“Culture Jamming, or sniggling, is the act of using existing
mass media to comment on those very media themselves, using
the original medium's communication method. It is based on
the idea that advertising is little more than propaganda for
established interests, and that there is little escape from<
this propaganda in industrialized nations. […] The word,
"culture jamming" comes from the idea of radio jamming: that
public frequencies can be pirated and subverted for
independent communication, or to disrupt dominant frequencies.
The Situationist International first made the comparison to
radio jamming in 1968, when it proposed the use of guerrilla
communication within mass media to sow confusion within the
dominant culture. […] Culture jamming is a form of activism
and a resistance movement to the hegemony of popular culture,
based on the ideas of "guerrilla communication" and the
"detournement" of popular icons and ideas.

- from Wikipedia, the peer produced encyclopaedia.

• How does this temporality relate to the high-rising expectations of a permanent change?
• Is there a life-cycle of anti-consumerism as a product?
• In which phase is it in various local contexts, from the well established North American markets to the early adopters in postsocialist societies?
• How does contemporary consumer culture sell in these contexts?
• How to localise this critique in a non-differentiated global consumer culture?
• What are the local roots of culture jamming, like samizdat and avant-garde movements were in Eastern Europe?

Panel leader:
Kembrew McLeod (University of Iowa)

Confirmed panel participants:
Alexandre Piquard (The Yes Men)
Marcell Mars (Multimedijalni institut)
Sebastian Luetgert (textz.com / piratecinema.org)
Nalini P. Kotamraju (University of California at Berkeley)
Petko Dourmana (InterSpace Media Art Center)

Paper presenters:

Dan Mercea: Exploding Iconography: the Mindbomb Project

Klaus Schönberger: How “false“ information creates true events: Persistent and recombined forms of activist communication through internet fakes and hoaxes.

Megan Boler: “A New Form of Desperation”: the Visual Politics of Irony and Multimedia after 9/11

Anthony McCann: Diagnostic Opportunities: Resistance and the Masks of Hegemony

Magdalena Wojcieszak: Frankfurtschool.com, The Application of the Frankfurt Schools’ Critical Scholarship to the Internet