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What is a Whirl-Mart?
The action is comprised of a group of anti-shoppers ranging in size from 1 to 50 members. The ritual consists of activists/actors arriving at a Wal-Mart, Toys-R-Us or another chain superstore at 12-noon on the first Saturday or Sunday of the month and proceeding to push empty shopping carts slowly and silently through the aisles. Eventually, all of the participants locate one another and form a single-file chain of anti-shoppers which weaves, wanders, and whirls throughout the store for about an hour. It is a collective reclamation of space that is otherwise only used for buying and selling. It is a symbolic display of the will to resist the capitalist ideology.
'Whirl-Mart' is an experiment that can be approached from several different angles. As a work of art, it examines and blurs the boundaries that have been established between performance art, protest, living sculpture, and direct action. As an action of resistance, it utilizes the power of silence in occupying private consumer-dominated space with a symbolic spectacle. As a ceremony, it is a counter-ritual to shopping that transforms the super-store and its wall-to-wall array of products into a surreal and colorful cathedral. And what the heck-- it's just darned fun!
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National & Worldwide
Whirl-Mart Ritual Resistance International Whirl-Mart HQ World Changing Models, Tools, and Ideas for Building a Bright Green Future Critical Mass Critical Mass is not an organization, it's an unorganized
coincidence. It's a movement ... of bicycles, in the streets. Rev Billy's Church of Stop Shopping Lots of great scripts from/for performance interventions
with a heavy focus on Starbucks. Commerce
Jamming Commerce Jamming source page. AdBusters A global network of those who want to advance the new social
activist movement of the information age. Commercial Alert wants to keep commercial culture within
its proper sphere, and to prevent it from exploiting children and subverting
the higher values of family, community, environmental integrity and
democracy. No Media Kings Jim Munroe's guide to doin' it for yourself Booksense.com Internet book search that sends your order to your nearest
independent bookstore. Starbucks Delocator Search that helps you locate locally owned alternatives to Starbucks
Media
The Independent Media Center is a network of collectively run media
outlets for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of the truth Project of the Independent Media Institute, a nonprofit
organization dedicated to strengthening and supporting independent and
alternative journalism. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the first to identify
threats to our basic rights online and to advocate on behalf of free expression
in the digital age. Declan
McCullagh's Politech Politech is the moderated mailing list of politics and technology.
Topics include privacy, free speech, the role of government and corporations,
antitrust, and more. MediaChannel.org The global network for democratic media.
PLUS the News Dissector's Weblog. CorpWatch.org counters corporate-led globalization through education,
network-building and activism.
In 2001, Adbusters ran an issue titled “Design Anarchy” and since that
time its once orderly pages have been in a state of heaving agitation.
Every time I pick up a new issue I find myself wondering why. For a
while in the late 1990s and early 2000, under art director Chris Dixon,
Adbusters’ editorial design was exemplary. Even when it departed from
conventional magazine structures, its content and the relationship
between the parts was clear. The elegant, carefully composed design
helped to give even its wilder flights of rhetoric conviction and a
much-needed measure of authority.
The magazine these days is a collection of fragments seemingly
thrown together in no particular order. It’s not that the type isn’t
perfectly legible – there are no tiresome typo hi-jinks to “decode” –
but Adbusters is nowhere near as readable as it was. All of the
standard editorial devices have been abandoned. I’m looking at a page
in the January/February 2004 issue, carrying two columns of type.
There’s no headline or intro and you have to find the small italics at
the end to discover that it was written by someone called Kevin Arnold
(a new name to me, I confess). It may be fascinating stuff, and
scanning down I see that Garrett Hardin, author of the excellent
Filters Against Folly, receives a mention, but the layout itself does
nothing to suggest that we need to read this article. Elsewhere, I
start reading some apparently untitled text about the failings of
postmodern theory, thinking I’m in the middle, only to realise that I
have started, quite by accident, in the correct place.
MediaChannel.org
