A History of Culture Jamming

The Words, "Culture Jamming"

Come from the idea of radio jamming: that public frequencies can be pirated and subverted for independent communication, or to disrupt dominant frequencies. The Situationist International first made the comparison to radio jamming in 1968, when it proposed the use of guerrilla communication within mass media to sow confusion within the dominant culture. (Kalle Lasn, the founder of AdBusters magazine, wrote a book entitled Culture Jam, but the term predates his title.)UrbanDictionary


More History

Each bullet is its own unique instance of Culture Jamming. Since there can be no one definition of what it is to Culture Jam, each one of these examples shows a different side of the art.

· “Jamming is part of a historical continuum that includes Russian Samizdat (underground publishing in defiance of official censorship)



· The anti-fascist photomontages of John Heartfield



· The underground journalism of ’60s radicals such as Paul Krassner, Jerry Rubin, and Abbie Hoffman



· Yippie street theater such as the celebrated attempt to levitate the Pentagon



· Parody religions such as the Dallas-based Church of the Subgenius



· Workplace sabotage of the sort documented by Processed World, a magazine for disaffected data entry drones



· The ecopolitical monkeywrenching of Earth First!



· The random acts of Artaudian cruelty that radical theorist Hakim Bey calls “poetic terrorism” (“weird dancing in all-night computer banking lobbies…bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks”)



· The insurgent use of the “cut-up” collage technique proposed by William Burroughs in“Electronic Revolution” (“The control of the mass media depends on laying down lines of association…Cut/up techniques could swamp the mass media with total illusion”)



· Subcultural bricolage (the refunctioning, by societal “outsiders,” of symbols associated with the dominant culture, as in the appropriation of corporate attire and Vogue model poses by poor, gay, and largely nonwhite drag queens).”


Courtesy of Mark Dery