Luther Blissett (nom de plume)
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Luther Blissett is a multiple-use name, an "open reputation" informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and social activists all over Europe since Summer 1994.
On the Usenet, the first reference to the Luther Blissett Project appeared on 7 November 1994. It was a trumped-up report on alleged uses of the multiple name all over the world, and - albeit written in a somewhat clumsy English - it was posted by a "Luther Blissett" from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
For reasons that remain unknown, the name was borrowed from a 1980's British soccer player of Afro-Caribbean origins. In Italy, between 1994 and 1999, the so-called Luther Blissett Project (an organized network within the open community sharing the "Luther Blissett" identity) became an extremely popular phenomenon, managing to create a legend, the reputation of a folk hero. This Robin Hood of the information age waged a guerrilla warfare on the cultural industry, ran unorthodox solidarity campaigns for victims of censorship and repression and - above all - played elaborate media pranks as a form of art, always claiming responsibility and explaining what bugs they had exploited to plant a fake story. Blissett was active also in other countries, especially in Spain and Germany. December 1999 marked the end of the LBP's Five Year Plan. All the "veterans" committed a symbolic Seppuku. The end of the LBP did not entail the end of the name, which keeps re-emerging in the cultural debate and is still a popular byline on the web.
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[edit] Forerunners in folk, popular and avantgarde culture
Other multiple identities in use include Geoffrey Cohen, Omar Ravenhurst, Monty Cantsin and Karen Eliot. These multiple-use names were developed and popularized in the 1970s and 1980s in artistic subcultures like Mail Art and Neoism.
The avante-garde pre-texts include the pseudonym Rrose Sélavy jointly used by Dada artist Marcel Duchamp and the surrealist poet Robert Desnos, but references in other realms of culture go back much further, eg Buddha (which is both a proper noun and a condition that may be achieved by anyone), Poor Konrad (the collective name adopted by all Swabian peasants during their rebellion against taxes in 1514), Captain Ludd, and Captain Swing. As to poetry, there are precedents such as Taliesin.
[edit] The real Luther Blissett
The multiple identity is named after the footballer Luther Blissett who used to play for A.C. Milan amongst other teams. It is particularly popular among Italian subcultural activists and artists, possibly because of the Milan connection. Another theory is that the name comes from the fact that Luther Blissett was purchased by AC Milan due to Milan scouts confusing him with the arguably more talented John Barnes.
The reasons why the group chose the name remain unclear to mainstream journalists (e.g. the BBC suggested that Blissett, one of the first black footballers to play in Italy, may have been chosen to make a statement against right-wing extremists in the country).
Since the beginning of the project the real Blissett was aware of the 'group' taking his name. However, reports differed widely in saying whether he liked the attention he received because of them. Some reports said he was flattered by the attention, others claimed he was very upset about it.
Blissett dispelled all doubts on 30 June 2004, when he appeared on the British television sports show Fantasy Football League - Euro 2004, broadcast on ITV. During the whole show, Blissett intelligently joked and quipped about his own (alleged) involvement in the Luther Blissett Project. At one point, he even recited a line from the novel Q's prologue: "The coin of the kingdom of the mad dangles on my chest to remind me of the eternal oscillation of human fortunes". At the end of the show, hosts and guests all said in unison: "I'm Luther Blissett!". Two years later, highlights of this broadcast were posted on YouTube.
[edit] A limited selection of Blissett's stunts, pranks and media hoaxes
January 1995. Harry Kipper, a British conceptual artist, disappears at the Italo-Slovenian border while touring Europe on a mountain bike, allegedly with the purpose of tracing the word 'ART' on the map of the continent. The victim of the prank is a famous missing persons prime time show on the Italian state television. They send out a crew and spend taxpayers' money to look for a person that never existed. They go as far as London, where novelist Stewart Home and Richard Essex of the London Psychogeographical Association pose as close friends of Kipper's. The hoax goes on until "Luther Blissett" claims responsibility for it.
June 1995. Loota is a female chimpanzee whose paintings are going to be exhibited at the Venice Biennale of Contemporary Arts. Formerly a victim of sadistic experiments in a pharmaceutical lab, Loota was saved by the Animal Liberation Front, then became a talented artist. Some newspapers announce the event. Unfortunately, Loota doesn't exist. No problem, disappointed visitors of the Biennale may turn their attention to a lot of garbage created by humans.
Four persons are found ticketless on an Italian train. When asked in court for their names, they all answer 'Luther Blissett'. This story is a highly distorted version of an event that really took place in Rome on June 17th, 1995, when a few dozen ravers occupied and "hijacked" a night bus. A rave party took place on the vehicle until the police decided to block the street and stop it. When the ravers came out of the bus, the policemen attacked them, one of them even fired three shots in the air. A journalist from an independent radio station (Radio Citta' Futura) was also on the bus, he was covering the event on the phone for a live chat show, thus the shots were heard by thousands of listeners. Eighteen people were arrested. Some of them said that they were "Luther Blissett", but none of them actually claimed that at the police station, later on.
Luther Blissett's most complex prank was played by dozens of people in Latium, central Italy, in 1997. It lasted a year, involving black masses, satanism, Christian witch-hunters in the backwoods of Viterbo and so on. The local and national media bought everything with no fact-checking at all, politicians jumped on the bandwagon of moral panic, there was even video footage of a (rather clumsy) satanic ritual abuse being broadcast on national tv, until Luther Blissett claimed responsibility for the whole racket and produced a huge mass of evidence. Blissett activists called this "homoepathic counter-information": by injecting a strong dose of falsehood in the media, they meant to show the unprofessionality of most reporters and the groundlessness of moral panic. The hoax was praised and analyzed by scholars and media experts, and became a case study in several scientific texts.
1998-99. Darko Maver is a controversial Serbian sculptor and performance artist. His works are life-size dummies looking very much like brutalized, maimed, blood-covered corpses. His art is the target of state censorship, and he's locked in a Serbian prison for anti-social conduct. In Italy, pictures of Maver's works are exhibited in Bologna and Rome. Prestigious, high-brow art magazines publish a solidarity appeal. Some respected critics even claim to know the artist personally. When "Darko Maver" dies in prison during a NATO bombing, pictures of the body appear on the web. Only, that man isn't "Darko" at all, he's a Sicilian member of the LBP. The truth is revealed a few weeks after the Seppuku. The "works" were pics of actual corpses, found on rotten.com. It's the last big hoax by the LBP, and the debut of a new group, 0100101110101101.org.
[edit] The novel Q
The novel Q was written by four Bologna-based members of the LBP as a final contribution to the project, and published in Italy in 1999. So far, it has been translated into English (British and American), Spanish, German, Dutch, French, Portuguese (Brazilian), Danish, Polish, Greek, and Korean. In August 2003 the book was nominated for the Guardian First Book Prize.
In January 2000 the authors of Q formed a new group called Wu Ming.
[edit] Works
- Mind Invaders (Italian, 1995)
- Guy Debord è morto davvero (Italian, 1995; English edition: Guy Debord is Really Dead)
- Totò, Peppino e la guerra psichica 2.0 (Italian, 1996)
- Handbuch der Kommunikationsguerilla (Germany, 1997, with autonome a.f.r.i.k.a. gruppe and Sonja Brünzels)
- Q (Italian, 1999)
- The Invisible College (2002)
- Green Apocalypse (with Stewart Home, 1996)
- Anarchist Integralism (1997)
- Numerous software recipes in the Python Cookbook edited by Alex Martelli and published by O'Reilly and Associates.
[edit] References
- Since January 2000 the authors of Q have been engaged in a new project using the pseudonym Wu Ming. More information can be found at their website and in this interview.
- Article in The Sunday Times, Sunday May 18, 2003
[edit] External links
- Luther Blissett Project Website
- Wu Ming Foundation - the authors of Luther Blissett's Q
- A very extensive and detailed interview with Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 2 (ex-Blissetts from Bologna) about the Luther Blissett Project, conducted by professor Henry Jenkins and published on his blog in two installments, 1 and 2.
