This movie is about culture jammers, people who send out mixed signals to the media in order to cause a disturbance in a system that often goes without check. Some of the featured artists are: Negativland, Emergency Broadcast Network, and others.
Perspectives and Intentions
From the early-Modernist experiments of the Cubists in the first part of this century to these final years of overwhelming mass-media influence over the Arts, the prototypical art-practice now recognized as most respresentative is collage. Legal provisions about copyright, about cultural property, even about authorship itself have hardly been able to keep up with revolutions in technology and art-making.
These ever-sharpening aesthetic, cultural and ethical contradictions have broken out into a fascinating real-life melodrama in the Negativland/U2 case.
Above the legal stake, however, many contemporary makers view this battle as a crucial stand in an increasingly commercialized arts environment, now almost totally dominated by dangerously centralized corporate power.