I know that roflcon just happened and that helps center the study of the comunity, but are people talking about rick rolling like they talk about throw ups? Is the appropriation of time through presentation of non-standard content either through shock or hacking appropriation of the same sort? Is stealing bandwidth akin to stealing the monetary resources used to remove graffiti - no matter how artistic - from a surface?

When a hacker or graphic designer is hired based on a portfolio consisting of computer hacking or non-standard graphic design trending towards infusions of internet-culture memes (both gaining recognition through a high rating on social bookmarking sites such as fark, digg, reddit, or slashdot) does it parallel a graffiti artist gaining prestege and eventually endorsement through a gallery or patron and an eventual art career?

Moving beyond what I see as a primal part of the human psyche, I am intreged by the notion of culture jamming. What conditions must be met for culture jamming to be effective? Is the message ever from the dominant part of the culture or does culture jamming originate out of the anonymus masses. Unlike throwups and tagging where the action is limited to the physical world, can we extend culture jamming to contain concepts such as rickrolling, duckrolling, or internet shock sites? If not, how does the appropriation of someone’s (or some corporation’s) space or object differ from the appropriation of time and attention (and bandwidth) from a visitor or viewer of a site?

The means of creation also fascinates me. It is one thing to explain the idea behind the tagging and repossession of city space in an urban environment, but I would like to spend time exploring the means by which the art or appropriation is performed. How is a spray can modified for ideal use in graffiti? How does one make wheat paste for effective distribution of flyers? What examples of urban culture jamming can we see in the environment local to the University of Oregon.

Is it possible to examain these with too fine of a lens? Is there a point where the exploration of the outter manifestations of the artist’s intent become an exploration of the inner baggage (the id, if I remember the psychology that I never learned) and the artist’s intent - or even the artist’s piece - fall to the side and we are exploring the rational and reactions of the subject as a singular or the subject as a population?

In the near future I’ll combine the about me and resume pages. The resume gives a bit more info about me.

In other news, I’m sick and bad at poker. The first one is pretty surprising, the second one not so much. My aquarious curiosity does not play well with the shoving my stack into the pot to see one more card. I’m playing the micro tables on stars and right now I’m down 12BIs. Awwwwkward.

Chugging some tea to fight off who knows what this is. Lets see if I can recover!

Greenwashing is using advertising to reposition a product to an eco friendly position.

A list of Greenwashed products can be found here.

My favorite Greenwashed product is Fiji Green.

Yes, every drop of fiji water transported to the US is deliciously green. By ‘Yes’ I mean ‘No’ and by ‘Deliciously’ I mean Christ man, its WATER!

A bumper sticker is a means to deliver a potentially subversive message to an entrapped audience. Like other street art the message can be ignored or reappropriated at the audience’s leisure. However, there seems to be a degree to which a bumper sticker does not fall into one means of evaluating street art. If evaluated by the Four As (Appropriation, Agency, Autonomy, and Authorship), a bumper sticker only fulfills Autonomy and Agency. The space used by a bumper sticker – traditionally the bumper of a car – is already possessed by the individual applying the sticker. The authorship of the bumper sticker is also often external, having been provided by or purchased from some external source.

What is intriguing is the notion of a bumper sticker capturing and defining space surrounding the exterior of the car it has been affixed to. In a paper published in May of 2008, researchers at Colorado State University authored a paper discussing the use of territorial markings as a predictor of driver aggression and road rage. The concept contained within the paper is an analysis of the personalization of, attachment to, and defense of a private territory (the car) contained within a larger, public territory (the road). The paper reached the conclusion that the personalization of a territory was correlated in intensity with a predictor of aggressive driving or road rage. Thus, the appropriation of space through the use of a bumper sticker is not the direct physical space appropriated as often seen in the use of smaller stickers, graffiti, or murals, but the surrounding physical local that makes up the region around the car.

Can this effect be observed in an alternate use of bumper stickers on a different surface? Is there another agency of appropriation in effect when the message is transmitted through a bumper sticker on a non-bumper surface that is not seen when a sticker is used?

Is there a DIY bumper sticker culture? In Eugene, does there appear to be a great number of self-made bumper stickers used to transmit a message? If so, how does this fit into the greater idea of bumper stickers as a means of appropriating mobile space? Is there evidence of this DIY bumper sticker usage being an even smaller means of rejecting the traditional message?

mmakai has an awesome list of tips for starting a company. Great reading for anyone interested in the topic.

In the coming year I really want to take the skills I’ve spent years learning and push The Weekly Enema real. Give it substance. Get people reading it. Get people noticing it. Get hate mail. (We get no hate mail. Our front page article for issue 4 is titled ‘10 reasons why your mother is a fat whore.’)

Are you an easily offended person? Well, you look funny and that haircut sucks. Mad? Write us!

“oh shit, he fell in the pool AND his code sucks. SOMEONE CALL BOB!’

Edit: Okay, Jared Hill just topped anything and everything I could lob.

About:
ST-14
IN-15
WS-16
DX-15
CO-14
CHR-17

Well played, Jared. Well played.

Marlena Shaw - California Soul

If I slap a sticker with an illustration on a sign at a street corner, am I fulfilling some of the key concepts of street art?

Appropriation, Agency, Autonomy, and Authorship.

Appropriation: I am appropriating the space. One function (sign) has been replaced by another function (carrier or medium of the message).

Agency: The control over the message. Thinking of Free Agency in Football, the inspiration for the transformation of the sign could have come from anywhere, but the inspiration for me to take action came from me.

Autonomy: What is the message’s inspiration? Is it corporate? Do I care that its corporate if the message has resonance within me?

Authorship: Who defaced the existing sign? What route did it take? The means of authorship is by my hand. The author is me.

So a sticker is dynamic street art.

That’s old hat, but the point I wonder about is what if the message is just text. Is it art if the message doesn’t contain art?

The check against the key concepts holds. The space is appropriated, the agency, Autonomy and Authorship all hold true.

So if it passes this arbitrary test to be recognized as street art, what holds me back from accepting it as street art?

I keep thinking of graffiti of the declaration of independence scratched into a wall. It isn’t art, but its passing along a powerful message. That’s what graffiti is. Messages. I just get caught up in the idea that because it has ‘art’ in the name, it must feature some art.

Graffiti takes 3 parts. The message (literally the message), the medium (a sticker, a tag, a painting), and the transformed medium (that which is transformed by the act of graffiti. The wall. The sign.) Regardless of if its art, the act of transforming an existing space to display a message is graffiti.