Bristol
Bansky, United Kingdom
It's not that surprising that a person living in a city will enounter over 5,000 advertisements in a single day compared to 2,000 thirty years ago. Whether it be in commercial breaks, pop-up ads, billboards or in our own schools, we live in a brand culture. With this oversaturation of logos and branding advertisers have sought ways to make product placement so implicit we don't even notice that the advertisement exists. Culture jamming is our wake up call. Wikipedia defines culture jamming as,
"the act of transforming existing mass media to produce commentary about itself, using the original medium's communication method. It is a form of public activism which is generally in opposition to commercialism, and the vectors of corporate image. The aim of culture jamming is to create a contrast between corporate or mass media images and the realities or perceived negative side of the corporation or media. This is done symbolically, with the "detournement" of pop iconography.
It is based on the idea that advertising is little more than propaganda for established interests, and that there is a lack of an available means for alternative expression in industrialized nations. Proponents see culture jamming as a resistance movement to the hegemony of popular culture, based on the ideas of "guerrilla communication".
Culture jamming's intent differs from that of artistic appropriation (which is done for art's sake) and vandalism (where destruction or defacement is the primary goal), although its results are not always so easily distinguishable."
Colombia
Bansky, UK
Oxford, United Kingdom
Latin America"A good jam, in other words, is an x-ray of the subconscious of a campaign, uncovering not an opposite meaning but the deeper truth hiding beneath the layers of advertising euphemisms." Naomi Klein, NO LOGO
Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_jam
Klein, Naomi. NO LOGO. New York: Picador 2002.
http://www.tni.org/detail_page.phtml?act_id=16129&username=guest@tni.org&password=9999&publish=Y
