The Influencers project started in 2004 in order to develop some of the ideas explored during a former initiative called Digital Is Not Analog. Our purpose is sparkling public debate about culture jamming practices in any possible field of today communication. As a festival the Influencers is a selection of independent projects that challenge, deform, contaminate what we could call global pop culture of the digital era.

The festival, whose last edition took place in Barcelona in February 2008, might well be considered the most eye-catching part of the whole project, which on the other side involves a wider research and documentation. The festival was actually conceived as the main and easiest "access point" to the territories explored in our ongoing research. The other obvious access point is definitely the video archive, available on this website, that includes the full documentation of the talks the guests of The Influencers gave since its first edition in 2004. The next phases of the project will develop new "access points" such as informal presentations, video or movie screenings, workshops, seminars and publications.

Goodbye desert of the real. Welcome to the land of the brave!

In a nutshell, The Influencers is a temporary stage for projects that question, subvert or make fool of the three fundamental pillars of information and mediascape:

• propaganda and the world of consumption, be it of material or immaterial goods;
• the rhetoric as well as the potential of digital technologies;
• global popular cultures, and within them the circulation of icons and stories, especially the viral and anonymous ones.

But what does it mean to experiment within the complex functioning of this machine? What does experimentation mean today in a context in which the exchanges between countercultures and the mainstream are consistently quicker, more intense and unforeseeable?

Our answer is a festival conceived as a sort of incubator of visionary projects which deform those three pillars to the point of paroxysm. Daring proposals which cleverly flip the most obvious expectations, among which is that of media and technology representing a democratic tool for the spreading of ideas, or also in its mirror version where the media is nothing more than a means of propaganda, manipulation and alienation.
Sabotage of the symbolic capital of the most powerful memes, invisible theatre on the stage of mass media, surreal or deviant technology and vicarious ideas are some of the preferred tactics of The Influencers.

These tactics work within global popular culture like unusual instructions given to a machine to produce interference and contradicting results. The apparent irrationality, and even lack of political correctness of The Influencers allows them to keep in constant movement the terms of debate in which they intervene.

Did anybody say "radical entertainment"?

In a certain way, the ensemble of projects presented in The Influencers represents a wide repertoire of science fiction in real time, slight distortions of reality and narrations from a parallel world. They do not dig exclusive trenches in the style of some avant-garde artists or politicians of the 20th century, but rather define a middle zone between serious culture and low-cost merchandise; a chaotic breech where nothing is safe and everything is possible at the same time.

So, why ‘entertainment’? Does it imply some kind of escape? Or harmless parody? It is more interesting for us to see entertainment more as a (momentary) suspension of some values, of those ethical, political, cultural, social categories which remain unquestioned in daily life. "What if all of a sudden everything were different?" In this short temporary lapse we experience the relief of stepping out of those values. As a psychanalyst would say, in ‘entertainment’, we enjoy our symptoms.

“Radical entertainment” is one of the labels we use to define the range of action of The Influencers. It might not be an academically correct definition but at least we know that the implicit contradiction is not gratuitous: "radical entertainment" is more like a martial arts move where the strength of enjoyment, visceral reactions, and the politically incorrect is used to put pop culture into a hall of mirrors and infiltrate it with new, parallel narratives. What's better than starting from a videogame, a viral marketing campaign, or fake identity?

Two guidelines through historical and cultural contexts

The research develops along two fundamental lines: the exploration of contemporary works and the documentation and reinterpretation of projects that came before the electronic revolution of the mid-1990s. These two lines of work not only appear to be perfectly complementary, but are also indispensable for understanding the subversion of communication as a deeply historical and conceptual phenomenon, as the juxtaposition of older projects and very different cultural contexts allows for a critical perspective towards the affinities as well as the unavoidable discontinuities due to historical, generational and technological leaps.