Fashion Slashin'

'The beauty industry is the beast'

Advertising within the Fashion Industry uses people's bodies to sell a product. It's concerning how desensitised we have become to seeing underweight, even gaunt-looking models, which are use to indicate what kind of appearance is appealing. In the mid 1990's Adbusters created a parody of Calvin Klein's advertising campaign. The jammers subverted the usual fashionable image of the brand to of a woman vomiting over a toilet whilst questioning 'why are 9/10 women dissatisfied with some aspect of their bodies?'

   

Unswooshing

Adbuster's launched a campaign against Nike with an aim to 'uncool' the Sportwear brand and expose the use of unethical sweatshops and human right abuses. Culture Jammer's have used various tactics to create parodies of Nike's advertisements including replacing Tiger Wood's smile with a trademark 'Swoosh,' replacing Nike's slogan with 'Just Don't Do It' and also personalising Nike trainer's with words such as 'Sweatshop.'    

I found a very interesting article on http://www.antimedia.net/nikesweatshop/ called 'Jamming the Jammer's.' This Article explains how Nike are aware of the effect and popularity of Jamming and have decided to use it as an advantage by 'jamming their own billboards,' the corporation seeks to get as much media coverage as it can get. 

Here is an example of what the author of the article wrote about Nike's tactic of 'Jamming the Jammers':

'This is really dangerous stuff because it adds to the cynicism felt by ordinary citizens to do something about their world. By pretending to be a group of ordinary citizens expressing community concern, but in fact being just the latest branding tactic of a largely faceless transnational corporation, it casts doubt on every other community group organising around principles of community concern. Every time I now hear a community group expressing concern I will wonder what corporate interests are at stake.'

Below is an example of an Adbuster 'tactical briefing' to help 'unswoosh' Nike:

'Just do it: Don't busy another pair of Nikes and urge your friends to do the same. If you already own a pair then take a marker and paint a blackspot over the logo for all to see. And next time you walk past a Niketown, slap a Just Douche It or All Empires must Fall poster on the front door or window...or better still, go inside and draw little black dots everywhere. And help spread the #UNSWOOSHNIKE meme so the whole world knows that Nike's production of top down, mega corporate cool is final coming to an end.'

(https://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/tactical-briefing)

Culture Jam - Kalle Lasn

Kalle Lasn, publisher of Abusters and activist, is a leading figure in the culture jamming movement. I have recently read Lasn's book 'Culture Jam: How to reverse America's suicidal consumer binge' which argues that 'America is no longer a country. It's a multitrillion-dollar brand' which sells it's image and ideals to the rest of the world. The book also describes how consumer culture has evolved into Guy Debord's concept of the spectacle, 'real living had been replaced by prepackaged experiences and media-created events.'   

(Culture Jammer's Manifesto)

Lasn explains who the jammer's are by saying directly what they are not, Lefties, feminists, slackers (...) he also states what the jammer's will do: 'We will uncool its fashions and celebrities, its icons, signs and spectacles. We will jam its image factory until the day it comes to a sudden, shuddering halt. And then on the ruins of the old consumer culture, we will build a new one with a noncommercial heart and soul'

Within the first chapter 'Autumn' a particular section stood out to me. Lasn makes the point that we are now overloaded by information, we are presented with so much information that it is no longer 'useful' and that the quality of the information around us is hyped and in most cases stretches the truth. We have seen so much that we lose our ability to be shocked by what we see. Lasn describes 'the erosion of empathy' he uses the example of the image of a starving child, which we have know become used to seeing on television,  'The first time we saw a starving child on a late-night TV ad, we were appalled. Maybe we sent money. As these images became more familiar, though, our compassion evaporate.'

When considering Lasn's points on consumerism, capitalism and culture jamming I want to consider arguments against Lasn, such as if he is being too extreme, whether 'Culture Jam' widely focuses on opinion rather than fact or whether Lasn could be bias in anyway.

d.

The Spectacle - Guy Debord

"The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images."

Guy Debord became an important figure of the Situationist movement. The Situationists (1957-1972) were a group of intellectuals and artists who rejected bourgeois art and the post World War Two capitalist, consumer society. 

'Situationist Guy deBord suggested in the 60s that we were living in a "society of the spectacle" - where real leisure and real living had been replaced by pre-packaged experiences and media-created events. Other Situationists practiced detournement as a response: most would take images from advertising, the mass media, or popular culture, and change the dialogue subtly so as to reveal the ideologies masked in everyday media experience (http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/culture_jamming2.html)

I definately found the 'Society of the Spectacle' a difficult read, however, I found Debord's concept of the spectacle is still, if not more, relevant today where we have vast amounts of saturated imagery distractions and media-created events which replace real life experiences. Below are a few scans of sections I found interesting, I especially thought the spectacle occupying social spaces is particularly relevant to my research

 'It [the spectacle] is the heart of unrealism if the real society. In all its specific forms as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life.' (Guy Debord 1967, Society of the Spectacle) 

The concept of the spectacle lead me to think about Baudrillard's point that the post-modern society is a 'hyperreality.' Baudrillard argues thats reality has been replaced by simulacra, where we only experience prepared, edited or reproduced realities.

Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs

The essay 'Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs' was written by Mark Derry, the cultural critic, in 1993 and is said to have popularised the concept of culture jamming.

'It is a postmodern commonplace that our lives are intimately and inextricably bound up in the TV experience. Ninety-eight percent of all American households — more than have indoor plumbing — have at least one television, which is on seven hours a day, on the average. Dwindling funds for public schools and libraries, counterpointed by the skyrocketing sales of VCRs and electronic games, have given rise to a culture of “aliteracy,” defined by Roger Cohen as “the rejection of books by children and young adults who know how to read but choose not to.” The drear truth that two thirds of Americans get “most of their information” from television is hardly a revelation.'

'Reality isn’t what it used to be. In America, factory capitalism has been superseded by an information economy characterized by the reduction of labor to the manipulation, on computers, of symbols that stand in for the manufacturing process. The engines of industrial production have slowed, yielding to a phantasmagoric capitalism that produces intangible commodities — Hollywood blockbusters, television sit-coms, catchphrases, jingles, buzzwords, images, one-minute megatrends, financial transactions flickering through fiberoptic bundles. Our wars are Nintendo wars, fought with camera-equipped smart bombs that marry cinema and weaponry in a television that kills. Futurologists predict that the flagship technology of the coming century will be “virtual reality,” a computer-based system that immerses users wearing headgear wired for sight and sound in computer-animated worlds. In virtual reality, the television swallows the viewer, headfirst.'

"the radical politics of visual literacy, an idea eloquently argued by Stuart Ewen, a critic of consumer culture. 

'We live at a time when the image has become the predominant mode of public address, eclipsing all other forms in the structuring of meaning,” asserts Ewen. “Yet little in our education prepares us to make sense of the rhetoric, historical development or social implications of the images within our lives.” In a society of heat, light and electronic poltergeists — an eerie otherworld of “illimitable vastness, brilliant light, and the gloss and smoothness of material things”

I found reading the essay useful as to why people would decide to use culture jamming to reject or resist the media environment. This particular section of the essay talks about the 'TV experience' and how, quite depressingly, television has become where we get a large amount of our information from. Within the essay I was most interested in Derry's argument that 'Reality isn't what it used to be' similar to Debord's 'Spectacle' Derry describes our society as 'an eerie otherworld of "illimitable vastness, brilliant light and the gloss and smoothness of material things.'

The Citizen's Art

(Communication, Cultural and Media Studies: The Key Concepts, John Hartley)

I found this short extract useful as a introduction to the term 'culture jamming' it explains how Culture Jamming is active and is about doing rather than theorising. Using the term the 'Citizen's Art' or 'Guerrilla Art' seems very appropriate for describing culture jamming because it puts in to perspective that anyone can create these anti-coporate campaigns.

Defining Culture Jamming

(image: https://www.adbusters.org)

What is Culture Jamming? Why and how is it carried out? What are it's main influences? And is it an effective form of media activism? These are some of the questions I want to be able to answer through my researching the topic of Culture Jamming as a starting point for my dissertation research. Through studying Graphic Design I have become much more aware of the imagery and advertising a round me - selling a product, demanding our attention and persuading us to consume . This lead me to be interested in the way that some people choose to reject and rebel against this constant flow of information, and if they could really make a difference.

• Culture Jamming is a form of commercial, social and political communication and is used as media activism. 
• It can be linked to movements such as the Punks, Dadaists, Surrealistics and the Situationalists. 
• Culture jammers use Subvertising and Detournement to hijack, de-myth and un-cool corporations and advertisements. 
• It is used tactically to expose underlying truths and raise awareness. 

'At their core, all culture jamming actions have a central intention: to challenge or disrupt dominant discourse with a dose of subversion and creativity. These actions use hacking and the spreading of disinformation as tactics – and they often use the same tools as mass media and marketing to create their disruptions.'

'Culture jamming is a tactic that embodies these and more: scathing critiques, clever reversals, hijacked official versions, subverted language, re-appropriated visuals. To jam is to interrupt the flow of information controlled by governments, corporations, the advertising industry, media corporations, fundamental religious leaders and other powerful people in society. In doing so, the lies, deceptions and sheer absurdities in their messages are laid bare.'

(https://informationactivism.org)