The artist as social provocateur and activist incorporates humor, satire, irony, political commentary and/or direct action to provoke critical thinking. Pranks challenge convention and the status quo and expose prejudices and biases.
Blog Posts
More great urban art from Street Art Utopia:
As seen March 2012 in Chiang Mai, Thailand:
Lace Fence by Demakersvan:
In Sao Paulo, Brazil. Photo by Felipe Carrelli. A car was abandoned 2 years ago. It burned and Filipe and his friends decided to make a garden on it. Before, during and after the intervention!
From Joey Skaggs: Based on the hate-mail I received, apparently because the Florida Family Association featured the April Fools’ Day Parade on their website, I expect to see the FFA protesting at the parade. If so, I’m sure the crowd will elect them hands-down winner as this year’s collective King of Fools. They seem to confuse satire with Satan.
From the Florida Family Association:
The progressive liberals in New York have added Florida Family Association leader David Caton to a list of people to mock in their April Fools day parade because of the organization’s public opposition to TLC’s All-American Muslim.
The PRNewswire reports in part:
The 27th Annual April Fools’ Day Parade will begin at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street at 12 noon, Sunday, April 1, 2012. Rain or shine, the parade will march down Fifth Avenue to Washington Square Park for the climactic selection of the King or Queen of Fools from the costumed marching look-alikes.
The marching celebrity look-alikes will include M.I.A. and Adele flipping the bird; Rush Limbaugh yelling “You slut!”; Arizona Governor Jan Brewer wagging her finger; Sara Palin citing Paul Revere revisionist history; Florida Family Association leader David Caton protesting anything Muslim; Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour bound to his pardoned prisoners as he sings Sam Cook’s “Chain Gang.” Following the parade down to Washington Square Park will be a brigade of New York City’s Finest led by Officer Anthony Bologna, pepper spraying the crowd.
Here’s a sampling of the hate mail:
From Joey Skaggs:
Occupy Washington Square Park!
For three decades, New York City’s Annual April Fools’ Day Parade has offered the public an opportunity to express, in a comical way, its outrage against the foolishness of mankind. 
Thousands of participants in look-alike costumes with satirical floats creatively mock the thoughtless, corrupt and selfish acts of the past year.
Kicking off noon on Sunday, April 1, the parade marches down 5th Avenue from 59th Street to Washington Square Park where revelers party to demonstrate against new rules that restrict the First Amendment rights of performing artists in the park. It will end with the annual crowning of the King of Fools.
Spread the word!
Read the press release here.
From Mike, Linda, and Ed:
Floris Kaayk: ‘Birdman’ Video A Hoax, ‘Jarno Smeets’ Not Real
by Natalie Wolchover, Life’s Little Mysteries Staff Writer
Huffington Post
March 22, 2012
A Dutch man named Jarno Smeets became an Internet sensation this week after posting a video on YouTube in which he appears to fly like a bird.
In the video, he straps on a contraption that supposedly syncs the motion of his flapping arms to that of a huge pair of wings made of kite fabric, allowing him to flap the wings and take off into the air.
Except not.
As reported yesterday by Life’s Little Mysteries, CGI experts quickly found flaws in the footage of Smeets taking flight that revealed the video clip had been tampered with. Internet marketing experts suggested the video may have been a viral ad campaign — for Nintendo Wii, perhaps, as Smeets claimed to have used Wii controllers to operate his wings. By the end of the day, doubt surrounding the video had soundly overtaken belief in the amazing new invention it seemed to show in action.
And now, the jig is up.
From Mark Borkowski:
The man who posted himself: The suburban accountant who tested the Royal Mail to its limits, exasperated Hitler and became one of Britain’s greatest pranksters
by David Leafe
dailymail.co.uk
19 March 2012
He was a most unlikely prankster, an Edwardian husband and father whose neatly clipped moustache and smart suit gave his neighbours no reason to believe he was anything but a respectable accountant.
In his everyday life, he observed the many rules and regulations drawn up by bureaucrats of the time — keep off the grass in public parks, refrain from spitting in the street and avoid putting your feet on train seats.
In short, he seemed a model citizen, but as in so many of us, within W. Reginald Bray there lurked an impish spirit that longed to cock a snook at officialdom.
And a clue as to his target was the red post-box outside his home in Forest Hill, a leafy suburb of South London.
Its positioning could not have been more fortuitous for a man whose hobby was to test the postal system to its limit.
From Deborah: The Leo Burnett Agency in Detroit used irony and saved a hometown library.
via Tom Parrett
From Adbusters:
Tactical Briefing #27 – #LAUGHRIOT
Alright you wild cats, nimble dreamers and jammer tacticians,
In a sudden about-face, the United States has conceded a victory to Occupy and moved May’s G8 summit to Camp David, an impenetrable military base in rural Maryland. Wow! Looks like the specter of 50,000 occupiers ready to swarm with a list of demands has turned the climactic Showdown in Chicago into a humiliating G8 Backdown. Bravo! Splitting the G8 and NATO summits was a deft move… but now we’ve got a major tactical rethink on our hands.
Moderator’s note: This won’t be the first time a satirist co-opted official letterhead to make a statement (see Joey Skaggs’ Brookyln Bridge Lottery Hoax, done in 1992), but it may be the last!!
Dane County DA considers charges against cartoonist who sent fake news
by Sandy Cullen
Wisconsin State Journal
March 14, 2012
Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne said Wednesday his office is considering whether to file a felony charge against a political cartoonist who reproduced the letterhead of state Rep. Steve Nass on a phony press release sent to a Madison newspaper.
Ozanne said Capitol Police have asked his office to determine whether Mike Konopacki of Madison should be charged with violating a state law that makes it a felony for someone who is not a public officer or public employee to act in an official capacity or to exercise any function of a public office.
The Class I felony is punishable by up to 3½ years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
Ozanne said his office has the discretion to file a different felony or misdemeanor charge, or to not prosecute.
Konopacki, 60, said Wednesday he believes his parody — which makes fun of Nass, a Republican from Whitewater, for his role in canceling an art exhibit related to last year’s protests at the state Capitol — is protected political speech.
He said he sent the fake news release to the editorial page editor at The Capital Times, which posted an erroneous story on the paper’s website and on Capital Newspapers’ website, madison.com, on Feb. 25. It was removed a short while later after the paper learned the source document was a fabrication.
Konopacki, who specializes in labor issues, has drawn editorial cartoons for The Capital Times for many years on a freelance basis, the paper said in an online statement.
State Pols Outraged by Anti-Abortion Laws Push Onerous Restrictions on Viagra
by Allison Yarrow
The Daily Beast
March 14, 2012
Want to use the popular potency drug? First undergo a rectal exam, celibacy lecture, and waiting period. How fed-up female state legislators—and at least one male—are pushing bills to retaliate against the male-led, restrictions-laden drive to limit women’s rights to abortion and birth control.
In the fierce public debate about contraception and abortion, revenge legislation is the new attack weapon. Women pols are using their posts to wage war on bills and laws that work to govern women’s wombs. And they’re not denying the obvious humor involved in what they’ve proposed. Monty Python is even a touchstone.
To give men a taste of how invasive and prodding government oversight into women’s sex lives has become, a number of state politicians sporting two X chromosomes have championed bills that mandate a pesky list of prerequisites for men who want Viagra pills. These include celibacy lectures, rectal exams, affidavits from former lovers swearing impotence problems, and forced viewing of a video pimping the medicine’s side effects. Acquiring the goods to get hard could be incredibly difficult. It’s tough enough reading that list of regulations with a straight face.
“We’re talking about it, that’s a start,” said Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner, who in the last 24 hours has been anointed the latest liberal media darling for introducing her version of a Viagra bill. The senator wants to “protect” Ohio’s men “from the risks of PDE-5 inhibitors, drugs commonly used to treat symptoms of impotence.” Turner is retaliating against her state’s cadre of male pols who push what are essentially abortion and contraception bans. They have, her press release suggests, been so protective of women’s insides that reciprocation is only fair.
“If you want to be preoccupied with regulating women’s wombs, we’re going to do the same thing with men,” she challenged.
Read the rest of this article here.
‘Homeless Hotspot’ stunt draws ire at SXSW
The Garden Island
March 13, 2012
Austin, Texas (AP) — A marketing stunt that paid homeless people to carry Wi-Fi signals during the South By Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas, is drawing widespread criticism.
BBH Labs, a unit of the global marketing agency BBH, gave 14 people from a homeless shelter mobile Wi-Fi devices and T-shirts that announced “I am a 4G Hotspot.”
BBH New York chairwoman Emma Cookson says the company paid them a minimum of $50 a day. She called the experiment a modernized version of homeless selling street newspapers.
But many have called the program exploitive. Wired.com wrote that it “sounds like something out of a darkly satirical science-fiction dystopia.”
ReadWriteWeb called it a “blunt display of unselfconscious gall.”
The experiment was meant to begin last Friday but rain delayed its implementation until Sunday. It stopped Monday.
image: cbc.ca
Submitted by Emerson Dameron:
In 1974, after 3 years of planning, a man named Oliver Bickar pulled off one of the world’s biggest (in size) April Fools’ Day pranks. He and his co-conspirators flew dozens of tires over to an extinct volcanic crater called Mount Edgecumbe on uninhabited Kruzof Island in Alaska. When he lit the tires on fire, people in Sitka, a town on the closest island, took serious note, wondering if the volcano, extinct for 4,000 years, had suddenly erupted. You can read the whole story on NowIKnow and at The Museum of Hoaxes.
From Tim Jackson:
It’s the Million Mustache March in support of the Stache Act – a simple request for a tax deduction stimulus for the cost of maintaining facial hair. Sounds reasonable…
Join the Movement to Seek Tax Equity for People of Facial Hair
From AmericanMustacheInstitute.org website:
On President’s Day 2012, The American Mustache Institute introduced the Million Mustache March in support of the Stimulus To Allow Critical Hair Expenses, or the STACHE Act. If adopted by Congress, the STACHE Act would provide up to a $250.00 annual tax refund for Mustached Americans. Americans can participate by:
Visiting StacheAct.com where you can add a past presidential mustache to a Facebook photo; Or, by joining the American Mustache Institute in Washington, D.C., on April 1 for a physical march of one million Mustached Americans from the U.S. Capitol to the White House. For every Million Mustache March participant, America’s leading tax authority – H&R Block – will make contributions to Millions From One — which delivers clean drinking water to those who cannot obtain it themselves.
From Charlie Todd of Improv Everywhere:
For our latest mission, a presenter at the TED conference has his talk interrupted by the Mac spinning wait cursor, commonly known as the “Spinning Beach Ball of Death.” As he stands awkwardly and waits, things get weird.
Enjoy the video first and then go behind the scenes with our report.
For the uninitiated, TED is an annual conference in Long Beach, California that focuses on “Ideas Worth Sharing.” I gave a talk at a TEDx event last year that was promoted to TED.com. For the conference this year, the TED curators approached me about staging something unexpected to surprise their audience. We had previously staged a musical prank at a conference, but I wanted to do something new and different for TED. I came up with the idea to have a fake speaker give a talk and make it seem like his big moment in the spotlight had been ruined by a computer crash. Apple users love to hate the notorious Spinning Beach Ball of Death. I started with that image and set out to heighten it to absurdity.
Produced by: Charlie Todd and Cody Lindquist; Shot & Edited by: TED; Starring: Eugene Cordero as Colin Robertson; Animation by: Bob Bonniol; Song by: Tyler Walker; Still Photos: James Duncan Davidson, Charlie Todd
Click here for more about Improv Everywhere.
Occupy pop culture: A lesson in détournement
by Natasha Lennard
Salon.com
March 8, 2012
Borrowing from the French, occupiers turn figures from the cultural mainstream into symbols of dissent
Credit: nycgeneralstrike
TV-show writers, pop culture purveyors and peddlers of general stuff-we-don’t-need didn’t take long to latch onto the Occupy brand. The language of the 99 percent is popping up in sitcoms and terrible pop songs; the word “Occupy” now adorns a neon green Swatch. It’s probably beside the point to mention that revolutionaries in Egypt and Greece are fighting on without the help of branded watches; this is America, after all — what did you expect?
But Occupy supporters are taking from pop culture too. Not in the obvious sense of message amplification and popularization, but by helping themselves to items from the cultural mainstream and flipping them on their heads for propaganda purposes. To see what I mean, check out this video attributed to “nycgeneralstrike”:
From Joey Skaggs:
SUMMARY:
For three decades, New York City’s Annual April Fools’ Day Parade has offered the public an opportunity to express, in a comical way, its outrage against the foolishness of mankind. Thousands of participants in look-alike costumes with satirical floats creatively mock the thoughtless, corrupt and selfish acts of the past year. Kicking off at noon on Sunday, April 1, the parade will march down 5th Avenue from 59th Street to Washington Square Park where revelers will party to demonstrate against new rules that restrict the First Amendment rights of performing artists in the park. It will conclude with the annual crowning of the King of Fools. Spread the word!
PRESS RELEASE:
The 27th Annual April Fools’ Day Parade will begin at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street at 12 noon, Sunday, April 1, 2012. Rain or shine, the parade will march down Fifth Avenue to Washington Square Park for the climactic selection of the King or Queen of Fools from the costumed marching look-alikes.
The New York April Fools’ Day Parade was created in 1986 to remedy a glaring omission in the long list of New York’s ethnic and holiday parades. These events fail to recognize the importance of April 1st, the day designated to commemorate the 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 or Queen of Fools from parading look-alikes. The King of Fools from the 2011 parade was Speaker of the House John Boehner.
“Every year the parade gets bigger and more outrageous. There’s never a shortage of fools,” says Joey Skaggs, parade organizer.
Welcome to the Art of the Prank, produced and edited by Joey Skaggs. Here you will find insights, information, news and discussions about art, pranks, hoaxes, culture jamming & reality hacking around the world - past, present and future - mainstream and counter culture. You are invited to contribute to its development. May your journey be filled with more than your expectations.
You are currently browsing the archives for the The World of the Prank category.
