A presentation by John Law
13.03.2015., at 19.00
Filodrammatica, Korzo 28/1, Rijeka

John Law (US) was among the founders in 1986 of the Cacophony Society. Emerging from the ashes of the mysterious and legendary Suicide Club, the Cacophony Society was an informal, unclassifiable group of anonymous people who spent their time exploring the boundaries of a conformist society, and occasionally crashing them. They sought imagination, adventure and mutual trust beyond the pale of those provided by mainstream society that involved playful ways of disrupting propaganda, mocking respected symbols (like in their infamous Santarchy, an invasion of rebellious Santas), exploring forbidden urban space (from sewers to bridges), rebuilding freedom through mayhem, confusion, dangerous operations and sometimes just outright madness. Mostly harmless, often illegal, always fun.

feat

Urban exploration and pranks group The Suicide Club, founded in January 1977, was the protean cradle of ideas that, while obscure at the time, have gone on to influence world-wide trends, sub-cultures and social movements. Starting in 1986, The San Francisco Cacophony Society, a more open experimental organisation that rose from the ashes of the secretive Suicide Club, was the group that created the Burning Man Festival. Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, arguably the most influential American novel of the 1990s as well as a statement defining an entire generation’s cultural displacement, was directly inspired by Cacophony and the earlier Suicide Club. The first decade of the 21st century saw the rise of a mass movement of street games and urban play epitomised by the new social media phenomenon of “flash mobs” and the world-wide “urban exploration” culture. Cacophony was one of the primary sources in the early encouragement and implementation of these types of play. Street art and media pranking were a part of the scene as well, embodied in the advertising pranking of the Cacophony affiliated Billboard Liberation Front (starting in 1977) and the punk rock circus and bike rodeo underground that blossomed in the 1990s, instilling a DIY spirit into the alternative performance scene world-wide.

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