Culture Jamming 2.0

By Sam Williams

[A similar version of this story appeared in SF Weekly as "The Medium is the Message." This version is an updated modification of the pre-edited draft.]


It's late afternoon, and a crowd of weary commuters is standing on the platform of San Francisco's Montgomery Street BART station. To pass the time and to avoid eye contact, most watch the overhead MetroChannel monitors. Between train updates, the smiling faces of KGO-TV newscasters Terilyn Joe and Dan Ashley beam down.

When a gust of wind indicates an imminent arrival, all eyes look up. The Channel 7 ad switches over to the characteristic lettering of a BART destination message -- only instead of announcing the incoming Fremont train, it makes an unusual announcement. "Capitalism Stops at Nothing," the monitors read, in unison.

The message blinks twice before giving way to the train's actual destination. For a few fleeting seconds, a hundred commuters scratch their heads, look quizzically at one another and wonder the same exact thing: What the hell was that all about?

Welcome to the world of 21st century culture jamming.

Coined by the Berkeley, Calif. art-rock group Negativland in the early 1980s, the term "culture jamming" refers to the practice of deliberately disrupting, distorting, or subverting mainstream media messages. Some call it "media hacking," an attempt to tie the practice to similar, mischievious pursuits in the software arena. Still, as Mark Nery, author of Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs, notes, the art of culture jamming draws its inspiration and history from an era well-before personal computers.

" 'Jamming' is CB slang for the illegal practice of interrupting radio broadcasts or conversations between fellow hams with lip farts, obscenities, and other equally jejune hijinx," Nery writes. "Culture jamming, by contrast, is directed against an ever more intrusive, instrumental technoculture whose operant mode is the manufacture of consent through the manipulation of symbols."

Nery traces the spirit of culture jamming back to the absurdist carnival traditions of medieval Europe. Most modern historians, however, would regard the brief dada art movement of the early 1920s and the absurdist Situationist International movement of the 1950s as the primary artistic influences of today's culture jamming community.

In the San Francisco Bay area, the community of artists willing to accept the "culture jammer" label trace the movement's roots to clandestine groups such as the Billboard Liberation Front, a team of guerrilla artists who began "improving" local billboards and taking credit for it as early as 1979. Others point to Negativland. The group's famous remake of the U2 song "Where the Streets Have No Name," a song which included outtakes of an off-air rant by disc jockey Casey Kasem, led to a years-long legal battle with the Irish group's record label, Island Records.

Lately, however, a new guard of culture jamming artists has been creeping out of the corners of the urban landscape. Where artists in the 1970s and '80s sought to add "noise to the signal," cultjam-speak for the sometimes illegal alteration of existing works, their 1990s progeny seem more content to avoid head-on confrontations with property owners and the law.

Andy Cox, the artist behind the short-lived "Capitalism Stops at Nothing" campaign, is a primary exemplar of the new culture jamming aesthetic. A civil engineer with a master's of fine arts degree from San Francisco State University, Cox says he came up with the idea for the "Capitalism" ad, predictably, while waiting for a BART train and watching the advertisements running on the overhead monitors.

"I noticed that two things were happening," Cox recalls. "The train destinations were coming up all the time, and they were asking people to advertise. They put up a phone number, and I thought, 'Why not?'"

Cox, who doesn't advocate any particular political ideology despite the tone of his work, says he paid roughly $800 to New Jersey-based MetroChannel, owner of the in-station monitors. At first, the company was happy to accept the money and ran the ad without edit. When riders complained, however, company execs, realizing they'd been duped, pulled the ad. Cox, already surprised by MetroChannel's original willingness to run the ad, considered the resulting controversy an added bonus.

"I tried calling other people, trying to get them to take the ad, including various ad companies," Cox says. "Except for MetroChannel, the all told me to call the Art Commission instead."

Filmmaker Craig Baldwin, a San Francisco filmmaker whose credits include Sonic Outlaws, a documentary about Negativland and other "audio jammer" groups, has been a student of the culture jamming phenomenon since it first appeared in the mid-'70s. He says Cox's "Capitalism" campaign has its precedents, most notably the 1979-1983 "Truisms" campaign by multimedia artist Jenny Holzer. In that campaign, Holzer used stock tickers, electronic billboards, and stadium scoreboards to flash sardonic messages like "money creates taste" and "murder has its sexual side" at captive audiences.

Where Holzer's "truisms" shocked and occasionally humored, Cox's "Capitalism" message merely mystifies. Baldwin sees a telling hint of defeatism in the work's tone. Unwilling to challenge an advertiser in direct, head-to-head fashion, it merely sounds a note of pessimistic frustration.

"People now are even more resigned to the pop culture world in general and advertising in particular," Baldwin says. "I think the utopian belief that we could just join together and get rid of [mass advertising] has come and gone."

Baldwin's comments extend to the work of Gordon Winiemko and Julie Wyman, creators of the short film Enjoy. The film, a satire about the huge neon Coca-Cola billboard at Fourth and Brannan streets in San Francisco's South of Market district, is less about lashing back than about acceptance.

"We referred to it as 'post-rage' when we were making it," says Winiemko. "When I look at billboards in the city, I don't see these corporate representatives. I see the art work of our culture. Just like any artwork, it expresses values, for better or for worse."

The resulting film brings to mind the cargo cults documented by 1950s anthropologists. Following World War II, South Pacific islanders built mock airplanes out of discarded engine blocks, Coke bottles and Spam cans in spiritual homage to the god-like B-17s and Corsairs that had dominated their skies during the wartime years. In a similar fashion, Winiemko and Wyman play a pair of semi-fictional "Cokeheads" out to achieve spiritual one-ness with the flashing neon Coca-Cola billboard.

Half "stalk-umentary," half semiotics lecture, Enjoy leaves the viewer scratching his or her head. Is this a critique or a celebration of a brand image that, according to the 1997 Encyclopedia of Brand Names, comes in second only to the Christian cross in terms of universal recognition?

For observers like Baldwin, the answer is, Yes.

"There's kind of a love-hate relationship going on," says Baldwin, who has seen the film and considers its deliberate vagueness to be in the same spirit as the "Capitalism" campaign. "They say we'll take this object, this crass commercial object, and we'll make it the central piece in our video. They don't disavow it like other artists do."

Winiemko, speaking as the film's co-creator, accepts Baldwin's interpretation. "We really do love that sign," he says. "We love it for its beautiful monstrosity and for its monstrous beauty."

Baldwin reserves his highest praise, however, for the group behind the "Seismic Solution" messages that popped up around the Mission and SOMA Districts during the heady last years of dotcom mania. A sly protest of the over-gentrification of San Francisco, the stickers and posters cheerfully anticipate a repeat of the 1906 earthquake. Implicit in the joke is the belief that the only way to curb the excesses of modern society is to destroy everything and start anew. Instead of lamenting high rents and the latest franchised restaurants and coffee shops, the "Seismic Solution" cheers them as yet another sign of a city stampeding over the brink.

"Our messages are meant to be seen as social commentary, meant to inspire thought about the state of the world, meant to make people think and laugh," reads an online polemic posted by an anonymous representative of the group. "We are the seismic messengers spreading the word about a city that's reached its limit."

By mating the guerrilla-art attitude of early BLF "subvertisements" with the style of a legitimate public-service ad campaign, Baldwin says, Seismic Solution has elevated the "jujitsu" aesthetic prized by early culture jammers.

"Jujitsu is the art of using the weight of the enemy against itself," Baldwin explains. "With corporations, sometimes the only way to beat them is not by brute force, but by symbolic agility."

For 1980s culture jammers, the "jiujitsu aesthetic," meant using the same symbols and techniques as the major ad agencies and altering works in such a way that it took a while for viewers to notice that the lettering that read "Joe Camel" now reads "Joe Chemo."

In the case of "Seismic Solution" the "jiujitsu aesthetic" still applies, albeit with a twist. By framing their "campaign" as an ordinary public service campaign, purloining the graphics and fonts from past public service campaigns to make it all the more authentic, the artists behind "Seismic Solution" have changed the rules slightly. No longer is it a corporate or government symbol flying over the vandal-slash-artist's hip. Instead, it's the reader himself. "It's a booby trap," Baldwin says. "People are confused by the message, but they're drawn in by the language and style. Once they're seduced by it, they're hit over the head by that seduction. The beauty of the presentation makes it work like an ad. It calls into question the whole frame, the whole purpose of advertising."

Winiemko says he has observed a similar "booby trap" effect in watching audiences react to Enjoy on the film festival circuit. "When people see it, there's a confusion at first," Winiemko says. "After about five minutes they start asking, 'Is this a joke?' After that, they start to put down their defenses and examine it for what it is."

Aping the style of mainstream advertising has its disadvantages. Where old-school culture jammers could guarantee attention for the work by choosing a prominent billboard to deface, the new generation is forced to rely on more subtle techniques if it wants to appear original. As Winiemko puts it, today's subversion-minded artist is less concerned with hijacking billboards and more interested in "hijacking the internal thought process that makes advertising work."

Hijacking the internal thought process of any viewer is no easy task. Given the number of advertising images an ordinary American views nowadays, Winiemko and his counterparts have to work as hard as any advertising executive when thinking up a fresh twist on an old game.

"A lot of our culture is based on people giving something one cursory glance," Winiemko laments. "That's hurt us a few times. People don't want to take the extra time to look at something and find out what it's really about."

Maybe that's why the artists behind Seismic Solution, "Capitalism" and Enjoy, along with other hard-to-pigeonhole people and groups such as the pie-throwing Biotic Baking Brigade, collectively rely on the same increasingly popular tool: ironic humor. Just as recent advertising campaigns like Tanqueray's "Mr. Jenkins" series have co-opted culture jamming's style, it seems artists have stolen a page from such ad agencies as San Francisco's Goodby Silverstein & Partners, creators of the "Got Milk" campaign. Simply put, humor sells -- even when you're selling subversion.

"A lot of artists I know tell me they can't get their message out without some form of ironic twist," says Cox. "Unless your work does something funny, the mainstream media isn't going to report on it, and you really need the mainstream media nowadays to get your message out."