…Exploring the role of the prankster as artist, activist and social observer and the significance of the prank in society.
From Steve Lambert:
A brilliant prank. At CheatNeutral, they offer to “offset your infidelity” for a small fee. You cheat, pay them $5, and they make sure there is someone else who doesn’t cheat – therefore there is less cheating in the world. They then go on to get coverage on the BBC and US media talking about what a scam carbon offsetting is.
via LiveLeak.com:
Who’s Lee Camp? This is according to the Huffington Post, February 24, 2008:
Over the past five years Lee Camp has performed standup comedy at over 300 colleges nationwide, but we don’t hold that against him. Seventy-five percent of his jokes go over the audience’s heads even though he’s not that smart. (He has had more than one audience member yell out ‘Who’s Karl Rove??’) He was named one of the best New Faces at the 2006 Montreal Comedy Festival and has also performed endless shows with Laughing Liberally. As an actor he’s had one sentence in at least three percent of the television shows you like, and as a writer he’s published three humor books you haven’t read. So he’s ubiquitous in stuff you’ve never seen. He views himself as a cynical optimist because he sees the glass as half full of shit.
Editor’s note: Alex Boese from the Museum of Hoaxes called this one right on February 11.
“˜Suicide blogger” claims project was art
by Jasper Hamill
Sunday Herald
February 17, 2008
Identity of “˜90DayJane” still unknown as site closed.
News of her imminent death swept the internet – a young woman who called herself 90DayJane started a blog with one promise: “I am going to kill myself in 90 days.”
But last week, after only seven daily entries, it emerged that her promise may have been a hoax. In a final blog, the 24-year-old claimed the whole project was a piece of art made in tribute to Christine Chubbuck, an American journalist who shot herself live on air.
Overwhelmed by the public response, the mysterious woman with the thick black bob wrote: “My closeness to this project must have made art seem like reality to many people. That is not a reaction that I expected nor can I morally justify. This is why my project, 90DayJane, will be taken down in the next few hours.”
There has been a furious online search to uncover the artist’s identity, spurred on, in part, by the belief that it was her final statement that was false and that she wrote it to escape the unintended scrutiny of the 150,000 visitors to her site. Certainly, one of her final comments – the claim that her project was meant as a “mirror to reflect the isolation” felt by internet users – suggested a unsettled frame of mind. Continue reading “90DayJane Gets Her 15 Minutes”
Update, January 24, 2008: That Mushroom Cloud? They”re Just Svejking Around — An article from the New York Times, that interviews three representatives of Ztohoven and explains a bit about their motivation.
Hoax nuke blast seen on TV weather
CNN.com/Europe
January 3, 2008
Prague, Czech Republic (AP) — Members of a Czech art group who hacked into television broadcasting with images of a hoax nuclear explosion were charged and will have to stand trial, a state prosecutor said Thursday.
The television broadcast:
The six members of the Prague-based Ztohoven group were charged last month with spreading false information and face up to three years in jail if convicted, said Dusan Ondracek, the state prosecutor in the northern town of Trutnov, who is in charge of the case.
The trial could begin by the end of January, Ondracek said.
On June 17, viewers of a Czech television channel watching a Web cam program monitoring weather in various Czech mountain resorts could see a nuclear explosion taking place in the Krkonose or Giant Mountains in the northern Czech Republic.
In December, the project was awarded the NG 333 prize for young artists by Prague’s National Gallery together with a cash prize of 333,000 koruna (US$18,350).
Related link:
French Press Falls For Major Facebook Prank
TechCrunch
January 9, 2008
This is probably the biggest hoax in the history of Facebook. It happened in France and is one of the most discussed stories in the French blogosphere right now. It all started a few weeks ago with a simple third-party Facebook application that was aimed at designating, every quarter, a new “Facebook Worldwide president”. A young 28 year-old French man by the name of Arash Derambarsh decided to run for the presidency believing this was a real election (or faking to believe) and started to invite his friends and even created an official program: stimulate tolerance across religions, fight illiteracy, and promote French culture worldwide. Until then, there was nothing really worth talking about.
But here is the crunch: Arash landed at the top of the application and became “president” (for the record, during the first session the application had been installed 140k+ times and the “candidate” received officially 9k+ votes..). He used that information and got some coverage with French media that started to report the news and really believed that a French man had become the new worldwide president of Facebook without event taking the time to validate the facts or understanding what this title implied. Continue reading “Facebook Worldwide President Elected in France”