Chris Barton: All hail era of the digital punk pirate
5:00AM
Thursday April 10, 2008
By Chris Barton
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Sometime in 2005, an iPod billboard was culture jammed. The New York advertisement - a hipster in silhouette holding the must-have accessory - was affixed with a speech bubble in which some wag wrote: "I steal music, and I'm not going away."
It is one of many jammed billboards that form artist Ji Lee's Bubble Project (www.thebubbleproject.com). Lee put blank speech bubbles on signs to give voice to anyone who wanted to add their thoughts.
Culture jamming, according to Matt Mason in his book The Pirate's Dilemma, is the act of subverting any kind of corporate control, especially advertising. "Remix" billboards with graffiti that changes the meaning of their messages are an example of branding's "blowback" - "a way to strike up conversation with the advertising industry by heckling it".
Mason, whose book is subtitled How hackers, punk capitalists and graffiti millionaires are re-mixing our culture and changing the world, is big on blowback. "The blowback from centuries of advertising and the privatisation of common spaces ... has armed corporations with new branding tools as much as it has encouraged people to counteract these intrusions," he writes.
