Comment from Mary Dery Promotional materials, correspondence, media coverage of “billboard bandits” such as The Billboard Liberation Front (BLF), Cicada Corps of Artists, BUGA UP (Australian), Ron English, etc. whose guerrilla media criticism takes the form of clandestine, illegal alterations of billboards (and other advertisements in public spaces) to subversive effect, often in the service of anti-advertising or anti-consumerist agendas. - Smashing the Image Factory, user’s manual on the theory and practice of billboard banditry. - Notes for, and final typescript draft of, my seminal essay on “subvertising,” which includes a mention of billboard banditry. - “The Billboard Jungle,” Mother Jones, May/June 2000 - Publisher’s catalogue page for Advertising Outdoors: Watch This Space! - Utne Reader article, “The Billboard Commandos,” about billboard banditry - “Billboard Corrections,” article on BB by noted art historian and scholar Douglas Kahn (author of a respected study of proto-jammer John...

Comment from Mary Dery Exhaustive file devoted to the seminal culture jammers and audio-collage band Negativland, which coined the term “cultural jamming” on its cassette release Jamcon ’84. From the band’s website: “Illegal radio antics abound as Crosley Bendix hosts a tumultuous convention for jammers and coins the now-popular term ‘cultural jamming.’” https://negativland.com/products/004-ote-1-jamcon-84 File includes promotional photo of the band, catalogue of the band’s record releases, press releases, record reviews and profiles of the band as well as media coverage of the rock group U2’s lawsuit against Negativland for its parodic cover of a U2 song (most notably, a Mondo 2000 cover story on the controversy whose centerpiece is a lengthy interview with members of Negativland), Keyboard magazine editorial by the band, Keyboard feature by the band, letter to the editor of Keyboard about Negativland and copyright, Negativland op-eds about Fair Use, related articles about rap band 2 Live Crew’s Fair...

Comment from Mark Dery

File contains promo postcard for Shooting Back, “an education and media center teaching photography, writing, and related arts to homeless at-risk youth in the Washington, DC area”; book, The Paper Tiger Television Guide to Media Activism; promo materials for Paper Tiger; article on the Gulf Crisis TV Project, which critiqued “the role of corporate media in the formation of public consent around the [Persian Gulf] war”; promo materials for Not Channel Zero (“an alternative news/cultural forum coming from an Afrocentric perspective”); two issues of The Independent magazine, “a publication of the Foundation for Independent Video and Film”; press materials from Deep Dish T.V. Network, “the first national grassroots satellite network,” “video by and for activists, distributed by satellite to public access cable channels and home dish owners nationwide.”

Comment from Mark Dery From ProcessedWorld.com’s “About” page: “Processed World magazine was founded in 1981 by a small group of dissidents, mostly in their twenties, who were then working in San Francisco’s financial district. The magazine’s creators found themselves using their only marketable skill after years of university education: ‘handling information.’ … [T]he choice to work ‘temp’ was also a refusal to join the rush toward business/yuppie professionalism. Instead of 40-70 hour weeks at thankless corporate career climbing, they sought more free time to pursue their creative instincts. Nevertheless, day after day, they found themselves cramming into public transit en route to the ever-expanding Abusement Park of the financial district. Thus, from the start, the project’s expressed purpose was twofold: to serve as a contact point and forum for malcontent office workers (and wage-workers in general) and to provide a creative outlet for people whose talents were blocked by what they were doing...

Comment from Mark Dery

Folder contains examples of subvertising by various culture jammers.

Comment from Mark Dery

File contains pamphlets, articles related to Situationism, culture jamming’s most immediate—and ideologically consonant—historical precedent.

Comment from Mark Dery

The writings of, and interviews with, Stuart Ewen, an eminent historian of visual culture (especially advertising and propaganda) and noted media critic, exerted a profound influence on my thinking about culture jamming. I corresponded with Ewen over the years and maintained an on-again, off-again collegial relationship with him. The file contains articles by and about Ewen, reviews of his books, and other materials related to his activities not only as a critic of “the Society of the Spectacle” (Guy DeBord) but as a jammer himself, through projects such as Encyclopaedia Billboardica.

Comment from Mark Dery

Ant Farm (“an experimental design team developing art and architecture”) was a pioneering group of culture jammers whose performance art work, Media Burn (1975), helped catalyze my theorization of culture jamming. I describe that piece in the opening paragraph of my pamphlet on CJ.

File contains correspondence with Antfarm co-founder Doug Michels, Michels’s CV, articles on Michels and Ant Farm as well as Michels’s other conceptual-art projects, some of which share with Ant Farm’s activities a spirit of sociopolitical satire; materials related to Ant Farm co-founder Chip Lord;
and, in mailing envelope, postcards documenting video works and performance pieces by Chip Lord (and Mickey McGowan; “Easy Living”), Ant Farm (“The Cadillac Ranch,” “Media Burn”), and Lord, Michels, and Hudson Marquez [“S.T.P. (Save the Planets”)].