While reading recently the many fascinating works of the members of the Situationist International, a group active in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s but who continue to inspire oppositional and underground cultures today with their streetwise cultural practices, I was surprised to learn how much their idea of détournement prefigures the activities we associate today with culture jamming. Whether mining the vast treasure-trove of moving and print images of the twentieth century and mixing it in new ways or literally ripping a page from today's headlines to reposition it, the aim of culture jamming is to repurpose, remix, and recontextualize the original image in such a way as to open it up to new scrutiny. The subversion of the messages of the mainstream media through the use of their own tools and images has become a favored practice of oppositional politically-engaged artists.

In their 1956 essay "A User's Guide to Détournement," Guy Debord and Gil J Wolman argue that the materials of cinema are particularly conducive for radical practices. Debord and Woman write, "The powers of film are so extensive, and the absence of coordination of those powers is so glaring, that virtually any film that is above the miserable average can provide matter for endless polemics among spectators or professional critics." They argue that a film like D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, which they profess shouldn't be shown because of its racist images, could be detourned by adding a soundtrack that denounced imperialist war and the activities of the KKK. When I read that passage, I thought that indeed the Situationists truly deserved to be called avant-garde. Some fifty years later, D.J. Spooky took the same film, remixed it, added a new soundtrack and new scenes and visuals to create D.J. Spooky's Rebirth of a Nation, all with the intended affect. The Situationists' additional strategy of detourning cinema, cutting up otherwise unworthy movies and remixing the scenes and adding new elements, has certainly caught on with experimental filmmakers.   

With intellectual roots in the collages of the Dadaists and later in the practices of détournement with the SI, cultural jamming began to flourish in the United States in the last couple of decades in the San Francisco Bay area and in the Pacific Northwest. Craig Baldwin, a San Francisco-based filmmaker and cultural jammer, has led the way in repurposing the treasures of the archive in service of oppositional culture. With his move from the East to the West Coast, Baldwin's friend Rick Prelinger further developed his already extraordinary collection of readily available ephemeral films into a wellspring for creative media artists in the area. Of course, with the Internet Archive available online, artists living anywhere have been encouraged to make use of the material. Berkeley, California serves as home to Ken Knabb, the translator, theorist, publisher and otherwise keeper of the flame of Situationalist texts and Guy Debord's filmscripts. From Vancouver, Adbusters, a non-profit magazine, serves as the flagship of the global Culture Jammers Network and its advocacy of earth-friendly political tools and media literacy. Outside of this West Coast culture of creativity, notable culture jammers include the Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping, based in New York, and Toronto-based Carly Stasko. Also in New York, artist Barbara Kruger has long turned her Madison Avenue training in graphic arts on its head with feminist attacks on the messages of advertising.

A few documentaries on culture jammers include Jill Sharpe's Culture Jam: Hijacking Commercial Culture (2001), a documentary that profiles Baldwin, Reverend Billy, and Stasko and examines their attempts to challenge corporate media domination. Filmmaker Pedro Carvajal has made a couple of films addressing the issue - Citizen Art: Culture Jamming (1996) follows the Cicada Corps, a six-member group that modifies junk food and tobacco ads, and POPaganda - The Art & Crimes of Ron English 2004, made with Ron English.

For those interested in learning more about culture jamming, Craig Baldwin's films available on Reframe are a good place to begin - Tribulation 99 (1995), Sonic Outlaws (1995), and Spectres of the Spectrum (1999). The last film takes the found footage of the archive and mixes in new scenes and voice-over narration to create a full-length 16 mm original science-fiction epic film. The premise is the creation of a secret weapon the elites have designed to erase people's minds. The film exudes many of the other elements associated with the intellectual culture of Dadaists, Situationists, and culture jammers - satire, a keen irony and a vigorous sense of play.

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