Likeness of Luther Blissett, from wumingfoundation.com

Luther Blissett is a multiple-use name, an "open reputation" informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and social activists, with situationist or libertarian inspiration, all over Europe and South America since Summer 1994. Image File history File links Size of this preview: 608 × 600 pixelsFull resolution (1590 × 1569 pixel, file size: 961 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) Official portrait of Luther Blissett, created in 1994 by Andrea Alberti & Edi Bianco. ... Image File history File links Size of this preview: 608 × 600 pixelsFull resolution (1590 × 1569 pixel, file size: 961 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) Official portrait of Luther Blissett, created in 1994 by Andrea Alberti & Edi Bianco. ... A multiple-use name is a name used by many different people. ... Look up Situation, Situationism in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... See also Libertarianism and Libertarian Party Libertarian,is a term for person who has made a conscious and principled commitment, evidenced by a statement or Pledge, to forswear violating others rights and usually living in voluntary communities: thus in law no longer subject to government supervision. ...

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. Usenet (USEr NETwork) is a global, decentralized, distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name. ...

For reasons that remain unknown, the name was borrowed from a 1980s British football 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. The Blissett name has, for example, been behind a great deal of "propaganda" on the myspace network, via myspace.com/lutherblissett Luther Loide Blissett (born February 1, 1958 in Falmouth, Jamaica) is a footballer and coach. ... Seppuku (Japanese: 切腹, belly-cutting) is a form of Japanese ritual suicide by disembowelment. ...

Forerunners in folk, popular and avant-garde culture

The name Alan Smithee has been in use in Hollywood since 1968 by directors who wish to disavow creative credit for a film where control has been taken away from them. Alan Smithee, Allen Smithee, Alan Smythee, and Adam Smithee are pseudonyms used between 1968 and 1999 by Hollywood film directors who wanted to be dissociated from a film for which they no longer wanted credit. ... ...

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. Likeness of Geoffrey Cohen produced by Luther Blissett. ... Kerry Thornley Kerry Wendell Thornley (April 17, 1938 - November 28, 1998) is perhaps best-known as the co-founder (along with childhood friend Greg Hill) of Discordianism. ... Monty Cantsin is a multiple identity that anyone can adopt, but has close ties to Neoism. ... Karen Eliot is a multiple identity, a nom de plume that anyone is welcome to use for activist and artistic endeavour. ... Mail art is art which uses the postal system as a medium. ... Street action at the 6th Neoist Apartment Festival in Montreal, 1983 Neoism refers both to a specific subcultural network of artistic performance and media experimentalists and more generally to a practical underground philosophy. ...

The avant-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. A work similar to Marcel Duchamps Fountain Avant garde (written avant-garde) is a French phrase, one of many French phrases used by English speakers. ... Rrose Sélavy (Marcel Duchamp). ... DaDa is a concept album by Alice Cooper, released in 1983. ... Marcel Duchamp (pronounced ) (July 28, 1887 – October 2, 1968) was a French artist (he became an American citizen in 1955) whose work and ideas had considerable influence on the development of post-World War II Western art, and whose advice to modern art collectors helped shape the tastes of the... Max Ernst. ... Robert Desnos (July 4, 1900 - June 8, 1945) was a French surrealist poet. ... Media:Example. ... Swabia (German: Schwaben) is both a historic and linguistic (see Swabian German) region in Germany. ... 1514 was a common year starting on Thursday (see link for calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Ned Lud is the person that forms the basis for the character of King (or Captain) Ludd who was supposedly the leader and founder of the Luddites. ... This article is about the threatening letters of the Swing Riots. ... Taliesin or Taliessin (c. ...

The real Luther Blissett

Main article: Luther Blissett (footballer)

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. Luther Loide Blissett (born February 1, 1958 in Falmouth, Jamaica) is a footballer and coach. ... Soccer redirects here. ... Luther Loide Blissett (born February 1, 1958 in Falmouth, Jamaica) is a footballer and coach. ... Associazione Calcio Milan, commonly referred to by the abbreviation AC Milan or simply Milan, is an Italian professional football club based in Milan, Lombardy. ...

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). For other uses, see BBC (disambiguation). ...

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. After host Frank Skinner read 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"), Blissett produced a copy of Luther Blissett's book Totò, Peppino e la guerra psichica (AAA Edizioni, 1996) and quoted extensively from it in the original Italian: "Chiunque può essere Luther Blissett, semplicemente adottando il nome Luther Blissett" [Anyone can be Luther Blissett simply by adopting the name Luther Blissett]. 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. Fantasy Football League was a British television programme hosted by Frank Skinner and David Baddiel. ... For other uses, see ITV (disambiguation). ... For other persons named Frank Skinner, see Frank Skinner (disambiguation). ... Q — Arrow paperback edition Q is a novel by Luther Blissett first published in Italian in 1999. ... YouTube is a popular video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. ...

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. Harry Kipper was a fictional character invented by the multiple-identity underground movement Luther Blissett. ... Stewart Home (born 1962) is a writer, subcultural pamphleteer, underground art historian, and activist. ... The London Psychogeographical Association (LPA) is a largely fictitious organisation devoted to psychogeography. ...

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. Beagles stolen by British ALF activists from a testing laboratory owned by the Boots Group. ...

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. This article is about a form of party. ...

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 calculated 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 academic texts. Moral panic is a sociological term, coined by Stanley Cohen, meaning a reaction by a group of people based on the false or exaggerated perception that some cultural behavior or group, frequently a minority group or a subculture, is dangerously deviant and poses a menace to society. ... Satanism Associated organizations The Church of Satan First Satanic Church Prominent figures Anton LaVey | Blanche Barton | Peter H. Gilmore | Peggy Nadramia | Karla LaVey Associated concepts Left-Hand Path | Pentagonal Revisionism | Suitheism | Might is Right Books and publications The Satanic Bible | The Satanic Rituals | The Satanic Witch | The Devils Notebook...

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. Rotten. ...

2007. A month before the appearance on the bookshelves of "Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows", an e-mail was sent to the Full Disclosure mailing list. In the e-mail, a self-declared group of catholic hackers purportedly gave away the ending of the book, declaring they violated the computer systems of Bloomsbury (exclusive publisher of the Harry Potter books) to obtain it. The e-mail quoted Joseph Ratzinger's words against Harry Potter. Full Disclosure is an Thriller with the Megastar Fred Ward. ... Bloomsbury may refer to: Bloomsbury, London, an area in the centre of the city the Bloomsbury group, an English literary group active around from around 1905 to the start of World War II. the Bloomsbury Gang, a political grouping centred on the local landowner, John Russell, 4th Duke of Bedford... The Nervous Witch: a tract written by fundamentalist Jack Chick, depicting the purportedly occult dangers of the Harry Potter series. ...

The news escalated from niche IT security mailing lists to mainstream media outlets, and in about 48 hours it was run by CNN, BBC, Reuters, and over 9000 blogs (declared in the claim). The Cable News Network, commonly known as CNN, is a major cable television network founded in 1980 by Ted Turner. ... For other uses, see BBC (disambiguation). ... Reuters Group plc (LSE: RTR and NASDAQ: RTRSY); pronounced is known as a financial market data provider and a news service that provides reports from around the world to newspapers and broadcasters. ...

Three days after, Luther Blisset claimed responsibility for the hoax in a public e-mail in which he described how easily the media could be manipulated and how this could be used for Psyops purposes. The revelation was ignored by most media outlets, with the notable exception of Noticiasdot, that published an interview with Luther Blissett. A hoax is an attempt to trick an audience into believing that something false is real. ... Psychological Operations or PSYOP or PSYOPS are planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to specific audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals. ...

The novel Q

Main article: Q (novel)

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, Czech, Russian and Korean. In August 2003 the book was nominated for the Guardian First Book Prize. Q — Arrow paperback edition Q is a novel by Luther Blissett first published in Italian in 1999. ... Q — Arrow paperback edition Q is a novel by Luther Blissett first published in Italian in 1999. ...

In January 2000, after their "seppuku" as Luther Blissetts, the authors of Q formed a new group called Wu Ming. Q — Arrow paperback edition Q is a novel by Luther Blissett first published in Italian in 1999. ... Wu Ming Wu Ming (Chinese for Anonymous) is a pseudonym for a group of Italian authors formed in 2000 from a subset of the Luther Blissett community in Bologna. ...

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 (AAA Edizioni, 1996, ISBN 88-86828-00-4)
• 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.

Q — Arrow paperback edition Q is a novel by Luther Blissett first published in Italian in 1999. ... Stewart Home (born 1962) is a writer, subcultural pamphleteer, underground art historian, and activist. ... Year 1996 (MCMXCVI) was a leap year starting on Monday (link will display full 1996 Gregorian calendar). ... For the band, see 1997 (band). ... Computer software (or simply software) refers to one or more computer programs and data held in the storage of a computer for some purpose. ... Python is a high-level programming language first released by Guido van Rossum in 1991. ... Alex Martelli is a member of the Python Software Foundation and works, as of 2006, as Über Tech Lead for Google, Inc. ... OReilly Media (formerly OReilly & Associates, IPA /əraɪli/) is an American media company established by Tim OReilly, primarily focusing on books related to computer programming. ...

See also

• Q (novel)
• Wu Ming
• 54 (novel)

Q — Arrow paperback edition Q is a novel by Luther Blissett first published in Italian in 1999. ... Wu Ming Wu Ming (Chinese for Anonymous) is a pseudonym for a group of Italian authors formed in 2000 from a subset of the Luther Blissett community in Bologna. ... 54 — Heinemann hardcover edition 54 is a novel by Wu Ming first published in Italian in 2002. ...

External links

• Luther Blissett Project Website (Archives 1994-1999)
• Wu Ming Foundation - the authors of Luther Blissett's Q
• Luther Blissett myspace page featuring Blissett-to-Blissett interview in blog
• 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.
• lutherblissett a comicbook-artist tries on the name...