Submitted by Peter Schlager:

Christoph Schlingensief made his own contribution to the 2000 Vienna International Festival by organising the reality TV event Please Love Austria:

In 2000, German director and activist Christof Schlingensief created a fake public TV-show. After the formation of the Austrian right wing coalition, Schlingensief built a public “container” show called Please Love Austria so people could (similar to the Big Brother reality TV show) vote for which of the “contained” immigrants should stay and which should go. Schlingensief was then accused by the Austrian right wing party of racism. He was publicly offended with the words “You Artist!”

For more about this performance, visit schlingensief.com, click on Works, then Performance, then select Bitte Liebt Osterreich (2000) from the pull down menu.

Editor’s Note: The Fox News Corporation is jumping all over a letter demanding that restaurant Osso Buco’s Albanian owner Nino Selimaj remove a photo featuring himself with Chelsea Clinton which has adorned the restaurant for years. Well… the letter is a fake. They just haven’t realized it yet. Below is an article posted today on FOXNews.com.

“It’s easy enough to fake letters from public offices,” says prankster and satirist Joey Skaggs. As evidence, check out the Brooklyn Bridge Lottery hoax. In 1992, Skaggs faked an inter-office memo from then Mayor David Dinkins, purporting that the City was planning a lottery to sell the Brooklyn Bridge. In addition to a million dollar prize, the winner would have the bridge named after him or her for five years. The proceeds would help to pay for the restoration of the decaying bridge.

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New York Restaurant Owner ‘Shocked’ Over Ex-President Clinton’s Demands to Remove Chelsea Photo
September 26, 2007
by Catherine Donaldson-Evans
FOXNews.com

NEW YORK — The owner of a New York City restaurant is “heartbroken” over a letter he received from former President Bill Clinton’s lawyer asking that a photograph of daughter Chelsea be removed from his eatery — or face legal action.

The photo, taken of the former first daughter with Osso Buco owner Nino Selimaj, has been on display in the window of the Greenwich Village haunt for about five years, the restaurateur said. (more…)

Submitted by Mike Ibanez:

Space cadets taken in by TV hoax
BBC
December 17, 2005

Three contestants have spoken of their disbelief after being fooled into thinking they went into space for the UK reality show Space Cadets. The three believed they had blasted off from a cosmonaut training camp in Russia, but were in fact in a fake spaceship in a warehouse in Suffolk.

They cheered up when told they had each won £25,000 ($44,300).

But one contestant, teaching assistant Keri Hasset from Birmingham, said she was “heartbroken” by the prank.

Fake ceremony

“When I thought we were coming back to Earth I was planning my speech. I was going to say it had been my childhood dream. Now I’m a little bit heartbroken,” she said.

Ms Hasset, plasterer Paul French, 26 from Bristol, and footballer/recruitment consultant Billy Jackson, 25, from Kent, had suspicions they were being tricked when they had to hold a ceremony for a celebrity Russian dog called Mr Bimby on the spaceship. (more…)

Submitted by Mike Ibanez:

Viewers fooled by ‘Belgium split’
BBC News
December 14, 2006

Belgians reacted with widespread alarm to news that their country had been split in two - before finding out they had been spoofed. The Belgian public television station RTBF ran a bogus report saying the Dutch-speaking half of the nation had declared independence.

Later it said Wednesday night’s programme was meant to stir up debate.

It appears to have succeeded. Thousands of people made panicked calls to the station and politicians complained.

“It’s very bad Orson Welles, in very poor taste,” said a spokesman for Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, referring to the famous director’s 1938 radio adaptation of War of the Worlds. That spoof fooled many Americans into believing Martians had invaded.

“In the current context, it’s irresponsible for a public television channel to announce the end of Belgium as a reality presented by genuine journalists,” he added. (more…)

‘Fake Steve’ Blogger Comes Clean
by Brad Stone
New York Times
August 5, 2007

San Francisco — For the last 14 months, high-tech insiders have been eating up the work of an anonymous blogger who assumed the persona of Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive and one of the world’s most famous businessmen.

The mysterious writer has used his blog, the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, to lampoon Mr. Jobs and his reputation as a difficult and egotistical leader, as well as to skewer other high-tech companies, tech journalists, venture capitalists, open-source software fanatics and Silicon Valley’s overall aura of excess.

The acerbic postings of “Fake Steve,” as he is known, have attracted a plugged-in readership — both the real Mr. Jobs and Bill Gates have acknowledged reading the blog (fakesteve.blogspot.com). At the same time, Fake Steve has evaded the best efforts of Silicon Valley’s gossips to discover his real identity. (more…)

Submitted by Peter Schlager:

Czech Dream (Český sen in Czech) is a documentary film directed by two young Czech directors, Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda. It records a large-scale hoax perpetuated by Klusák and Remunda on the Czech public, culminating in the “opening event” of a fake “hypermarket”. The filmmakers succeeded in attracting more than 3 thousand shoppers to an empty plain for their “grand opening” on May 31, 2003. What looked like a huge building from a distance was actually only a canvas facade backed by scaffolding.

The film hit selected theaters in the U.S. starting in June. Check here for the remaining dates in September for Seattle and Chicago.

The “bloody trailer” and a film scene can be downloaded here. Bloody trailer is in quotes because there appears to be a “blood-free” trailer which may be more aligned with reality (both are available on the DVD which is for sale).

Here’s some movie footage [9:30]: (more…)

Anonymous members of the Czech art group Ztohoven hacked into a Czech Television (ČTV) location camera on June 17, 2007 during the TV weathercast and in real time broadcast their own footage of a nuclear explosion over the landscape of a town named Black Mine. The picture then changed and instead of Black Mine, the website ztohoven.com came up on the screen.

Here’s the broadcast footage:

Read a statement from Ztohoven and an article from The Prague Post.

An Oxfam campaign stunt prior to the start of the G8 Rally in Rostock on June 2, 2007 in which the G8 leaders gamble away Africa’s future.

Submitted by Raul Minchinela:

A Spanish TV channel created a prank and openly showed that biased, unchecked, fill-the-void information is the common currency for Spain’s broadcast networks. This is a veritable course on media pranking — creating and perpetrating a hoax, then documenting it and analyzing what happened on TV. And it has inspired more of the same. The prank as media commentary has taken the media. Welcome to Spain.

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The goal of media pranks is to show how information is manipulated by leaking false news into newscasts that is more revealing than the actual truth. In creating a news story that should exist, we see that the media do not listen to reality, but rather expect specific things to happen according to a pre-determined structure. Anything that does not fit that mold is simply not heard and, consequently, not shown on TV.

The second phase of a media prank invites, and expects, media outlets to confess that the leaked prank is in fact false news — that they broadcasted the material not because it was real, but because it “fit” what was expected.

With that in mind, the perfect horizon in the “media prank world” would be an actual TV show that created unbiased media pranks. Their rival channels would fall for them, and then the TV show would create an hour-long special about how every top-watched program broadcasted false news, asking them to publicly admit that it was all a prank. In that perfect world, that portion of the show providing commentary about the TV’s biased perspective of the world, including the lies and the unchecked information and the sensationalist let-the-s**t-hit-the-fan attitude, would be presented by a comedian with a sharp-tongue.

Guess what? This happened in Spain on May 11, 2007. All of it. (more…)

From Yahoo! Tech:

Bloggers Taken for a Ride in a $4 Billion Hoax
May 16, 2007

It sounded like a juicy scoop for a Wednesday morning. Engadget, arguably the world’s most widely-read technology blog, got wind of an internal memo sent to Apple employees: the iPhone would be delayed for four months, and the Leopard operating system pushed into 2008. In the breathless world of Mac fanboydom, that’s news to send readers into a full-tilt tizzy.

The only problem: It wasn’t true. The email was a hoax, spoofed to look like it came from Apple’s servers (whether or not it did is still under investigation).

Tech Crunch notes that the subsequent panic, which was over inside half an hour, knocked $4 billion off of Apple’s market cap, however briefly. At its nadir, the stock was down over $4, about 3 percent. People who sold on the way down lost money… and those who bought made a pretty penny. (more…)

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Submitted by Henry Emsixle
MDOT Depotty Director of Transanitation

The Grand Rapids Alliance of MICHief in MICHigan is pleased to announce its latest contribution to our “single supremely tangible freedom”, the PRANK!

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Public Roadside Urination (PRU) a problem in your neighborhood? According to a recent government study conducted by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI), Public Roadside Urination is on the rise and has fast become a national epidemic, a national dilemma requiring a radical solution. The main contributing factor is there are simply not enough public toilets to support the population.

After the 4 year study, UMTRI recommended to the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) a revolutionary new concept in transanitation called JIFFI, an acronym for Jons Installed at Fast Freeway Intersections. JIFFI is a radical innovation born in Michigan that delivers value and performance on a variety of levels: cost, space, speed and utility. MDOT immediately embraced the JIFFI concept, quickly secured Federal funds and matching grant funds, designed and built the nation’s very first JIFFI STOP in just under 6 months.

(more…)

Thank you David Strom for sending us this story about Fox News falling for a parody of a news story about a ham sandwich incident in a middle school in Maine.

From Think Progress:

…The backstory: Last week in the town of Lewiston, Maine, a group of Somalian Muslim middle school students were the subject of a cruel prank when their peers placed a ham steak next to them in order to personally offend the students. School officials filed a report because the students considered the act to be a hate/bias crime.

This actual story was then spoofed by a parody site called Associated Content, which made up quotes and details, such as the school’s intention to “create an anti-ham ‘response plan.’”…

Fox & Friends subsequently picked up the spoof story and reported it as news, or should we say, mocked what they thought was the news. Here’s the video:

(more…)

Submitted by Mike Ibanez from ¡Zap! (Futura Ediciones, 1995) in Spanish.

But, first, a quick English summary:

In 1978, a pair of French nexialistas - third generation fantasy anarchist situationists - mounted a prank on the Spanish intellectual world. Planning to bring a manifesto of an old Italian anarchist in their luggage when visiting friends in Barcelona, and concerned that it might be questioned, they disguise it as a work of Sartre entitled “Jean Paul Sartre: My political testament”.

Act 1: They decide it will be great to take it to a left wing Spanish magazine called “El Viejo Topo” (the old stumbler). The magazine is surprised at the stated philosophy and tries to get in touch with Sartre or his publisher to verify. Unable to do so, they decide to publish it anyway, with a disclaimer that they are not sure Sartre would say these things.

Act 2: Two men show up at the magazine claiming to represent Sartre who, indeed, had not written the testament. They insist that the magazine has been hoaxed and must print a retraction. But — the two men are the same French guys who brought the story there in the first place…

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El año 1978, un par de nexialistas franceses –anarquistas de fantasía, situacionistas de tercera generación- montaron un buen prank, un bromazo en el mundo intelectual español. Los dos nexialistas -les llamaremos Dupont & Dupont- venían a España para visitar Barcelona. En su equipaje llevan una soflama de un viejo anarquista italiano. La llevan, entre otro material, para enseñar a colegas de grupos anarcoides barceloneses. El anarquista de Catania, entre la broma y el afán de difusión, ha titulado su texto Jean Paul Sartre: Il mio testamento político. (more…)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
The New York April Fools’ Committee Is Proud to Announce:
NEW YORK CITY’S 22nd ANNUAL APRIL FOOLS’ DAY PARADE

THE CIRCUS IS COMING! THE CIRCUS IS COMING!

The 22nd Annual April Fools’ Day Parade will march down Fifth Avenue, from 59th Street to Washington Square Park, beginning at 12 noon, Sunday, April 1, 2007. (more…)

In 1993, Mark Dery wrote this seminal discourse coining the phrase Culture Jamming. I think it’s a must read for anyone interested in the subject. This is an open source document and is available on Mark Dery’s Web site. JS

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“Culture jamming,” a term I have popularized by articles in The New York Times and Adbusters, might best be defined as media hacking, information warfare, terror-art, and guerrilla semiotics, all in one. Billboard bandits, pirate TV and radio broadcasters, media hoaxers, and other vernacular media wrenchers who intrude on the intruders, investing ads, newscasts, and other media artifacts with subversive meanings are all culture jammers. (more…)