Mark Dery

Mark Dery, who helped explain and expand on the term “culture jamming” is giving a lecture on Thursday, May 18th at Rx Gallery in San Francisco. I met Mark briefly back in 1999 when he was on a panel at the BLF’s billboard liberation show that I was helping out with at CB’s Gallery in New York. Mark has written quite a bit about the Billboard Liberation Front, Ron English and others involved in billboard modification, reality hacking, media manipulation and other cultural phenomena.

Mark Dery is a cultural critic. He writes about media, the visual landscape, fringe trends, and unpopular culture. He is the author of The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (1999) and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (1996). He edited Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (1994), the anthology that inaugurated cyberstudies as an academic field. His 1993 essay “Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs” popularized the term “culture jamming” and helped launch the movement. He is the director of digital journalism at New York University, where he teaches in the Department of Journalism.