Pranktivism
assisting you in pranking better
John Oliver and State Run Gambling
State Gambling Activity
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Apply one concept of rhetoric to the video
Apply one concept from linguistics
Apply one concept from cognitive psych.
Apply one concept from social psych.
Apply one concept from semiotics
Example of hegemony
Example of humor
Example of parody
Toss a coin fifty times – heads we win, tails you
lose.
How effective was the video?
• What types of evidence or support worked
well in the video?
– How come?
• What types of evidence or support didn’t
work so well in the video?
– How come?
Imagine Pranktivism
• Plan a prank for the end of the John Oliver
video.
• Use two concepts we’ve covered from two
different disciplines to apply in your
pranktivism.
• The winner (judged by majority vote) gets two
Tweet days recouped.
The Situationists
• Situationist International –
• An art movement in France in the 1950s and 1960s.
• Believed that we live in “a tautological world in which the appearance of real
life is maintained in order to conceal the reality of its absence” (Plant 10).
– Tautology 1 – needless repetition of an idea, statement, or word (“Tautology”).
» I went there personally.
» 4g cell phones are a new innovation.
» There is a lot of frozen ice on the road.
– Tautology 2 – When things are presented in a way that there seems to be no escape. It’s
a statement framed in a way it cannot be denied without inconsistency (“Tautology”) –
pretty absolute.
» All men are rational.
» What I see is real life. What I don’t see is not real.
» All CEOs deserve to make a lot more money than their employees because they
are in charge of things and people who are in charge of things deserve to make
more money over the people they are in charge.
• Members of the movement want to construct situations that “were envisaged
as incendiary devices heralding an unpredictable eruption of an alternative,
non-capitalist and poetic life” (Frances).
Dérive
• Dérive – a concept for un-doing and re-doing our
everyday urban spaces, through aimless strolls
unguided by maps (Debord).
• It's about disturbing the status-quo. And reinterpreting the
environment.
• It’s about experiencing our environment in a new way and, often,
to highlight the "invisible" - racial, ethical, socio-economic
disparities and peripheries - within what we perceive the
normalized organization of the city.
Examples –
A crosswalk
A city bus
Psychogeography
• Psychogeography – it’s the idea that we not
only make our environment but that the
environment makes us.
– “the study of the specific effects and affects of the
altered or détourned urban geographies or
environments, consciously organized or not, on
the emotions and behaviours of individual
participants” (Frances).
McMap
Détournement
• It’s taking things out of their initial contexts
and bringing them together within a new
context, hence replacing their original
meaning with a new one.
• It’s proto-culture jamming.
Détouring a McMap
Situationists to Pranking to Graffiti
• As we watch Exit Through the Gift Shop, we
want you to make connections between
Graffiti artists, our concept of pranking, and
the terms we’ve covered on the Situationists.
• Tweet and fill out the handout.