement for early payment of a bonus to veterans of World War I that had been originally scheduled for disbursement in 1945 when the World War Adjusted Compensation Act was passed in 1924. The group jokingly advocated the payment of a similar $1,000 "bonus" to future veterans of a coming European conflagration while the recipients were young enough—and alive—to enjoy it.
WThe Yes Men are a culture jamming activist duo and network of supporters created by Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos. Through various actions, the Yes Men primarily aim to raise awareness about problematic social and political issues. To date, the duo have produced three films: The Yes Men (2003), The Yes Men Fix the World (2009), and The Yes Men Are Revolting (2014). In these films, they impersonate entities that they dislike, a practice that they call "identity correction." The Yes Men operate under the mission statement that lies can expose truth. They create and maintain fake websites similar to ones they intend to spoof, which have led to numerous interview, conference, and TV talk show invitations. They espouse the belief that corporations and governmental organizations often act in dehumanizing ways toward the public. Elaborate props are sometimes part of the ruse, as shown in their 2003 DVD release The Yes Men. The Yes Men have collaborated with other groups of similar interest, including Improv Everywhere, Andrew Boyd and Steve Lambert.
WThe Youth International Party (YIP), whose members were commonly called Yippies, was an American youth-oriented radical and countercultural revolutionary offshoot of the free speech and anti-war movements of the late 1960s. It was founded on December 31, 1967. They employed theatrical gestures to mock the social status quo, such as advancing a pig as a candidate for president of the United States in 1968. They have been described as a highly theatrical, anti-authoritarian and anarchist youth movement of "symbolic politics".
WA zombie walk is an organized public gathering of people who dress up in zombie costumes. Participants usually meet in an urban center and make their way around the city streets and public spaces in an orderly fashion. Zombie walks can be organized simply for entertainment or with a purpose, such as setting a world record or promoting a charitable cause. Originating in North America during the 2000s, zombie walks have occurred throughout the world.