Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Culture Jam

The intent of culture jamming is to reroute ones perception of an image changing/relating it to something entirely different. This is becoming widely popular. Culture jams usually focus of social and cultural issues and take popular and well known imagine and distort them in such a way to resemble something that was never originally intended. These images are becoming easier and easier to find, one that caught my eye is taken from ct4ct.com, here it is below.
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This imagine is a fine example of culture jamming. What you see when you first look at this picture is very clearly what appears to be a baby sporting the infamous outfit of a KKK member. What some people may not realize is that this sculpture is created entirely using ancient artifacts. Many art connoisseur would be able to recognize the artifacts Fred Wilson used in this image, which he gathered from the Maryland Historical Society's museum in Baltimore. These objects never once implied a statement about racism, however with simple matter of placement the meaning of all those objects came together and now represent something of a totally nature. Who really knows what the artist is trying to say, but they could very well be implying something about the nature of racism, and if racism is a subtle theme in the ancient artifacts he reassembled. Or maybe he is trying to say that our children can easily be molded into racist if either left in the wrong hands, or allowed to be influenced by the wrong people. None the less, the culture jam as been put in effect. No person who knows of these artifacts will ever be able to look at these pieces of art again without their train of thought being rerouted to the racism image you know see here.

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