From thegraffitiproject.net about a project recently completed in Scotland:

“Kelburn is prominently located on the west coast of Scotland, 35 miles west of Glasgow, overlooking the sea. Parts of the building are in need of repair, but funds have recently been secured to begin an extensive restoration, that includes the removal of the external render, allowing the opportunity to use the present surface as a vast temporary canvas…

“We are bringing together four of the world’s leading graffiti artists from Brazil to create a unique burst of colour, embracing the walls and turrets of the south side of Kelburn Castle and the castle grounds. On a traditional typecast building, this bold and striking artistic statement will hopefully receive positive media attention, whilst challenging the public’s understanding of both urban graffiti art and the British institution the building represents. It is a project that bridges between rural and urban realms and unites two proud and very different cultures.”

Watch the project evolve:

via Davidairey

A new book about culture jamming:

OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture
by Christine Harold

When reporters asked about the Bush administration’s timing in making their case for the Iraq war, then Chief of Staff Andrew Card responded that “from an marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” While surprising only in its candor, this statement signified the extent to which consumer culture has pervaded every aspect of life. For those troubled by the long reach of the marketplace, resistance can seem futile. However, a new generation of progressive activists has begun to combat the media supremacy of multinational corporations by using the very tools and techniques employed by their adversaries.

In OurSpace, Christine Harold examines the deployment and limitations of “culture jamming” by activists. These techniques defy repressive corporate culture through parodies, hoaxes, and pranks. Among the examples of sabotage she analyzes are the magazine Adbusters’ spoofs of familiar ads and the Yes Men’s impersonations of company spokespersons. (more…)

OutFront: Sex, Pranks and Reality
by Allison Fass
Forbes.com
July 2, 2007

Second Life’s virtual Web world can be a weird, chancy place for real-life brands.

In April a helicopter crashed into a Nissan building, starting a fire that left a couple of dead bodies. The explosion took place on Altima Island in Second Life, a Web fantasy world where users create customized, cartoonlike characters called avatars. The crash, whether an accident or an intentional prank, wasn’t exactly an image-enhancing moment for a carmaker. Nissan’s online reps cleaned up the virtual mess, coffins and all.

Marketers have flocked to Second Life since it went live in 2003. Coca-Cola, H&R Block, IBM and Toyota are among 80 companies that have set up a virtual presence there to capture eyeballs–Second Life boasts a population of 7.1 million registered users–and experiment with online branding. It’s cheap: Linden Lab, the site’s creator, charges $1,675 plus $295 a month to occupy an island. Visitors pay nothing.

But this leasehold doesn’t fence out troublemakers. It turns out that avatars seem more interested in having sex and hatching pranks than spending time warming up to real-world brands. “There is nothing to do in Second Life except, pardon my bluntness, try to get laid,” blogged David Churbuck, Web-marketing vice president for computer maker Lenovo. (Lenovo isn’t represented on Second Life.) (more…)

Article from Mother Jones, May/June 2007:

Burnt By The Man
News: How copyrighting, capitalism, and lawsuit chaos disturbed the radical utopia of Burning Man.
By Josh Harkinson
Mother Jones
May/June 2007 Issue

They all burned the Man. The punk bicyclists, the drunk faeries, the people painted blue. So splendidly did Larry Harvey’s 40-foot wooden hominid burst into flame that he and his friend John Law burned the Man again, each and every year since 1986, until everybody involved—last year, nearly 40,000 of them—simply became known as Burners. And the Burners built a Bedouin arts community called Black Rock City in the Nevada desert: a tent metropolis with its own “gift economy” that banned all commerce and its own government complete with a Department of Public Works. In short, they made a new Man—though maybe not a better one.

“I think it’s something that needs to be skewered and mocked,” says Law, Burning Man’s cofounder. He quit running Burning Man a decade ago, but not before he and Harvey began selling expensive tickets to the event (last year they went for up to $350), trademarked and split ownership of the Burning Man name, and licensed it to Black Rock City llc, a for-profit, limited liability corporation run by Harvey. Law believes the corporation has become unaccountable, so he’s challenging Harvey’s oversight in a California court—quite literally putting the fate of Burning Man in the hands of “the Man.” (more…)

From Medill Reports Chicago: Street art has moved not just to the art world, but to the world of everyday consumption

It’s not the car, it’s the graffiti selling it
by Phillip Kaplan
May 16, 2007

Graffiti and advertising are kind of like cops and robbers: eerily similar to each other yet at complete opposition.

Members of each group cross into the other with the each group usually condemning the other’s action, but sometimes covertly encouraging it. Each has a righteousness of rhetoric, and the perspective of which is “right” or “wrong” depends on what turns you on — getting over authority or getting “bad” guys.

While advertising is meant to inform people, graffiti writing often addresses only those who can decode it.

But the advertising industry seems to think there are enough decoders out there to cater to, perhaps thinking if someone stares at some graffiti to find out the name of the artist who did it, what’s the difference if the name spells Honda? (more…)

News Analysis: Boston Bomb Hoax Scares Up More Guerrilla Business
May 14, 2007
By Becky Ebenkamp
Brandweek

A $2 million fine and Senate bill can’t cage envelope-pushing efforts.

“Now more than ever!” is the rallying cry for guerrilla marketers three months after a misunderstanding over a stealthy street stunt promoting Cartoon Network’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force brewed a Boston bomb scare.

Some marketing agencies say the headline-making hoax has actually increased business despite a bill making its way through the Senate that would impose harsher punishments should such a hoax happen again.

Early reports after the Jan. 31 hysteria had many speculating marketers would steer clear of this big-bang/small bucks school of buzz building. After all, Cartoon Network gm/evp Jim Samples resigned; parent company Turner Broadcasting and guerrilla agency Interference agreed to pay $1 million in compensation to Massachusetts and another $1 million to support federal homeland security.

“The smarter clients I spoke to [realized] that a $2 million fine equals $120 million in publicity,” said Peter Shankman, president of New York-based pr/marketing agency The Geek Factory. “They said, ‘Just get the damn permits first!’” (more…)

Commentary:

by Bruce Kushnick
for Nieman Watchdog,
Nieman Foundation for Journalism
at Harvard University

April 4, 2007

Needed: Blacks, Hispanics, disabled, deaf, low-income and the elderly to support the telecoms’ positions on anti-consumer FCC rulings and legislation.

DEFINITIONS:

Astroturf—An organization set up by a large corporation or corporations to put forward the corporate agenda but to look like an authentic ‘grass-roots’ group.

Co-opted—An authentic group that is given funding by a large corporation or corporations, where the group lobbies for corporate initiatives even if they are contrary to the needs of its members.

Skunkworks—A well coordinated campaign funded by large corporations (or industries) that incorporates Astroturf and co-opted groups, research think tanks, PR firms, lobbying firms, state and federal politicians to put forward the corporate agenda on a specific topic.

Over the last few weeks numerous groups have been lobbying and hyping the corporate position of AT&T and Verizon for relaxed cable franchise requirements or to stop any net neutrality legislation.

Some of these groups are working together to supply a message that blacks, Hispanics, seniors, low income, deaf or disabled persons care about these issues – and that they back the AT&T and Verizon positions. (more…)

Troy Jollimore reviews the book “Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole”, by Benjamin R. Barber, Norton, 2007, in the San Francisco Chronicle, April 1, 2007 and writes about “the transformation of Homo sapiens into Homo consumerus” by way of the “consumerization of the child” and infantilization in general by marketers who, using culture jamming and other techniques, have created a population of consumers who are “a ready and pliable modeling clay for the marketers’ sculpting techniques”.

“Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole”, by Benjamin R. Barber, is available at Amazon.com via this link. -JS

UPDATE, May 13, 2007: At the end of this article, check out the Benjamin R. Barber interview with Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report, Comedy Central.

When the movie “Smokin’ Aces” opened in late January, the first paragraph of the review by New York Times film critic A.O. Scott — which, Scott went on to claim, constituted a “fair summary” of the movie — read as follows:

“‘F.B.I.! F.B.I.!’ Blam blam blam blam. ‘[Expletive]. [Expletive].’ Blam blam blam. Spurt of blood. Plot twist. ‘F.B.I.! F.B.I.!’ ‘[Expletive].’ Blam blam blam blam blam. ‘[Expletive].’ ‘F.B.I.!’ ‘Hotel Security!’ Blam. Exploding skull. Guy sits on a chain saw. Montage. [Expletive]. Plot twist. Roll credits.”

Undaunted — indeed, apparently delighted — the studio quoted from the paragraph in their ads. Predictably enough, millions of American moviegoers turned out to see it. (more…)

Strom writes his “Web Informant” blog about current trends in technology and Internet marketing. This appeared in the fall of 2006, and was originally published for the site TidBITS.com, a site geared towards Apple computer users. The article is updated for Pranks.com.

The news in the fall of 2006 has me confused; so let me see if I have this straight. MTV is now doing a game where you can play as one of the characters from one of their reality TV shows, a show that employs script writers. These are different writers from the ones who not too long ago were protesting that they weren’t paid enough and had to falsify their time sheets to show that they worked fewer hours.

Then there are people making money off of selling Second Life businesses that sell virtual goods to others inside their virtual world. (more…)