My area of expertise will be "adbusting" and "culture jamming," which use images, text and design to "jam" the cultural framework of advertisements in public spaces.
I have been interested in this type of cultural experiment since I was in middle school; during that time the war in Iraq had just started, and the magazine Adbusters had just started becoming popular. I have fond memories of laying on the hammock in my backyard after school reading all of my issues cover to cover.
This is the statement on Adbuster's website, https://www.adbusters.org/: "We are a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age. Our aim is to topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we live in the 21st century."
Pretty heavy stuff.
But each edition of their magazine is an art relic. It's essentially a novel and art book in one (despite the sometimes god-awful graphic design). Their goal is to spread social, political and environmental awareness through print media.
I will be exploring Adbusters more thoroughly throughout the following weeks.
I also want to talk about Jordan Seiler. You can see a page of New York magazine that I scanned above. The tagline says "Jordan Seiler, 29, is on a mission to replace outdoor advertisements with art. Late last month, he coordinated a stealth campaign to whitewash and redecorate swaths of lower Manhattan."
Seiler is an example of what I hope to accomplish - I want to experiement with my own form of culture/ad jamming through my images.
See you soon,
Taylor
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