Why brands are the US Army – and culture jammers are the Viet Cong

In this guest posting, Dave Burgess, who painted ‘No War’ on the Sydney Opera House, claims that ‘amoral’ advertisers have copied his idea.

Culture jamming is a 28-year-old term coined by the San Francisco-based band Negativland, who declared that the ‘Studio for the cultural jammer is the world at large’. The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought defines culture jamming more narrowly as: ‘The manipulation of the mass media by artists and activists. The intent, in most cases, is to critique the media’s manipulation of reality, lampoon consumerism, or question corporate power.’

I prefer Negativland’s idea, as it doesn’t limit an act of culture jamming to only taking place in the mass media. Human behaviour doesn’t change much over time. It merely gets the opportunity to play itself out with newer and faster technology. The truth is that acts of parody and subversion has been around since year dot. But opportunists in every generation like to believe that they have invented something new and rebrand it with a new name, in our case the ‘culture jammers’ and, in the now and immediate future, the “hacktivists”.

Of course, modern acts of culture jamming are most effective in the mass media as it is a dynamic fertile playground, and also the most visible platform given the large potential to be seen. But they are not restricted to it. Our action atop the Sydney Opera House on the day of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was an act of culture jamming. But we were also culture jammed ourselves – by the media and advertisers.