[aha] Media Ghosts Between Conspiracy, Pranks and Myth

[T_Bazz]

-- il testo e' in inglese, ma credo che possa interessare...si tratta di 
una mia proposta di analisi della tematica crime e fiction accettata 
alla conferenza "Emotion, Media and Crime di Aarhus".
bye T_Bazz

*Media Ghosts Between Conspiracy, Pranks and Myth*

Talk at the Emotion, Media and Crime Conference
September 29 – October 1, 2010, Dep. Information and Media Studies, 
Aarhus University
http://www.imv.au.dk/emcconference/

The aim of the conference Emotions, Media and Crime in Aarhus is to 
highlight the relationship between emotion, media and crime in 
contemporary culture.

"Crime is the central point of an extensive production of fiction in 
books, films, TV series, and games. Crime is also a popular subject of 
journalism, mediated in newspapers and electronic media, not least the 
internet. Import and export flourish, developing intercultural exchange 
in a variety of fiction genres as well as forms of journalism. In short, 
national and transnational mediation – and mediatization ? of crime has 
been a crucial factor in determining how crime is perceived and 
discussed within the public sphere. Popular crime fiction, TV series and 
crime scenes have even become concepts in tourism and destination branding".

My proposal reflects on the activity of a series of media artists and 
activists in Italy who created fictional myths, conspiracies and 
mythopoiesis – between urban legends and alleged crimes – in the middle 
of the 1990s. It addresses the creation of media ghosts and conspiracy 
theories as a form of art, where tactical and strategic use of media 
aims to underline sensitive nodes of social and political reflection (Wu 
Ming, 2006). Through the analysis of some pranks, conspiracies and 
artistic interventions, I will describe the process of creation of 
fictional identities as a challenge for cultural criticism. The method 
will be comparative, based on the ethnographic investigation of a few 
cases. First, I will address the pranks by the Luther Blissett Project 
(1994-1999).

Luther Blissett, a multi-use collective alias adopted by artists and 
activists, followed the need of a multitude of people in the Italian 
underground scene to be represented by a collective folk hero, a 
collector of experiences and memories beyond individualistic belonging 
(Bazzichelli, 2006). The prank to the TV-show Chi l’ha visto? (Who Saw 
Him/Her?), in which investigators search for a fictitious artist 
disappeared on the Italo-Yugoslavian border; the prank played by dozens 
of people in Latium, involving black masses, Satanism, Christian 
witch-hunters in the backwoods of Viterbo (1997); and finally, the 
creation of a made-up artist Darko Maver (1998) – the real name of a 
well known Slovenian criminologist – who simulates violent murders to 
denounce the war’s crimes in Yugoslavia, were able to reach the purpose 
of quickly penetrate the defence system of culture, and therefore of the 
art world (0100101110101101.ORG, 1999).

Finally, a more recent work, Amazon Noir – The Big Book Crime (2006), by 
Ubermorgen.com, Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico, trio of artists who 
discover the bugs in the Search Inside the Book Amazon’s function, 
making copyright protected books ready for free download, will conclude 
my investigation on the ability of fictional plots and subliminal media 
fights to provoke social debate.

More about the Emotion, Media, Crime Conference, Aarhus University:
http://www.imv.au.dk/emcconference/callforpapers/