Cultural Hijack: Rethinking Intervention Paperback - 2012

From the publisher

Cultural Hijack explores our unforeseen encounters with creative action in the sites and situations of the urban everyday. These interventions and disruptions of habitual behaviours and perceptions by the anomalous and the out-of-place challenge us in radical ways to rethink our relationship to the urban environment. Cultural Hijack positions the artist as narrator, revealing the thinking behind interventions as well as the process of their creation and reception, to expose the ways in which the city becomes the playground, stage and instrument for unsanctioned artworks, informal creative practices, activist interventions and overtly political actions.

Cultural Hijack aims to enrich our understanding of the creative process, highlighting artists' development of new weapons in the arsenal of critical resistance, expanding and emancipating the spaces of artistic and cultural production. The interventionist becomes a catalyst for a 'user-generated' city, whose tactical procedures are reinventing the way art is encountered and experienced. Together they form an emergent culture of appropriations of city infrastructure: acts of infiltration, subversion and reclamation that generate individual and collective empowerment within the city.

In this book Jump Ship Rat have brought together personal testimonies and original interviews, from bgl, Alan Dunn, Nina Edge, Gelitin, Peter McCaughey, Tatzu Nishi, Michael Rakowitz, Krzysztof Wodiczko and others, to provide unique insight into the work and the life of the interventionist artist.

Cultural Hijack is a book of ideas about reclaiming our right to the city. We invite you to rummage through this creative toolbox as inspiration for a do-it-yourself urbanism.

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