This book is an attempt to decipher the unforeseen encounter with the unexplainable in the situations of everyday life. These insertions, interventions and disruptions, the anomalous and the out-of-place, breach the order of perception and challenge us to rethink.
Cultural Hijack: Rethinking Intervention consists of a series of personal testimonies, interviews and essays. It chronicles diverse creative disciplines and shares knowledge about the mechanisms, processes and tactics for multiple approaches to urban interventions which, taken together, form an irregular interpretation of the artist’s handbook. The interventionist becomes a catalyst for a ‘user-generated’ city, whose tactics and procedures are reinventing the way in which art is encountered and experienced, empowering people to act and think differently about the world around them. In this book the city becomes the playground, stage and instrument for unsanctioned artworks, informal creative practices, activist interventions, political actions and situations.
In this book Jump Ship Rat have brought together testimonies and original interviews, from artists bgl, Gelitin, Peter McCaughey, Tatzu Nishi, Michael Rakowitz, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Nina Edge, Alan Dunn, Yabon Paname, Ben Parry, Mudlevel and essays by Pavel Buchler and Declan McGonagle, to provide unique insight into the work and the life of the interventionist artist.
By revealing the ‘backstage’ of cultural practice this book positions the artist as narrator, and in the telling expounds the thinking as well as the process. Cultural Hijack is not just a book about intervention, art activism, or creative disruptions in our city streets, it is a book about storytelling and the unique voice of the lives and experiences of the principle actors: the artists. This insight into the work and the life of the artist, rarely articulated in writing about art, aims to illuminate our understanding of the creative process; how artists are developing new tools in the arsenal of critical resistance, both freeing up and expanding the spaces of art and cultural production. Hijack is for anyone interested in how personal and collective experience and action shapes urban life and the roles of art in how and where we play out public life.
