culture jam – Remix Culture

A culture jam uses the media of a dominant culture (corporate, entertainment, political) to criticize and subvert the ends of that culture.

Culture jams may be audio, video, or still images, and could possibly exist in other modes as well.

A culture jam is something more than a parody (of, say, an ad). Its intentions are to disturb you and your normal passive unconscious consumption of mainstream culture.

Dominant culture typically aims at seduction, reassurance, a pleasing message, and to keep you unconscious of its “constructedness” (that it is not just the natural way of the world). Ads, for instance, aim to make you feel good about what they are showing you, and to desire it. For instance, a beer ad, two attractive young people, the girl in a bikini, everybody looking good and happy, familiar, nothing you need to think about.

Parodies tend to “laugh off” dominant culture stuff that we may not always be comfortable with, leaving it still accepted and normalized in our culture.

Culture jams typically try to be disturbing, upsetting, disruptive, leave you uncomfortable or even outraged. They want to make you feel different about the dominant culture.

Wikipedia:

Culture jamming is a form of disruption that plays on the emotions of viewers and bystanders. Jammers want to disrupt the unconscious thought process that takes place when most consumers view a popular advertising and bring about a détournement.

Activists that utilize this tactic are counting on their meme to pull on the emotional strings of people and evoke some type of reaction. The reactions that most cultural jammers are hoping to evoke are behavioral change and political action. There are four emotions that activists often want viewers to feel. These emotions – shock, shame, fear, and anger – are believed to be the catalysts for social change.

Though its practitioners may not mention it, or in some cases even know about it, culture jamming is an application and example of the Situationists’ idea of détournement.

iPad culture jam

For instance, take a look at the culture jam at the left. Though clever and “funny,” it is more than a parody. It draws our attention to how “First World” the desire to have a thinner device is, and how useless such a thing is as a gift to an African (presumably) child who is dying from hunger. The intention is to make us feel guilty for our comparative wealth and to see our own consumer experience in a new, more viscerally real light.

There is more to it than that, for the informed viewer. The image could also be viewed as the starving African child giving the iPad to the person with the white hand. This might seem absurd unless you know something about the entire iPad manufacturing process. Many minerals are required to make an iPad, and these include what have come to be called “conflict minerals” (they include cassiterite (for tin), wolframite (for tungsten), coltan (for tantalum), and gold). These minerals are often mined in central Africa, and there have been many reports showing that they are sometimes mined by children in forced labour camps, and the profits used to support arms purchases to continue conflicts in countries such as the Congo. Apple and other technology giants try to keep the dirty supply chain that often leads to your cool device from public consciousness, but there have been attempts to trace back the parts and labour to such appalling origins as the suicidal workers in a Chinese Foxconn campus and the war-financing human rights violations of forced child labour in Central Africa. For a viewer who grapples seriously with the image, there may be at least a small, genuine consciousness-raising experience in seeing this culture jam.

The term culture jam was coined by the artist collective Negativland to refer to their appropriative and countercultural take on the mainstream media. One of their best-known culture jams is Guns, which tries to make us see our fascination with firearms in a new way, and in particular how we pass this fascination on to our children:

Here is another classic Negativland culture jam.

You can watch Sonic Outlaws, Craig Baldwin’s 1995 documentary about Negativland and other early jammers, on YouTube.

The mashup documentary Rip! A Remix Manifesto (2008) discusses culture jamming at length. In this segment, Negativland’s Mark Hosler talks about why he thinks this kind of appropriation is legitimate. Part of his argument is that our public space is saturated with the messages of the mass media, and that we have no choice about this, even though the space is arguably a shared public commons.

Most culture jams end up being critiques not of specific politicians, parties, or products, but of consumer mass culture itself. A simple form of culture jam is to attack a well-known product to criticize the broader politics, morality, destructive values, unhealthiness etc of our consumer world.

Culture jams taking off on ads are sometimes referred to as subvertising. A franchise like Adbusters has capitalized on this kind of parody/satire/critique of consumer brands.

A basic form of subtervising is changing a company’s logo in a satirical way. Some people have started treating this as a form of meme hacking, because corporate logos are among the most widespread and recognized memes in our world, understanding memes broadly.

Though such take-offs can be funny and critical, many viewers will assume that the attack is on a particular brand, rather than the whole way our world is currently commodified and marketed. For instance, people might watch “The Greatest Taste Around” and think that the target is Pepsi, rather than the overall situation with junk food, seductive advertising, our addiction to the media, etc.

Here is a culture jam that is somewhat effective, but perhaps grades too easily into parody or coolness:

Notice how the slick production and edgy music somewhat detracts from the message and reaffirms some of the elements of Apple’s cultural force.