The Influencers

The Influencers is a research project that investigates innovative forms of art, communication guerrilla and cultural jamming. It began in 2004 in collaboration with the Centre de Cultura Contemporanea de Barcelona (CCCB) and has continued with the support of the Generalitat de Catalunya’s department of culture. As a research project, The Influencers sets out to explore and document contemporary forms of creativity that use, as their raw material, information flows (ideas, passions and all kinds of collective meanings) and the channels in which they circulate through the entrails of the media machine in western societies.

2006 EDITION:
Welcome to episode three of The Influencers series, the live talk show you won’t see on TV! With us tonight, we have media pranksters, star remixers of ideas, saboteurs of academic categories and reality agitators of every stripe.
Over the next three days, our 7 guests will present their work and discuss it with us. They will take us into stories of collective hallucinations that turn into reality and vice versa, like the time a Nazi icon was used to celebrate the patron-hero of a socialist state, or that fun time we spent bribing scientists and crushing workers so that our junk food company would come out on top (at least in a videogame).
And more: porn movies transformed into sequences of letters and numbers, fake newspapers announcing the end of the Polish communist regime and a new king Wojtyla, stolen web pages, an apologia for copying, DIY artists who have cracked the top ten, masked insects hanging from the billboards of corrupt presidents…
Our 7 guests will talk about the origins of their projects, their challenges and objectives, giving us all the dirt on the strategies that work while suggesting clues we can use to explore subterranean affinities through different periods, disciplines and cultural contexts. Acquisition of other identities on a mass scale and a trip through the turbulences of information flows are our recommended remedies to July sunburn and other nuisances.

July 6 7 8 – 2006
Center of Contemporary Culture Barcelona
http://d-i-n-a.net/influencers