The Influencers 2008: Monochrom & Alan Abel in Barcelona

The Influencers 2008: Alan Abel and monochrom in Barcelona

This weekend I attended the 4th edition of the “The Influencers“-Festival at the CCCB. The event describes itself as…

The talkshow you won’t see on TV! The Influencers explores controversial forms of art and communication guerrilla, presenting independent projects that play with global popular culture, infiltrate the mass media, and transform fashions, consumption and technological fetishism.

I was not able to see all of the lectures, but it started on Thursday with a very mediocre talk of the US-American interactive artist Brody Condon.

On Saturday, Johannes Grenzfurthner of the collective monochrom from Vienna held a brilliant presentation. He described monochrom’s subversive approach of irritating the contemporary neoliberal discourse with the distribution of post-modern ideas: “context hacking” is how they call it.

Then, Alan Abel, the Godfather of hoaxes, talked about his experience of the last 60 years as a prankster. With a lot of anecdotes about his recent activities – like the campaign to ban breast-feeding – he managed to entertain all of us!

I recommend checking out the festival’s website because they host most of the presentations as flashvideos online – for example when the Yes Men Group visited them in 2005.

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