Culture jamming

Culture jamming, a name coined in 1984, is a tactic used by many anti-consumerist social movements and artists to disrupt or subvert media culture and mainstream cultural institutions. Wikipedia

Companies like Adbusters have been doing ad commentary for a long time, but many artists use the technique of appropriating and changing cultural imagery to create cultural commentary, like this work of Jason Freeny.

Another artist that I mentioned a few blog posts ago is the work of Vermibus, who, if you didn't look at the first time around, you should definitely check out. That post can be found here.

And of course, you can't forget the greats like Banksy, who revolutionized graffiti culture and comes up with images that constantly move me to the core of my being. 

One of the most amazing things about information right now, is that all of these images are so accessible that artists can now use things from virtually anywhere to put together something new. It's not just visual arts, music does this all the time. 

One artist who's gotten famous for their culture jammed music is the producer Pogo, who has made his career off of making music entirely based on samples from movies. 

An artist who my partner just showed me the other day is named Kutiman. He makes songs entirely out of YouTube videos and they are WONDERFUL. If you don't watch anything else in this post, you should at least watch this video. I cannot imagine how much time he spends going through YouTube videos for samples! 

And finally, there's always the option of taking bad music videos with beautiful images and putting them to something else, like this appropriation of Justin Bieber with Dr. Steel.

Just so you can see the original (and you do NOT have to watch it all):

And the truly awesome version: