Cultural Hijack Rethinking Intervention

Cultural Hijack explores the role of the tactical practitioner in the urban everyday, chronicling the procedures, tools and tactics which make-up the interventionist's toolkit. It positions the artist as narrator, and in the telling expounds the thinking behind interventions as well as the process of their creation and reception, revealing the ways in which the city - from Liverpool to Glasgow, from Paris to New York - becomes the playground, stage and instrument for unsanctioned artworks, informal creative practices, activist interventions, political actions and situations. The interventionist becomes a catalyst for a 'user-generated' city, whose insertions, interventions and disruptions in everyday life are reinventing the way in which art is encountered and experienced, empowering people to act and to think differently about the world around them. Here, the everyday becomes the opportunity, the apparatus and location, material and purpose. Ordinary life becomes the new space of urgency, expanding the terms of reference for the creation of socially and politically engaged art.Cultural Hijack aims to enrich our understanding of the creative process, highlighting artists' development of new weapons in the arsenal of critical resistance, expanding and emancipating the spaces of artistic and cultural production - practices rarely articulated in writing about art. Drawing on essays, personal testimonies and original interviews, from Tatsuro Bashi, BGL, Gelitin, Michael Rakowitz, Krzysztof Wodiczko and others, this book provides unique insight into the work and the life of the interventionist artist.

Ben Parry is an artist and curator based in London. He co directs arts organisation Jump Ship Rat and has initiated numerous projects and interventions in the public realm. He is currently undertaking a practice-led PhD in the faculty of creative and cultural industries, University of West Scotland. His work explores tactical and informal urbanism; appropriations and interim uses of the unclaimed and overlooked. Sally Medlyn is a creative cultural planner and producer who has worked with Jump Ship Rat since 2005. Myriam Tahir lives and works in Paris. As co-director of Jump Ship Rat since 2000, she has run independent art spaces, curated provocative international exhibitions and commissioned temporary interventions in public space.