Luther Blissett (nom de plume)

Luther Blissett is a freely usable collective pseudonym and media Phantom. With the release of the name of the separation of the individual and the collective should be repealed.

History

The name " Luther Blissett " goes back to a real person, the Caribbean- English professional footballer Luther Blissett, who played in the 1980s, including for the Watford FC and AC Milan.

1994 launched a group of subcultural activists in Bologna a number of false reports in the Italian media, the Luther Blissett established as a collective phantom and prankster. As a founding myth was a made-up story in the popular television show Chi l' ha visto? , The Italian equivalent of Please get in touch, launched. In the broadcast was " reported " that a British performance artist was, hidden in his attempt with a bicycle, the contours of the word ART ( 'art' ) abzufahren on the Italian map.

Between 1994 and 1999 numerous pranks went on Luther Blissetts account, among other things, a fake book under the name of the popular subculture author Hakim Bey and the arrest of several people in Rome who had insisted as " Luther Blissett " only a tram ticket to solve. Italy, particularly Bologna and Rome, remained in the center of the Luther Blissett activities, but also the name of artists, underground musicians and political activists in England, Spain, Germany and the U.S. took over.

After mass media had seen through the game and could no longer be confused by Luther Blissett actions, the Italian Luther Blissett Project 1999 announced his " Seppuku ", ritual suicide. The Bolognese founding activists gave themselves especially to recognize and published, under the name Blissetts, the jointly written novel Q, which tells the story of the Italian left counter-culture in the guise of a historical novel about the Reformation period. Q became an international bestseller. Since the imprint allowed to copy the book freely, it is probably the most commercially successful to date open-content publication at all.

In German-speaking countries under the name Luther Blissett next to the German translation of the Q Manual of guerrilla communication (together with Sonja Brünzels, 1997), the plunderphonics CD Vivacide (1996) and the text collage The Invisible College published.

Immediate precursor and inspiration of the Luther Blissett project were the Neoist multiple identities Monty Cantsin and Karen Eliot. Other major influences were the Situationist International and the Bolognese subculture of the 1970s to the collective of the newspaper A / traverso and the station Radio Alice. Other known multiple names are Subcomandante Marcos ( movement of the Zapatistas in Mexico ) and General Ludd ( English labor movement ). The pseudonym Rrose Sélavy that was used in the 1920s jointly by the artist Marcel Duchamp and the Surrealist poet Robert Desnos, forms another, less well-known historical pretext, see also the scientists Collective Nicolas Bourbaki.

Others

• As a guest Luther Blissett also appears on a record of the punk band class Kriminale.
• The singer-songwriter duo The three funny both claiming Luther Blissett was working for them as a lawyer and would represent them in the proceedings for the murder of Øystein Aarseth.