The Null Device

Russia's rogue film translators have struck again: this time, a pirate version of the Margaret Thatcher hagiography The Iron Lady has Thatcher admiring Hitler and vowing to “crush the working class, crush the scum”:

In a scene from the original film, two Conservative advisers tell Thatcher that she needs to soften her image after they watch her being interviewed on television. In the Russian version, which has been dubbed to have her say that she would crush the working class, an adviser responds: "Of course you went a bit over the top ... One of them [the workers] could be literate and have a television and see everything and tell all the rest," he says, "and then rumours would spread that you are a pitiless, heartless bitch."

Creating a new script over pirated films is nothing new in Russia; one famous translator working under the pseudonym Goblin made his name by making entertaining versions that were sometimes better than the original. But this seems to be the first time that a mainstream film has been so radically changed to fit in with a political viewpoint, in which Thatcher and her ministers are shown as part of a world conspiracy, controlled by shadowy leaders. The script veers from the hysterical to the absurd – at one point Thatcher says she intends to deliberately start the Falklands war with the help of fellow fans of her favourite free market economist, Milton Friedman.

¶ détournement film margaret thatcher russia 0 Share

Some hackers in Germany have automated the process of generating semi-random T-shirt designs. The result is Zufallsshirt (“chance shirt”), a sort of Borgesian infinite library of quasi-ironic T-shirts. It generates a huge number of combinations of phrases (mostly in German, though with quite a few in English), words and clip-art. Some look like the sort of thrift-store attire hipsters wore 15 years ago, others like miscellaneous ravey wordmarks pumped out by T-shirt labels, and others are rectangles of acrostics of random words.

Some of the results are more presentable than others; one might believe that “Budapest Bicycle Flux” was a semi-obscure math-rock band whose gig the wearer happened to catch in some college-town bar back in the day, and there are situations where one might plausibly wear a T-shirt reading “I Reject Your Reality And Replace It With Cupcakes”, which, alas, cannot be said for some of the outputs, such as “your vagina is a wonderland”, or a grid of words including “Hitlerponys”, “Mörderpenis” and/or the decidedly euphemistic-sounding “wurstvuvuzela”. There are no permalinks and no way of keeping a design other than by buying it (i.e., getting it printed and shipped, which is done by a Leipzig-based mail-order T-shirt printing company). Or by saving the .png file of the image from the website. Anyway, I suspect that the creators have made a fair amount of money, and quite a few people have drawers full of odd-looking shirts from a parallel universe.

Interestingly enough, after clicking through the site for a while, a reader with a limited grasp of German may find their German comprehension improving slightly; perhaps the flood of meaningful (if nonsequiturial) sentences exercises the language pattern-matching parts of the brain in some kind of process of combinatorial fuzzing, reinforcing plausible word sequences.

(via MeFi) ¶ dadaism détournement germany hacks language random text t-shirts 0 Share

Art Threat has an article about VOINA, the Russian radical performance-art collective responsible for happenings protesting against the corruption of the Russian state, its abuses of human rights, and the complicity of the mainstream art world. Their projects have included provocations such as sliding live sheep down a pro-Putin election banner at a book fair opening, staging mock hangings of gays and foreigners in Moscow to protest the Mayor's hostile stance to both, spray-painting a giant phallus on a drawbridge opposite the headquarters of the security services in St. Petersburg; though a lot of their ire is also directed at a bourgeois contemporary art world they see as more oriented to catering to the corrupt elites than questioning the state of affairs:

At the Moscow Art Fair in 2007, they staged It’s Time to Whip Russian Art, inviting members of the public to participate in a public flogging of a man dressed in white lying on a white sheet with an S&M whip dipped in red paint, a protest against elitism and conformism in Russian contemporary art.

“All our actions have political underlying messages, but we use art language only. We speak in images, symbols, which are mostly visual. We don’t use the language of political journalism. Politics is just a main theme of our works. In the current socio-political situation in Russia, an honest artist can’t be mute and make glamorous “masterpieces” for oligarchs, who decorate their “brilliant” dachas.”

“Being captured, the artists with handcuffs on their hands and plastic bags on their heads were thrown into a minibus and were carried from Moscow to St. Petersburg on the iron floor for ten hours. During this trip, cops kicked Oleg, the ideologist of the art group, in the kidneys and head. Two weeks later the human right defenders and the medics, who visited the arrested artists in prison, found hematomas on Oleg’s body in the kidney area and handcuff marks. Leonid had serious bruises.”

¶ art dadaism détournement politics russia street art 0 Share

And more on unintended consequences: in the US state of Vermont, the decals on police cars are manufactured by prison labour. Now, it turns out, one creatively-inclined inmate has made a subtle, and unilateral, improvement to the state crest on the logo, by inserting the silhouette of a pig (hidden as a spot in the cow on the state logo):

"This is not as offensive as it would have been years ago. We can see the humor," Flynn said. He said the artist has talents that could be used elsewhere. "If that person had used some of that creativeness he or she would not have ended up inside."

(via tyrsalvia) ¶ détournement pigs pranks unintended consequences usa 0 Share

A group of hackers in Germany have built a device disguised as a wall-mounted power supply which connects to wireless networks, intercepts packets and subtly changes the content of pages from news websites:

The Newstweek uses ARP spoofing to change the text displayed on several news sites. After doing some field research, placing and configuring the device, there’s a simple web frontend that configures the man-in-the-middle hack. Right now, the Newstweek only allows a few news sites to be targeted, but the team is working on allowing anyone to add their own targets.

Meanwhile, Charlie Stross extrapolates on more serious applications of such technologies:

This sort of gadget is, in bulk, extremely cheap — I bet you could order them for well under $100 in batches of a thousand and up. Say you're a repressive regime, but not so repressive that you can just haul random dissidents off to the torture chamber without paying lip service to due process. How hard would it be to plant these things in your targets' homes, so that you can gaslight them by interfering with the news they're reading? Call it a digital agent provocateur. Say you're the DHS and you want a steady stream of clueless Al Qaida wannabes to arrest and show on CNN to keep everyone afraid enough to go along with your PATRIOT Act extension? Plant these in the homes of young muslim males who hang out at the wrong mosques, crank up the volume of hateful news, and see who snaps ...

¶ disinformation détournement hacks linux pranks 0 Share

Jeff Koons Must Die!!! is a new art installation by multimedia artist Hunter Jonakin. It consists of a video arcade cabinet running a first-person shooter game involving the eponymous artist and his works:

The game is set in a large museum during a Jeff Koons retrospective. The viewer is given a rocket launcher and the choice to destroy any of the work displayed in the gallery. If nothing is destroyed the player is allowed to look around for a couple of minutes and then the game ends. However, if one or more pieces are destroyed, an animated model of Jeff Koons walks out and chastises the viewer for annihilating his art. He then sends guards to kill the player. If the player survives this round then he or she is afforded the ability to enter a room where waves of curators, lawyers, assistants, and guards spawn until the player is dead. In the end, the game is unwinnable, and acts as a comment on the fine art studio system, museum culture, art and commerce, hierarchical power structures, and the destructive tendencies of gallery goers, to name a few.

(via MeFi) ¶ art détournement jeff koons videogames 1 Share

An art exhibition in Berlin involves a hall divided into two parts, each of which containing six reindeer. One half of the reindeer are (possibly) fed fly agaric mushrooms, fabled by Lapp shamans to give their urine hallucinogenic properties. In the centre of the hall there is a hotel-like suite, which may be rented for €1,000 a night; the suite contains a minibar, which is stocked with bottles of urine collected from the reindeer; however, the bottles are not labelled as to which reindeer they came from. The title of this show is Soma, though an alternate title is "how to make hipsters pay €1,000 to drink piss". Pabst Blue Ribbon is the main sponsor.

Dorothée Brill, the museum's lead curator, says: "As far as we can tell, nobody's done anything they shouldn't have." Staff at the restaurant, however, report that some guests "drink the minibar dry".

¶ art berlin bizarre drugs détournement hipsters pranks 0 Share

A Berlin-based advertising agency has created some clever ads for the International Society for Human Rights' press freedom campaign:

¶ advertising détournement freedom of speech human rights media propaganda 0 Share

A resort in the Maldives has been offering wedding packages to (mostly Western) tourists, where, for $1300, they can have a "traditional Maldivean" ceremony. Unbeknownst to the tourists, the actual ceremony consisted of a stream of obscenities and nonsequiturs in Dhivehi, directed at the clueless couple. This only emerged when a staff member uploaded the video of one of the ceremonies, originally taped for the couple in question, to YouTube:

“Before buggering a chicken, check if the hole is clean. That is because the people of the countries that you are from are familiar with the taste of the ****holes of chicken,” he chants, still with hands held over the couples’.

The concluding chant is delivered in a gentler, softer voice: “Keep fornicating frequently, and keep spreading hatred among people. The children you will have from this marriage will all be bastard swine.”

¶ détournement maldives postcolonialism pranks tourism 1 Share

Some prankster has been stickering the Barclays branding on London's rental bicycles (a.k.a. the Boris Bikes), prefixing the imperative "fuck" to the sponsor's name:

(via Arbroath) ¶ bicyclism culture jamming cycling détournement fuck london 0 Share

Some culture-jammers in New York have affixed official-looking "Spoiler Alert" signs to LED train attival signs in the subway.

¶ culture jamming détournement nyc public transport society 3 Share

Modern audio processing technology can work wonders, such as, for example, turning a song by manufactured pop star Justin Bieber into a 35-minute glacial ambient soundscape, in an Icelandic touristcore vein. Apparently the trick was slowing the original down by 800% with the right software. (Which makes me wonder whether or not that is, in fact, how artists like Jónsi make their music, or at least the backings.)

¶ détournement music touristcore 0 Share

Handily printable journalism warning labels, for putting on newspapers with dubious journalism in public places:

¶ dishonesty détournement journalism spin 1 Share

And now, interrupting regular (or even irregular) blogging to introduce a side-project I have recently been working on: The Postmodernism Generator for iPhone. This is an iPhone port of the venerable Postmodernism Generator, which has been around the web, in various forms, for a decade and a half. The iPhone edition runs on the same engine, albeit slightly extended and cleaned up (aside: stopping a 15-year-old command-line C program from leaking memory enough to run acceptably on a phone involves considerable work), with some improvements (you can adjust the target length of essays and, optionally, use surnames from your address book in authors' names). Additionally, the grammar has been updated somewhat, with new content (for example, it now knows about Lady Gaga, Slavoj Žižek and Quentin Tarantino films made after Jackie Brown); these changes will be ported to the web-based version shortly.

The Postmodernism Generator for iPhone is available from the App Store, here. It's priced at the lowest price point (US$0.99/£0.59/0,79€/AUD1.29), which gets you a virtually infinite cornucopia of dense verbiage at your command, with or without a network connection, for amusement, befuddlement or plagiarism*.

Note: The Null Device does not encourage the use of the Postmodernism Generator for plagiarism.

¶ détournement iphone personal postmodernism pranks self-promotion 3 Share

Another reaction to the changing economics of recorded music: American indie band The Fiery Furnaces are protesting the falling monetary value of recorded music by declining to provide it; and so, an indie Atlas shrugs and, instead, releases a "Silent Record":

The Fiery Furnaces’ next album will consist of instruction, conventional music notation, graphic music notation, reports and illustrations of previous hypothetical performances, reports and illustrations of hypothetical performances previous to the formation of their hypotheses, guidelines for the fabrication of semi-automatic machine rock, memoranda to the nonexistent Central Committee of the Fiery-Furnaces-in-Exile concerning the non-creation of situations, Relevant to Progressive Rock Division, conceptual constellations on a so-to-speak black cloth firmament, and other items that have nothing to do with the price of eggs, or milk, or whatever the proverbial expression ceased to be.

Upon release of the record, the band will organize a series of Fan-Band concerts, in which groups of perfectly ordinary Fiery Furnaces’ fans will perform, interpret, contradict, ignore, and so on, the compositions that make up Silent Record. Write to thefieryfurnacesemail@gmail.com to nominate your post office break room, truck stop parking lot, municipal arts center, local tavern, or what-its-name to host one of these ‘happenings’. By ‘happenings’ I mean, what will be in the future, perfectly normal rock shows. And propose yourself for Fan Band participation.

(via Ian W.) ¶ culture détournement fiery furnaces music the recording industry 2 Share

A New York-based group of culture jammers calling themselves TrustoCorp has been droplifting parodic products into supermarkets:

¶ culture jamming droplifting détournement nyc pranks 0 Share

The New York April Fools' Committee is proud to announce New York's 25th annual April Fool's Day parade:

The theme for this year's parade is "Up, Up and Away." Led by Grand Marshall Ben Bernanke, the parade will kick off with the Where's-the-Money Marching Band playing this year's theme song by the Fifth Dimension "Up, Up and Away in My Beautiful Balloon." Color commentary will be provided by Sarah Palin for her new Fox TV show "We Make It Up, You Believe It." Thanks to a contribution by a secret donor in honor of the parade's 25th anniversary, 10,000 red, white and blue helium balloons, each with a crisp one-dollar bill attached, will be released along the parade route.

The floats this year will be led by Richard and Mayumi Heene with their Homemade Helium Flying Saucer Float. Next will be the Northwest Airlines Flight 188 "Siesta" Cockpit Float with pilot Timothy B. Cheney and first officer Richard I. Cole napping. Then a North Korea Missile Launch Float will launch H2O bombs into the crowd.

The New York April Fools' Day Parade was created in 1986 to remedy a glaring omission in the long list of New York's annual ethnic and holiday parades. These events fail to recognize the importance of April 1st, the day designated to commemorate the perennial folly of mankind. In an attempt to bridge this gap and bring people back in touch with their inherent foolishness, the parade annually crowns a King of Fools from parading look-alikes.

¶ april fool's détournement joey skaggs pranks 0 Share

An unemployed sysadmin in Russia hacked into a video billboard and reprogrammed it to show a pornographic video, causing a traffic jam as drivers on a nearby road stopped to gape at the video and record it with their mobile phones.

The hacker, from Novorossiisk, used a server in Chechnya in an attempt to cover his tracks, though was unsuccessful; the Interior Ministry managed to track him down. (I wonder whether he'd have had more luck had he chosen a less politically fraught staging point.) He is now facing two years imprisonment; meanwhile, security rules for video billboards have been tightened.

I'm thinking something like this would make a good plot device; imagine a gang of assassins/bank robbers planting logic bombs in a few strategically placed billboards; at a preset time, they start showing porn, causing instant traffic jams and trapping their victim/blocking their pursuers. Or international jewel thieves hack video screens in an exclusive reception to show Goatse-style shock porn; as the attendees are momentarily stunned by the shock, unable to react, the bandits (dressed as waiters, naturally) act quickly, snatching the valuables and making their escape. Police have a hard time piecing together what happened afterward.

(via Boing Boing) ¶ crime détournement hacks porn pranks russia security 2 Share

A news story recently appeared about a new installation by a US conceptual artist named Richard Whitehurst: an exhibit reachable only by a tunnel, with the artist waiting to rape anybody who attempted to pass:

I've constructed a 22 ft tunnel out of plywood that leads into the project room. There is no way in or out of the project room except for this tunnel. As you travel through the tunnel, it gets smaller and smaller, making it so that you have to crawl and put yourself in a submissive position in order to reach the tunnel's destination. At the end of the tunnel the subject will find me waiting in the project room and I'll try to the best of my ability to overpower and rape the person who crawls through.

I want to make it clear that I plan to make the experience as unpleasant as I possibly can to anyone who dares to crawl through the tunnel. I will try to the best of my ability to make them regret their decision.

In 2007 at the Seward Projects Space in Columbus, I had my first breakthrough with an installation that was to be the prototype for this current one. It was called THE PUNCH-YOU-IN-THE-FACE TUNNEL. It was the same set-up as THE RAPE TUNNEL except at the end of the tunnel I’d punch the subject in the face instead of raping him or her. The impetus was completely reactionary to the current state of art, and motivated by pure frustration.

As it turns out, I ended up breaking the nose of the third person to crawl through the tunnel, an aspiring model. She went to the hospital and eventually sued me. Her modeling career was put on hold. The civil case was long and drawn out and the matter still hasn’t been resolved. To this day she still has unpaid medical bills. The point of this long aside is that all this took place two years ago, and I’m still having an impact on this young lady’s life, something not many other artists could claim about their work

(via nicky_j) ¶ art détournement hoax rape 0 Share

Some anonymous culture jammer visited Bristol Zoo and affixed to the outside of a visitors' café a plaque framing it as the "Human" enclosure, drily writing up the behaviours and characteristics of H. sapiens:

The human diet is very adaptable to regional crop varieties and personal taste, with some groups able to live almost exclusively on chipped potatoes and sugary drinks.

Groups of humans are often fed by unrelated individuals in exchange for tokens made of paper, metal and plastic -- behaviour which can frequently be seen inside this enclosure.

(via Boing Boing) ¶ anthropology banksy bristol culture jamming détournement pranks 1 Share

The editor-in-chief of a commercial academic journal has resigned after the journal accepted for publication a nonsensical, computer-generated article:

Bentham confirmed receipt of my submission the very next day (January 30, 2009). Nearly four months later, I received a response — the article was accepted. The acceptance letter read:

"This is to inform you that your submitted article has been accepted for publication after peer-reviewing process in TOISCIJ. I would be highly grateful to you if you please fill and sign the attached fee form and covering letter and send them back via email as soon as possible to avoid further delay in publication."

The letter was written by a Ms. Sana Mokarram, the Assistant Manager of Publication. She included a fee schedule and confirmation that I would pay US$800, to be sent to a post office box in the SAIF Zone, a tax-free complex in the United Arab Emirates.

The paper in question ("Deconstructing Access Points", by "David Phillips" and "Andrew Kent" of the "Center for Research in Applied Phrenology"), incidentally, may be downloaded here. It contains howlers such as:

Our implementation of our methodology is pseudorandom, wearable, and collaborative. We have not yet implemented the centralized logging facility, as this is the least private component of our method.

Gaussian electromagnetic disturbances in our mobile telephones caused unstable experimental results. Note that vacuum tubes have less jagged effective floppy disk throughput curves than do autogenerated robots.

¶ cs détournement pranks pseudoscience random text scams 1 Share

When US filmmaker Andrea Wachner was invited to attend her 10-year high-school reunion in the affluent Los Angeles suburb of Palos Verdes, she didn't want to go; so she recruited an exotic dancer to pretend to be her, fitting her with an earpiece and coaching her interactively on the people she was meeting. Tattooed, scantily-clad "Cricket" claimed that she was Andrea, had had reconstructive surgery and suffered amnesia after a car accident, and that she was working as a stripper to pay for her graduate school tuition. She was followed by a camera crew, ostensibly making a documentary about the daily lives of artists. Cricket finished off her performance by doing a striptease to a Lisa Loeb song.

Most of the people were taken in by this, or at least sufficiently uncertain to not raise a fuss in case they ended up making fools of themselves, and found out only later, when Wachner posted video to YouTube, as a teaser for a 40-minute documentary titled "I Remember Andrea Better" she was making on the incident.

(via Boing Boing) ¶ class détournement gargoyle gibson's law pranks psychology usa 0 Share

Some unidentified pranksters in Nottingham have put up official-looking signs advising that it is legal to urinate in certain areas.

They feature a toilet sign and include the words: "Public Urination Permitted After 7.30pm".

The prank also featured a laminated note, headed with the logo of Nottingham City Council, which said the scheme was aimed at reducing the mess faced by residents outside their homes.

The notice reads: "In an attempt to reduce late night public nuisance, during the holiday period, Nottingham City Council has designated several public urination areas across the city. This urination area will be cleaned daily between the hours of 5am and 6am."

¶ culture jamming détournement pranks signs uk 0 Share

Artist/culture jammer Jimmy Cauty's latest project: horrifically gory versions of classic animated cartoon cels:

(via Boing Boing) ¶ animation art cartoons détournement jimmy cauty klf looney tunes 1 Share

The culture jammer calling himself The Decapitator has released a video of his latest stunt—hijacking a consignment of copies of free commuter tabloid TheLondonPaper, modifying them by gruesomely beheading David Beckham in a mobile phone ad, and then droplifting the doctored copies near Old Street, all in the space of 3 hours.

(via Wired News) ¶ advertising culture jamming david beckham détournement london media pranks the decapitator 0 Share

The latest thing to do on the London Underground: swapping station names around on maps, confusing tourists:

(via london-underground) ¶ détournement london london underground maps pranks 2 Share

Six members of Prague-based art group Ztohoven are facing trial for hacking into a television feed showing images from a webcam and superimposing a mushroom cloud over a mountain landscape. If convicted, they face 3 years in jail; that's one year for each 111,000 koruna (approximately US$6,150) they were awarded by another arm of the Czech state, Prague's National Gallery, for the same project.

(via Boing Boing) ¶ at czech republic détournement guerilla art pranks 0 Share

Some anonymous guerilla artist has been hacking the heads off models in advertising posters in London. Dubbed the "East London Decapitator", he or she creates meticulously photoshopped overlays, with the figures' heads replaced with gory stumps and the surroundings splattered with blood, and pastes them over the advertisements. Nobody — not squeaky-clean Disney stars, not pop singers, not even computer-animated characters — is safe.

(via Wired News) ¶ advertising art culture jamming decapitation détournement guerilla art london pranks 1 Share

Conceptual Terrorists Encase Sears Tower In Jell-O:

"Your outdated ideas of what terrorism is have been challenged," an unidentified, disembodied voice announces following the video's first 45 minutes of random imagery set to minimalist techno music. "It is not your simple bourgeois notion of destructive explosions and weaponized biochemical agents. True terror lies in the futility of human existence."

According to a 2007 CIA executive summary, the terrorists responsible for masterminding the attack are likely hiding somewhere in Berlin's vast labyrinth of cafés. Though officials said they didn't know if any of those involved in carrying out the plot were still in Chicago, several dozen local performance artists and interpretive dancers have been brought in for questioning.

Hayden said the CIA is working closely with the National Endowment for the Arts to cut off all grants that may serve as funding for the group. In addition, the Department of Homeland Security has begun monitoring any large purchases of gravy, tinfoil, pig's blood, and barbed wire in hopes of preventing another aesthetic tragedy.

(via Schneier) ¶ art conceptual terrorism détournement satire situationism surrealism terrorism 0 Share

Someone has invented a must-have accessory for the radical urban itinerant, a means of getting free accommodation whilst striking a blow against car culture: a tent shaped like a car cover, which turns any parking space into a campsite:

(via Gizmodo) ¶ anti-car design détournement pranks protest subversion 1 Share