“As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska.” – Sarah Palin

Joey Skaggs Launches Art of the Prank
boingboing.net
by David Pescovitz
April 1, 2007

Joey Skaggs Launches Pranks.com ArtofthePrank.com, The Art of the Prank
laughingsquid.com
by Scott Beale
April 1, 2007

The Art of the Prank
April Fools’ Is Always More Fun When The Joke’s Not on You
Washington Post
by Dan Zak
April 1, 2007

The Art of the Prank
About: Urban Legends and Folklore
by David Emery
March 31, 2007

The Wilson Show
Joey Skaggs Radio Interview (5:19) about Pranks.com ArtofthePrank.com [mp3, 1.2 MB]
WIBC, Indianapolis, Indiana
March 30, 2007

PRWEB Podcast
Joey Skaggs Interview (5:22) about Pranks.com ArtofthePrank.com [mp3, 5.0 MB]
March 29, 2007

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PRWEB Press release with downloadable podcast featuring Joey Skaggs

Joey Skaggs, Notorious Artist and Satirist, to Launch The Art of the Prank Blog at ArtofthePrank.com on April 1, 2007

Summary: A new Web site and Blog all about pranks, hoaxes, culture jamming and reality hacking launches on April Fools Day. Honest!

New York, NY, (PRWeb) March 26, 2007 — Artist and satirist Joey Skaggs is proud to announce the debut of his new blog The Art of the Prank at ArtofthePrank.com on April Fools Day, April 1, 2007. Here visitors will find insights, news and discussions on everything to do with pranks, hoaxes, culture jamming and reality hacking around the world – past, present and future – mainstream and counter culture.

With Skaggs as editor, the site will have submissions from many known and not so known pranksters, artists, performers, activists and writers. The Art of the Prank, launching April Fools Day, will provide a continuing and growing exploration into the art of the prank; the role of the prankster as artist, activist and social observer; and the contribution of the prank to society.

Pranks have traditionally been relegated to the realm of the juvenile bad-boy or special occasions, like April Fools Day. People typically think of the word prank as referring to funny, embarrassing, humiliating, non-redeeming acts of just plain silliness or revenge. And while this may represent the majority of pranks in the world, the role of the prankster throughout history has been quite significant and influential. Mythic archetypes such as the trickster and coyote; the jester in the royal court; and pranksters throughout literature will all be explored.

In addition, topics such as pranks in the news, the sociology and psychology of pranks; political pranks; First Amendment issues; hoax etiquette; publicity stunts; urban legends; illusion and magic; fraud and deception; hype; spin; and propaganda will all be fodder for thought. As will, of course, all sorts of practical jokes and mischief…

“April Fools Day, my favorite holiday, is the perfect launch date. This site will provide one stop shopping for anyone interested in mounting an insurrection, over-throwing a government, crashing a stock market, creating global chaos, growing hair, losing weight or keeping their horny dog satisfied. It will provide a sure way to get the federal government to tap your phone line, or, at the very least to embarrass and humiliate yourself, says artist, Joey Skaggs.”

Pranks offer an alternative palette for criticism and dissent, as well as a looking-glass into the human gullibility that results when critical analysis is suspended for wishful thinking. “I challenge personal belief systems that sustain status-quo thinking and that support close-mindedness, bias and prejudice, says Skaggs.” Key motives running throughout his personal work are to inspire people to question authority in all of its guises and to ultimately think for themselves.

With this new endeavor, launching April Fools Day, Skaggs hopes to reach a broad audience of people interested in the intersection of reality and illusion. Those interested in contributing content will be invited to do so once the blog launches.

The Art of the Prank blog, at ArtofthePrank.com, will shed light on all aspects of the topic, examining the intent, content, technique, and the magic that makes a prank live. It will even include tutorials and how-to instructions. Although the site will not encourage or condone irresponsible, misguided, unlawful or unethical practices, some meaningful pranks rightfully test the limits and cross the boundaries of lawfulness. To trivialize, ignore or dismiss them for this reason would be a disservice to everyone.

About Joey Skaggs: Joey Skaggs has been a doctor, a lawyer, and an Indian chief. Hailed as an entrepreneur extraordinaire, he created a bordello for dogs, was the proprietor of a celebrity sperm bank, and founded an organization to wipe out fat. He has saved the world with his cockroach vitamin elixir and was the first and only person to ever windsurf from Hawaii to California. As a pedaling priest with a confessional booth mounted on the back of a tricycle, he took confessions from politicians at the Democratic National Convention. As a real estate developer, he created the Final Curtain cemetery theme park mall and time share program for the dead. And as a computer scientist, he revolutionized the American Judicial System using a series of super computers that meted out equal justice to all.

Although these and other illustrious activities have been presented as truth in the annals of the international news media, in reality they have all been hoaxes, products of his imagination. For over 40 years Skaggs has been an artist and a satirist with a serious message. He has used the media as his canvas, creating performances to bring to light many of the difficult and complex socio-political issues of our day.

A life-long educator and performance art practioner, Skaggs has taught at the School of Visual Arts and Parsons/New School and he lectures and does presentations at schools, festivals and conferences around the world. His commentaries on media literacy and creative independent thinking are hilarious and thought provoking and have reached millions of people on a global scale. He has been hailed as The World’s Greatest Hoaxer.

To add to his bag of tricks, he recently designed and manufactured the Universal Bulls**t Detector Watch (a real product) to enable people to humorously call it as they see it. Available online at www.bswatch.com, it flashes, moos and poops. It also tells time.

And, if that’s not enough, New Yorkers are encouraged to attend prankster and performance artist Joey Skaggs’ 22nd Annual April Fools Day Parade. The press release is available in the News Flash section of joeyskaggs.com.

About The Art of the Prank blog: The ArtofthePrank.com is designed by David Bunde of DGB Design using Wordpress software, and hosted, by Laughing Squid.

Download Portofess Photo

Photo caption: Father Anthony (aka Joey Skaggs) peddles Portofess, his portable confessional booth, because the church must go where the sinners are. Religion on the move for people on the go!

Contact:
Joey Skaggs
212-254-7878

###

Non-fiction
Fiction
News
Links to other sites
Video (preferably linked from another site)
Podcasts (video or audio)
Photographs
Cartoons
Illustrations
Audio clips

No matter what the format of the material you submit, please provide a title for your post and either a summary or your personal comments to frame the item for the Art of the Prank site. Materials submitted without a title or your framing comments might not be selected to be used on the site (this is true of plain links too). Please also, wherever possible, include photographs or illustrations with your text.

Any work that you submit will be credited to you and to whomever else you indicate should receive authorship credit. We will assume that all contributors will do their best to honor the intellectual property rights of others. Providing correct attribution is your responsibility. Art of the Prank will function merely as a “pass-through” and will not be responsible for any intellectual rights that are not our own. Please act responsibly in this regard. If ownership of any materials is contested by a third party, they will be removed from the site until the rights ownership can be clarified.

All submissions will be reviewed by one or more editors before being mounted on the site. If your material is deemed appropriate and acceptable, it will be uploaded as quickly as possible. If you do not see your postings, please do not be discouraged. There could be any number of reasons. And, you are encouraged to continue submitting materials you would like considered for posting.

Art of the Prank is intended to be interesting to people of all ages. Even though parts may be controversial and somewhat subversive of status-quo-run-of-the-mill thinking, contributors are requested to be mindful of the use of offensive language that might cause parents to censor the site from their children. To have a future filled with full-functioning, responsible, independent adults, positive examples of critical thinking must be available to the young!

Please submit all materials to submit@artoftheprank.com. Include your first and last name. If your material is not verifiable (i.e., if we can’t tell if it’s true or not, but we think it’s interesting), it will probably be placed in the “Truth or Fiction: You Decide” category.

Thank you in advance for sending us your interesting and inspiring contributions.

The Activist Cookbook, by Andrew Boyd, United for a Fair Economy, 1997

The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum, by James W. Cook, Harvard University Press, 2001

Big Book of Hoaxes: True Tales of the Greatest Lies Ever Told!, by Carl Sifakis, DC Comics, 1996

Comments on The Society of The Spectacle by Guy Debord, Verso, New Ed edition, 1998

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole, by Benjamin R. Barber, W. W. Norton, 2007

Don’t Believe It!: How Lies Become News, by Alexandra Kitty, The Disinformation Company, 2005

Encyclopedia of Hoaxes, by Gordon Stein, Gale Research Inc., 1993

Essays on the Blurring of Life and Art, by Allan Kaprow, University of California Press, 2003

Other Books by Allan Kaprow

Fakes, Frauds & Other Malarkey, by Kathryn Lindskoog and Patrick Wynne, Zondervan Publishing House, 1992

Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov, Doubleday, 1982

Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet, by Graham Meikle, Routledge, 2002

Happy Mutant Handbook: Mischievous Fun for Higher Primates, by Carla Sinclair, Gareth Branwyn, Mark Frauenfelder, Riverhead Trade, 1995

Herzog on Herzog by Werner Herzog, Paul Cronin (editor), Faber & Faber, 2003

Hey, Kidz! Buy This Book: A Radical Primer on Corporate and Governmental Propaganda and Artistic Activism for Short People by Anne Elizabeth Moore, Soft Skull Press, 2004

Hippo Eats Dwarf: A Field Guide to Hoaxes and Other B.S. by Alex Boese, Harvest Books, 2006

Hoaxes, by Curtis MacDougall, Dover Publications; 2nd Edition, 1958

Hoaxes and Deception: Library of Curious and Unusual Facts, Time Life Books, 1991

Hoaxes, Humbugs and Spectacles: Astonishing Photographs of Smelt Wrestlers, Human Projectiles, Giant Hailstones, Contortionists, Elephant Impersonat, by Mark Sloane, Villard, 1990

How a satirical editor became a Yippe conspirator in ten easy years, by Paul Krassner, Putman, 1971

How To Draw a Bunny (2002), DVD, by John W. Walter, Palm Pictures, 2004

Impropaganda: The Art of the Publicity Stunt, by Mark Borkowski

Jamming the Media, by Gareth Branwyn, Chronicle Books, 1997

Jay’s Journal of Anomalies: Conjurers, Cheats, Hustlers, Hoaxsters, Pranksters, Jokesters, Impostors, Pretenders, Sideshow Showmen, Armless Calligraphers, Mechanical Marvels, Popular Entertainments, by Ricky Jay, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001

Making the News: A Guide for Activists and Nonprofits, by Jason Salzman, Perseus Books Group, 2003

Media Hoaxes, by Fred Fedler, 1989

Media Virus!, by Douglas Rushkoff, Ballantine Books, 1996

Media Wizards: A Behind the Scenes Look at Media Manipulations, by Catherine Gourley, 21st Century, 1999

The Messenger’s Motives: Ethical Probelms of the News Media, 2nd Edition, by John L. Hulteng, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1985

Mischief Marketing: How the Rich, Famous, & Successful Really Got Their Careers and Businesses Going, by Ray Simon, McGraw-Hill/Contemporary, 2000

The Modern Con Man: How to Get Something for Nothing, by Todd Robbins, Bloomsbury, 2008

Modern Primitives, by V. Vale, RE/Search Publications, 1989

The Moral Animal, by Robert Wright, Abacus, 2004

More Scams from the Great Beyond!: How to Make Even More Money Off the Creationism, Evolution, Environmentalism, Fringe Politics, Weird Science, the Occult, and Other Strange Beliefs, by Peter Huston, Paladin Press, 2002

Mount Analogue, by Rene Daumal, Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd, 2005

Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology, by Lawrence Weschler, Vintage, 1996

The Museum of Hoaxes, by Alex Boese, Orion, 2004

No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs, by Naomi Klein, Picador, 2002

Pranks!, RE/Search Publications, 1987

Pranks! 2, RE/Search Publications, 2006

Publicity Stunt, by Candice Jacobson Fuhrman, Chronicle Books. 1989

Radical Melbourne 2: The Enemy Within, by Jeff Sparrow and Jill Sparrow, Vulgar Press, 2004

The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins, Oxford University Press, 3rd edition, 2006

Spite, Malice and Revenge: The Ultimate Guide to Getting Even (3 Diabolical Volumes in 1), by M. Nelson Chunder and George Hayduke, Random House Value Publishing, 1988

Spook Country, by William Gibson, Putnam Adult (August 7, 2007), Putnam Adult, 2007

Stories of hoaxes in the name of science, by Irving Adler, Collier Books, 1962

True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, by Farhad Manjoo, Wiley, 2008

Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity , by Anne Elizabeth Moore, New Press, 2007

U-Turn: What If You Woke Up One Morning and Realized You Were Living the Wrong Life?, by Bruce Grierson, Bloomsbury, 2007

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time, by Michael Shermer, Owl Books; 2nd Rev edition, 2002

The Wolf Files: Adventures in Weird News, by Buck Wolf, Globe Pequot, 2003

More Coming!

Andrew Boyd is an author, humorist, and a 20-year veteran of creative campaigns for social change. As “Phil T. Rich,” he was Schmoozer-In-Chief of the 2004 media sensation “Billionaires for Bush.” He has written a few books, including two books of “serious” humor published by W. W. Norton: “Daily Afflictions” and “Life’s Little Deconstruction Book.” He’s at work on two others: “Wherever You Go, They’re Already There,” about the ironies of adventure travel when there’s no elsewhere anymore; and “Enlightned Machismo,” about the odd challenges men face in a “post-feminist” world. His writing has appeared in The Nation, The Village Voice, Salon.com, and elsewhere. For part of his bread and butter he does trainings and speaking engagments at campuses and conferences across the country. For another part, he’s a founding partner in Ruckus Productions, a “subvertising” agency specializing in cutting edge New Media support for environmental & social justice campaigns. Last year he co-produced “The Oil Enforcement Agency,” a mini-mockumentary on global warming (think Inconvenient Truth meets Spinal Tap). He lives in Brooklyn with his wee laptop.

Albert Cahn, contributor
Entries (1)

Albert Cahn is a Senior at Brandeis University where he is majoring in politics and philosophy.

André Gattolin, contributor
Visit André’s Site | Entries (10)

André Gattolin is an independent researcher based in Paris and working on hybrid activism and unconventional forms of communication. A former research and marketing manager in media companies, he has concurrently contributed to the development of various contestational and underground movements against commercial propaganda. He regularly publishes essays on these subjects in Multitudes (a French critical review) and on alternative websites (www.hns-info.net & www.poptronics.fr). He is currently preparing a Phd at the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle on how hoaxes penetrate and modify the mediascape practices in Europe and in North America.

Beauvais Lyons, contributor
Visit Beauvais’s Site | Entries (2)

Beauvais Lyons is a Professor of Art at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville in the United States since 1985 where he teaches printmaking. Lyons received his MFA degree from Arizona State University in 1983 and his BFA degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1980. See his web site for information on his projects as a fake curator through the Hokes Archives. Lyons’ one-person exhibitions have been presented at over 40 museums and galleries, including recent exhibitions at EyeDrum in Atlanta, Georgia; Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee; Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia; and Nowy Oficia Gallery, Gdansk, Poland. He has published articles about print theory and pedagogy in Contemporary Impressions and Printmaking Today, about art censorship in American Universities in the Art Journal and about his studio work in Archaeology and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His prints are in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. PA, and the Tennessee State Museum. He has been active with the Southern Graphics Council, serving as President, Editor of Graphic Impressions, and helping to organize their conferences in 1992 and 1995 in Knoxville and 2002 in New Orleans. In 2002 he received a Fulbright Fellowship to teach at the Fine Arts Academy in Poznañ, Poland and coordinated the IMPACT 4 International Printmaking Conference in Berlin and Poznañ in September 2005.

Charlie Todd, contributor
Visit Charlie’s Site | Entries (37)

Charlie Todd is a New York based actor, comedian, and prankster. He is the founder of Improv Everywhere, a New York prank collective that has been profiled by The New York Times, SPIN Magazine, and Rolling Stone (where his work was named “Hot Comedy” in the Hot List Issue 2005). Charlie has given interviews about his pranks to news outlets around the world including The Guardian in London, German Public Radio, and NHK TV in Japan. He brought Improv Everywhere to Aspen, Colorado in 2006 as part of HBO’s US Comedy Arts Festival.

Charlie is a teacher at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, where he has written, performed, and directed comedy for the past five years. He has created many shows at the UCBT including PAID PROGRAMMING, FOUND ON CRAIGSLIST, and THE MP3 EXPERIMENT (all of which were Time Out New York critic’s picks). He currently performs at the theatre every Saturday with the house team Reuben Williams and every Thursday with the UCBW, a ridiculous wrestling league he created.

Charlie has made appearances on LATE NIGHT WITH CONAN O’BRIEN, BEST WEEK EVER and VH1’s 40 GREATEST PRANKS. He has worked on pilots for ABC and TBS, and he will soon appear in the THIS AMERICAN LIFE pilot on Showtime.

Charlie was named one of the “10 Funniest People You’ve Never Heard Of” by New York Magazine.

Dino D’Annibale, contributor
Entries (4)

Dino is very good at writing bullshit about himself in the third person in order to give the appearance of an unsolicited quasi Bio and partial list of highlights, amazing accomplishments and other random unverifiable bullshit in order to subtlety impress the reader without being so obviously disingenuous as to illicit a question of its voracity. An alumnus of the Betty Ford Treatment Center in Palm Springs, California, Dino is currently in the Witness Protection Program. Dino is very active in the community and is a member of several organizations including, Charter Member of the People who Hate People Party (he has spent the last eight years painstakingly trying to arrange a party member meeting); Bullshit Detector Owners Group; and Lesbians Trapped in Men’s bodies, to name a few. Dino enjoys reading Camus, long walks on the beach and sushi. Turnoffs: Virgo’s, kids who scream at the theater, Espadrilles with black socks.

Doug Harvey, contributor
Visit Doug’s Site | Entries (1)

Since graduating with an MFA in painting from UCLA in 1994, Doug Harvey has written extensively about the Los Angeles and International art scenes and other aspects of popular culture, primarily as the art critic for LA WEEKLY, the largest circulation free weekly newspaper in America, and Art issues, the highly respected LA-based journal of art and contemporary culture, which ceased publication in 2002. His writing has also appeared in Art in America, The New York Times, Modern Painter, ArtReview, and numerous other publications. He has written museum and gallery catalogue essays for Jim Shaw, Jeffrey Vallance, Camille Rose Garcia, Tim Hawkinson, Lari Pittman, Georganne Deen, Margaret Keane, Big Daddy Roth, Thomas Kinkade and many others.

Harvey’s curatorial projects have ranged from many traditional gallery exhibitions (including the October 2005 First Annual LA Weekly Biennial: State of Emergence at Track 16 Gallery in Los Angeles and the forthcoming Aspects of Mel’s Hole at Santa Ana’s Grand Central Art Center) to CD compilations of sound art, programs of found and experimental films, performance events, experimental radio, artist’s comic books and zines (including Less Art which continues to be published sporadically, and is currently being transformed into a cable access television series), and an LA solo gallery exhibit determined by raffle. He has also been part of the curatorial collective creating the exhibition content and design at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, CA. Mr. Harvey also continues to maintain an active art career, exhibiting his visual art (painting-based multimedia) locally and internationally, and participating in international experimental sound, radio, and filmmaking communities. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

David Moye, contributor
Entries (3)

David Moye is Senior Editor of Wireless Flash News Service, a pop culture news agency specializing in weird news. He believes in coming up with a story and than finding someone to parrot his point.

Dadara , contributor
Visit Dadara’s Site | Entries (3)

Dadara (1969) is an Amsterdam based artist, who got known beginning of the nineties by designing lots of flyers and record covers internationally for the then burgeoning house music scene. Most of the time he is painting, but apart from making animations, designing baby-shaped loudspeakers and campaigns for Greenpeace, he also occasionally builds huge boats, which he ships to the States from Amsterdam to burn in the desert, or big pink tanks on roofs, which he blows up with explosives. Always fighting against the new Superhero of our society: the Greyman, who between 9 and 5 combats all that’s colorful and creative. Dadara erected a 9 metres high statue for this anti-hero in his hometown: The Statue of No Liberty.

David Strom, contributor
Visit David’s Site | Entries (1)

David Strom is one of the leading experts on network and Internet technologies and has written extensively on the topic for nearly 20 years for a wide variety of publications, including holding several editorial management positions for both print and online properties. He was the former editor-in-chief for Tom’s Hardware.com and Network Computing magazines, and has appeared on the Fox TV News Network, NPR’s Science Friday radio program, ABC-TV’s World News Tonight and CBS-TV’s Up to the Minute news broadcasts. He is also the author of two computer-related books.

Erin Clermont, contributor
Visit Erin’s Site | Entries (2)

Erin Clermont, seen here in front of her winter palace, is a writer and jack-of-all-trades editor. Since 1991 she has been an online host of Echo’s Movies and TV Conference.

Weigh in on the The Great Fargo Debate.

Joey Skaggs, editor
Visit Joey’s Site | Entries (27)

Joey Skaggs is an artist and satirist who has used the media as his medium since the 1960s. Summaries of his hoaxes and performance pieces are available at joeyskaggs.com.

Ethan Persoff, contributor
Visit Ethan’s Site | Entries (2)

Ethan Persoff is a Austin TX-based sound artist and cartoonist, known best for his SPREE recordings, his comic book collaboration with Al Columbia (POGOSTICK, Fantagraphics Books), and for his series of TEDDY stories. He maintains a widely read Internet archive of unique and obscure “government comics”, “drug comics” and other “comics with problems”, and is currently assembling an archive of the entire 146 issue run of Paul Krassner’s classic and important The Realist magazine. He can be reached at http://www.ep.tc/ and at http://www.ep.tc/music.

Homer Fink, contributor
Visit Homer’s Site | Entries (3)

Homer Fink likes to refer to himself as “Publisher, Altruist, AMERICAN”. He claims to have “been a blogger before there was blogging”, a reference to the fact that The Fink File, which started as a fanzine in 1991 has been on the web in one way or another since the mid-90s. Fink also tried podcasting for “one hot minute” but quickly grew bored with it. “It’s like having another job, feh!”

Fink also alleges to have been part of the roadcrew for the late 80s punk band Enema Priest, but no documentation of that can be found.

Fink continues to publish The Fink File, but is now spending more time on his “serious” effort, Brooklyn Heights Blog. He’s also the capo of Brigate Bocce, a bocce team in the FloydNY league.

Additional Link: brooklynheightsblog.com

Podcast: homerfink.wordpress.com/

W.J. Elvin III, contributor
Visit W.J.’s Site | Entries (78)

W.J. Elvin III has been an investigative reporter, magazine feature writer, book columnist and antiquarian researcher, among various survival maneuvers. As a young man he eluded formal education and hung out on beaches reading beat poetry, but was eventually recognized by the U.S. military as someone needing to be taught how to speak Morse code. Having acquired that and a few similarly marketable skills he naturally took up journalism. His popular “Inside the Beltway” column was known as “coffee-spilling time” among the high and mighty in Washington. Some of his scoops have been stuff that can get a reporter killed while other articles appear to have been channeled from another dimension. A shamanic Taoist with a knack for intuiting outcomes of news situations, his predictions earned a comment from a former senior FBI official: “I wish I had your crystal ball.” Seeking a line of work offering a better chance of getting old, Elvin has in recent years focused on investigating literary deception. He is editor of “Fiona: Mysteries & Curiosities of Literary Fraud & Folly,” available from Amazon. His other interests include treasure hunting and banging on rocks.

Jorge Luis Marzo, contributor
Visit Jorge Luis’s Site | Entries (7)

Jorge Luis Marzo (Barcelona, Spain). Art Historian and Curator, writer and professor. Last projects: Mobile Culture (LABoral, 2010); The Baroque D_efect (CCCB, 2010); Low-Cost (FAD, 2009); Political Ads. The Spectacle of Democracy (Palau de la Virreina, 2008). Recent Publications: Political Ads. The Spectacle of Democracy (Turner, 2008); Modern Art and Franquism. Conservative Origins of Avantgarde and Art Politics in Spain (Fundación Espais, 2008); Photography and Social Acitivism (Gustavo Gili, 2006); Me, Mycell and I. Technology, Mobility and Social Life (Fundació Tàpies, 2003). Professor at Elisava/University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.

John Lundberg, contributor
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John Lundberg is an artist and filmmaker. He founded the arts collective Circlemakers in the early 1990s and has been creating crop circles all over the world ever since. More info can be found at circlemakers.org and offkilter.co.uk.

KDM and CLM , contributor
Entries (1)

KDM and CLM have spent most of their lives devising pranks. “I guess it’s some kind of genetic mutation,” says KDM, “That I’ve always been driven to pull a fast one.” Most of their work involves photography because it’s easy to entertain themselves and others with a digital camera. They are trying to figure how to make a career out of pranks, because as CLM says, “That’s got to be better than doing 9 – 5 like mom and dad.”

Kate McCamy, contributor
Entries (12)

Kate McCamy was raised in lower Manhattan by bohemian artist parents and grew up surrounded by creative minds. She has worked in film and theatre all her life from off off Broadway to Hollywood films. She is a published and produced playwright, screenwriter and songwriter, has been employed as a script doctor; taught playwriting at Julia Richman High School in Queens for Theatre For New Audiences; ran an improvisation workshop and was a Teacher-Director for the Circle Repertory Company Arts and Education outreach program. She studied film and screenwriting at New York University, but has learned the most from the school of life, traveling the world and working in the “Business”.

Kembrew McLeod, contributor
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Kembrew McLeod is an independent documentary filmmaker and a media studies scholar at the University of Iowa whose work focuses on both popular music and the cultural impact of intellectual property law. Associate Professor McLeod has written refereed journal articles on copyright and music, and has published two books on the subject: Owning Culture: Authorship, Ownership and Intellectual Property Law (Lang, 2001) and Freedom of Expression®: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity (Doubleday, 2005), which received the Oboler book award from the American Library Association. McLeod’s documentary, Money For Nothing: Behind the Business of Pop Music (2000), was programmed at a variety of film festivals, including the 2002 South By Southwest Film Festival and the 2002 New England Film and Video Festival, where it received the Rosa Luxemburg Award for Social Consciousness. He is currently working on a feature length documentary about digital sampling titled Copyright Criminals: This is a Sampling Sport, as well as a second documentary, Freedom of Expression®: Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property, which focuses on free speech and fair use. He is an occasional music journalist whose pieces have appeared in Rolling Stone, Mojo, Spin, The Village Voice and the New Rolling Stone Album Guide (Fireside, 2005). Additionally, McLeod was involved in Carrie McLaren’s traveling Illegal Art show, which traveled to New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., and was hosted by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Artist Gallery in 2003. His scholarly and creative work can be accessed at kembrew.com.

Matt Besser, contributor
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Matt Besser has always been an asshole and managed to turn that into a living by calling himself a comedian. He is a founding member of the Upright Citizens Brigade and can be seen at their theater in LA every weekend in their improv show “Asssscat”. The UCB have always pursued a mission of spreading chaos by incorporating prank elements into their sketches. As a solo performer Besser has teased the papers in Chicago (1989-96) with fake letters to the editor; in New York he attacked people dialing his apartment seeking customer service, and in LA he jerked the chains of cocky pundits on his fake debate show “Crossballs”.

Mark Borkowski, contributor
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Mark Borkowski and his 30-strong agency BORKOWSKI PR are among the London media industry’s most talented practitioners of the craft of publicity, with Mark widely acknowledged as the contemporary authority on public relations.

He trained in theatre publicity at the Wyvern Theatre, Swindon, and subsequently with Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Royal, Stratford East. Borkowski PR was founded in 1988, and grew rapidly by representing a broad spectrum of leading arts and entertainments stars, from the left-of-field (Archaos, Cirque du Soleil, Stomp, The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow) to the mainstream (The Bolshoi Ballet, The Kirov, The Royal Albert Hall, Sir Cliff Richard), to landmark TV (The Word, Spooks, Cracker, Our Friends In The North, Never Mind the Buzzcocks) and current theatre (Cabaret, The Glass Menagerie, MAMMA MIA!, Treats, The Last Laugh, A Model Girl).

What distinguishes him from other publicists is the showmanship of his ideas. This is a man who has commissioned interviews with tap-dancing dogs, publicly auditioned parrots, cats and crocodiles, and was once frog-marched from the BBC for letting scorpions loose in a Green Room. There’s more; cow pat flinging competitions, sword-fighting workshops with Douglas Fairbanks, driving cars on two wheels across the Albert Bridge, a dull cheapest–ever book launch in a dirty launderette, an Action Man party in an NCP car park, a Vivienne Westwood dress for a doll, and a ballet for radio-controlled vacuum cleaners. He’s created a newspaper column written by a cat, and once walked an elephant into a fish and chip shop with the Andrews Sisters.

Although the agency’s clients have included products and companies as diverse as Vodafone, Peugeot, Virgin Megastores and JCB, links with the arts remain strong. The roll call of major international stars includes Noel Edmonds, Michael Flatley, Macaulay Culkin, Damien Hirst, Michael Jackson, Joan Rivers, Eddie Izzard, Mikael Gorbachev, Graham Norton and Boy George.

To publicise the agency’s tenth anniversary, Borkowski PR produced an exhibition and a book entitled Impropaganda: The Art of the Publicity Stunt.

Mark is a regular performer on television, commenting on all matters concerning PR. In the spring of 2004 he presented the BBC 3 documentary How The War Was Spun on the use of censorship and cover-up during the 2nd Gulf War. Mark took to the stage of the Edinburgh Festival fringe in August 2004 with his show Son of Barnum: A Stunt Too Far? the history of the forgotten Hollywood publicists. Mark was then commissioned to write a book on the subject, due for publication in 2007.

Margaret Engel, contributor
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Margaret Engel is the managing editor of the Newseum, the interactive museum of news in Washington, D.C. She also is the president of the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the nation’s oldest journalism writing fellowship. She is a graduate of the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism and was a Nieman fellow at Harvard University. She is a board member of the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards and a longtime member of Investigative Reporters and Editors. She has been part of the reporting staffs of the Washington Post, Des Moines Register and Lorain (OH) Journal. She has written for Esquire, Saveur and her book, “Food Finds,” co-written with her twin sister, is in its sixth season on The Food Network. She co-authored a Fodor’s guide to American baseball parks with her husband. She lives in Bethesda, Maryland and is a board member of the Montgomery County Community Foundation.

Mike Ibanez, contributor
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Cultural Sniper and spanish radio-personality, Mike works through the mediasphere. He created the cult radio program La Rosa de Vietnam for Radio-3 (1983), Moonlight & Muzak for Radio PICA (1990-1995), and Psikotroniko Berriak for Radio Vitoria (2001-now). Mike also wrote ¡Zap!–Caos, capitalismo y televisión (Futura Ediciones, 1995) and pOp cOntrOl. Crónicas post-industriales (Glenat, 2000). His hit in TV is Subliminalia, a 1998 shockumentary about the subliminal kingdom in movies, advertising… In 1995 Mike set up Mess/Age, a subversive agit-prop-oriented media agency (or so).

Marcy LaViollette, contributor
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Marcy LaViollette is the first female prankster to successfully thread the eye of the Space Needle. Disfigured at a young age by a tragic “got your nose” accident, Marcy tends to stay close to her hometown of Olympia, Washington. Embiggened by this blog, she is excited to expand her pranktasticness to global proportions (or at least outside of her direct circle of friends) and to stop speaking about herself in the third person.

monochrom , contributor
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monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993. For more information visit Wikipedia.

Norm Magnusson, contributor
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My main artistic focus been painting and the creation of metaphors that are not so obvious as to be totally unpoetic, but not so obscure as to be totally unreadable. At first, my allegorical works looked to nature for symbols of the human condition. From there, my focus moved naturally toward creating works with environmental messages.

The next short step brought me more into the political and social arena, with a show of paintings on the theme of America’s Seven Deadly Sins and a series entitled Finding the truth, in which I “excavated” my own text from verbatim speeches by George W. Bush.

Frustrated by traditional political and socially conscious art, its venues necessarily corralling it into the relatively impotent arena of “preaching to the choir” and its well-accepted strident tone creating a message that could never resonate outside the same old churches, I sought to create an art of social conscience that had both the venue and the language to put it in front of and get it considered by a wider variety of viewers.

So I produced three 30 second pieces of public art that appropriated an increasingly popular American political vernacular: religion. Two of these art pieces Practice what you preach and Do unto others aired 48 times each on a small, national television network in October of 2004.

Most recently, I produced the first few pieces of my proposed I-75 project, which would place “historical” markers with contemporary social and political content in the 50 or so rest areas of Interstate 75, which starts in Michigan and runs through Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and Florida. In May, two of the markers will be shown at Insight/Onsite: Site Specific Sculpture at SUNY Ulster and in June, they’ll be The Main Street Sculpture Project at The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art.

http://www.funism.com

Nancy Weber, contributor
Entries (2)

Nancy Weber put an ad in The Village Voice in 1973 offering to trade places with a stranger. She actually did the deed several months later: moved into Micki Wrangler’s bedroom and office and tried to get into her skin. Meanwhile, back downtown, Micki tried to remake Nancy’s existence instead of experience it. Nancy memorialized this exalted and messy prank in The Life Swap, often imitated but never equaled. A new edition is available at www.backinprint.com or through your favorite online bookshop. The Gift of Evil, Nancy’s 23rd title and sequel to her 1980s thriller The Playgroup, is being serialized on Amazon Shorts, where you can buy each nail-biting chapter for 49 cents a pop at www.amazon.com. Nancy co-starred in Joey’s Geraldo Rivera hoax and is proud that her two grown-up children, Rose and Albert, appeared in Biopeep and White House Outhouse, among other Skaggs masterworks. She caters and teaches under the rubric Between Books She Cooks and collaborates with artists on such projects as the Bake Love not War refrigerator magnet and TruffleLips, a balm infused with essence of black Perigord truffles.

Photo caption: Cooking up mischief
Photo credit: Andrew Marks

Paul Krassner, contributor
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Paul Krassner calls himself an investigative satirist. Don Imus labeled him “one of the comic geniuses of the 20th century.” And, According to the Los Angeles Reader, “Krassner delivers 90 minutes of the funniest, most intelligent social and political commentary in town.”

On the other hand, a couple of FBI agents went to one of his performances and stated in their report, “He purported to be humorous about government policies.” His FBI files indicate that after Life magazine published a favorable profile of him, the FBI sent a poison-pen letter to the editor, complaining: “To classify Krassner as a social rebel is far too cute. He’s a nut, a raving, unconfined nut.”

“The FBI was right,” says George Carlin. “This man is dangerous–and funny; and necessary”…

See more of Paul’s bio at paulkrassner.com

Peter Moosgaard, contributor
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Peter Moosgaard is a media artist and writer, working in Vienna and Helsingborg. In his work he deals with topics like pain, nationality, mythology, science and digital media. Moosgaard’s ambition is “..to exploit the neverland between art and technology,” as he once said, “because I´m not sure that culture is my friend.” Currently he is working on a way to transmit and save data via biological systems.

Ron English, contributor
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Ron English, a New York-based painter, has exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide for over twenty years his unique sensibility, in which the familiar is reflected through funhouse mirrors into something startlingly new. Recently his commentary and art were featured in the hit movie “Supersize Me,” widening his audience beyond the boundaries of intrepid art seekers, and he has appeared on television in the US, Canada, Europe, and Japan. He is also the subject of an award-winning documentary, “POPaganda, the Art and Crimes of Ron English.”

Most recently Ron has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Amsterdam, where he created a series of paintings and billboards addressing the recent controversy surrounding the assassination of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by Muslim extremists. He has also found time to delve into toy making, with a newly released series of vinyl figures, including MC Supersized, Ronnnie Rabbbit, Big Yang and the Yangbangers, and Cathy Cowgirl.

In addition to painting, Ron English is widely considered to be one of the seminal figures in the culture jamming movement, in which artists and activists subvert existing advertisements to encourage free thought. He has pirated more than a thousand billboards over the last twenty years, replacing existing advertisements with his own “subvertisements,” ranging from his “Cancer Kids” campaign featuring preadolescent camels hawking cigarettes to children, to Apple computer’s “Think Different” campaign, where Ron added such 20th Century luminaries as Charles Manson to Apple’s roster of spokesmen. Most recently Ron staged an elaborate “tribute” to Ronald McDonald in San Francisco, in collaboration with the Billboard Liberation Front, featuring animatronic sculpture, billboard art and the spontaneous performance of fifty-odd Ronalds, Hamburglars, and assorted clowns.

In July of 2006, Ron premiered his 12 x 27-foot interpretation of “Guernica,” which is one foot longer and one foot taller than Picasso’s original, featuring a psychodrama acted out by his children, and viewed from the point of view of the bomber airplane. In 2007 the artist celebrates the 70th anniversary of Guernica with an series of billboard installations in Spain depicting modern variations of Picasso’s classic painting.

Rev. Al , contributor
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Rev. Al is a writer, artist, animator, and licensed minister, who served 9 years (1990-1999) as “Grand Instigator” of the Cacophony Society a national network of provocateurs serving as prototype for Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. He may be best known for his “Cement Cuddlers” (cement filled teddy bears) deposited on the shelves of Toys R Us or his appearance as “Faceless Boy,” a hideously disfigured man-child celebrating his birthday at a Southern California Chuck-E-Cheese. His current project is The Art of Bleeding, an ambulance-based performance troupe dedicated to providing alarmingly unorthodox theatrical programs in safety education.

Rose Fox, contributor
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Rose Fox is the Dissociative Editor for the Annals of Improbable Research, a reviews editor for Publishers Weekly, a frequent contributor to Overheard in New York, a freelance medical journalist, and an all-around dilletante.

Photo credit: Andrew Marks

Samuel Bester, contributor
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Samuel Bester lived twelve years in the Swiss dream. Torn off from his birth place in 1987, in Montpellier, Nimes and then Strasbourg where he discovers the world of art. After different kinds of experiences in art schools, he moves towards the audio-visual art. A way of expression which allows him now to explore his passion by making documentary and experimental films.

Steve Lambert, contributor
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Steve Lambert was born in Los Angeles in 1976 and moved to the Bay Area four days later. He was born to a former Franciscan Monk and a Dominican Nun who practiced a variation of Liberation Theology, then abandoned organized religion and left the church a year before his birth.

Despite never graduating from high school, Steve went on to study sociology, film, and music before receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2000 and a Master of Fine Arts degree at UC Davis in 2006. He founded the outdoor, guerilla art gallery, the Budget Gallery, in 1999 and the Anti-Advertising Agency in 2004.

Steve has worked as a furniture installer, radio host, record store clerk, ballet dancer, parking lot attendant, Winnie the Pooh at kid’s parties, mystery shopper, undercover store investigator, theater house manager, delivery truck driver, national dealer representative, upright bass player in country western band, high school teacher, landscaper, and lecturer among other things. He currently claims artist and professor on his taxes.

Steve’s projects and art works have won awards from Rhizome/The New Museum, the Creative Work Fund, Adbusters Media Foundation, the California Arts Council, the Belle Foundation, and others. His work has been shown nationally in cities like Detroit, New York, and throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as internationally in Havana, Canada, Barcelona, and Rotterdam. Writings about his work have appeared in multiple publications such as the New York Times, Punk Planet, Artweek, and Newsweek Magazine.

Steve is currently a fellow at Eyebeam’s Open R&D Lab in New York.

Read Steve’s Artist Statement here.

Steffani Martin, contributor
Entries (1)

Retired educator/pornographer, formerly known as the best educated slut in New York. Steffani is a long time member of Joey Skaggs’ repertory company of hoaxers and current member of the GSCSF (Geriatric Swingers Club of South Florida).

Steve ESPO Powers, contributor
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Stephen Powers was born and raised and Philadelphia, then moved to New York City in 1994. After stints as publisher of On the Go Magazine, author of the book The Art Of Getting Over, and full-time graffiti writer, Powers opened his studio practice in Janurary of 1998. Since then he has shown at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Deitch Projects, The 49th Venice Biennale, and The Luggage Store in San Francisco. In 2004, he founded the Dreamland Artist
Club and partnered with Creative Time to commission over 45 artists to paint signs and rides in Coney Island. His book of pop art short stories, First And Fifteenth, was published by Villard in 2005. He lives and works in Manhattan.

Sean Ryan, contributor
Entries (1)

Sean Ryan is a consummate success at failing to finish anything of real value in its entirety. Other notable accomplishments include his active and consistent participation in the propagation of other’s extreme wealth as a lemming employed by Goldman-Sachs as an Instructor in a Culinary School. For the pittance, he pontificates about the grandeur of wine, its history, its position within multiple cultures, and is extraordinarily well versed in the biological, psychological, and long term effects of its active component, ether.

Sean is a student of life who “keeps it real” by actively searching out the worldviews of others through art, literature, music, and dogmatic rhetoric (“W” is his current hero and holds his beliefs as the standard to be emulated). He currently finds himself immersed in the world of homosexual internet porn where he believes that he is close to bridging the source of the social fractures between those who enjoy muscle cars, the WWF, and “big tits” with those who like to simply ride the muscle. He often muses that he is a renaissance man who proudly bears the nickname that his students have ascribed to him, “King Dolt”.

Survive LA , contributor
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Located in the center of the beating heart of Los Angeles, SurviveLA is a blog and an urban homestead dedicated to the idea that through small steps, we can create households and communities that are self-sufficient, in the interest of the betterment of ourselves, our communities and the health of our planet. Organized on the concept of moving household systems from a consumer orientation to a production orientation, i.e. growing food vs. buying it, SurviveLA.com presents practical advice, carefully selected resources, and interviews with Urban Homesteaders “living the life”.

Tim Jackson, contributor
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Tim Jackson directed “Radical Jesters” (.com), a film profiling 11 pranksters, provocateurs, and performers who rankle the system, and “Chaos and Order” a film about The American Repertory Theater in Cambridge. He has contributed drums to several film soundtracks and many bands including his own group The Band That Time Forgot (.com) He also works part time as an actor and full time teaching film, art, and popular culture at the New England Institute of Art in Boston.

Tamara Thorne, contributor
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Tamara Thorne is a novelist, journalist, and photographer specializing in paranormal muckraking and political jokes like the Bush Administration. Proud inventor of the word, ‘ectojism’, Thorne idolized Houdini and Sherlock Holmes as a child, learned April 1 etiquette at her mother’s knee, and, since being confused with a ghost-hunting hero in one of her novels a couple years ago, is happily having her cake and eating it too in a haunted house near you. Her pastimes include long walks on the freeway, string theory and pina colonics. Tamara has two other Web sites to her credit: haunster.net and grimmacres.com

V. Vale, contributor
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In 1977 Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg each gave $100 to V. Vale, a City Lights Bookstore employee, to begin publishing SEARCH & DESTROY which chronicled and helped spark the International Punk Rock Cultural Revolution. Inspired by Andy Warhol’s early Interview tabloids, Vale’s focus was on primary-source interviews and photographs involving artists. Search & Destroy morphed into RE/Search (get it?) which continues publishing books to this day. Vale’s greatest hits include PRANKS, Modern Primitives (which, believe it or not, was originally conceived as a kind of faux-anthropological prank), J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, books on William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, and the Industrial Culture Handbook, which put the “industrial music” category into the world’s record stores and websites. Vale’s most recent books include PRANKS 2 (which also includes a Joey Skaggs interview), J.G. Ballard Quotes, J.G. Ballard Conversations, and a limited-edition hardback on art paper of THE INDUSTRIAL CULTURE HANDBOOK.

Wayne Zebzda, contributor
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Wayne Zebzda is a multimedia sculptor and videographer. In the late 1970’s� he made art installations on the streets in California’s Bay Area where he graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute. This outdoor metropolitan setting offered Zebzda an additional context to tweak reality and create installations which he considers theater sets for life. Many of the works also involve audience participation. He is currently raising kids on Kauai, in Hawaii, where he was awarded two public art commissions from the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts. For more information visit www.waynz.com.