Barcelona, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona February 5-7, 2009
The Influencers is a cult festival exploring unconventional weapons of
mass communication. Over the past six years The Influencers has been
defined as a gallery of unclassifiable projects, an investigation on
guerrilla communication, a demonstration of present-day science
fiction, a talk show you won't see on TV. The Influencers is a three
intense days event spent interweaving tales of subversion,
manipulation and the transformation of live elements of contemporary
culture.
The Influencers is a geografic and cultural exploration, whose main goal is to gather the carefully selected protagonists and to bundle their innovating and disruptive capacity. The Influencers are creating a multifaceted and vital Vision of media intervention, since the aim is to cross the guidlines of the disciplines in order to be able to discover or to emphasize underground affinities through times, countries and different cultural contexts.
At the beginning street art was considered an illegal practice close to pure and simple vandalism, while now it is largely acknowledged as a relevant creative, artistic and social phenomenon. BLU, among others, contributed to shape this new creative practice and define its distinguishing marks: reclaiming free public space, breaking daily routines through surprise and finally sending out messages to its audience.
This group from New York was founded in 2001 under the slogan ?we cause scenes?. Since then, they have carried out more than 70 "missions" in public spaces managing to always create a strange mix of chaos and fun. The Influencers and Enmedio collective will coordinate a new "mission" in Barcelona!
Based in Berlin, Bismarck is the author of the "Image Fulgurator", among other projects. Bismarck hacked an analog photo camera (the so called "reflex") and literally reversed its normal functioning. This time it doesn't work to record the reality in front of the camera, but to perform just the opposite: the Image Fulgurator has a flash light behind the film that turns the camera into a projecting device. The image remains invisible to the human eye, but is recorded in the pictures shot by other people's cameras. When photographers look back at their images they find something unexpected: unknown images entered without permission the private or public space of their images.
Their successful intrusion in a weather programme on Czech television, where amongst the usual weather scenes they were able to infiltrate the image of an atomic bomb explosion, was spread massively over internet in 2007. This intervention was talked about all over Europe barely 24 hours afterwards and which they themselves called "Media Reality". They were reported by the television channel and the state prosecutor accused the six artists of generating panic and propagating false information, for which they faced up to three years in prison.
