Joey Skaggs

Joey Skaggs: Program Outlines

Joey Skaggs is an artist who uses the media as his medium like a painter uses a canvas. Since the 1960s he has conceived, written, produced and acted in elaborate hoaxes that have successfully and repeatedly hooked the news media on a global scale.

Abandon any preconceived ideas about news media. Your mouth will drop open and your eyes will pop with disbelief as you see Skaggs in various disguises and personas repeatedly fooling the people whose job it is not to be fooled.

Using extensive video documentation, Skaggs reveals the stories behind his most provocative and successful work. In hilarious detail, he chronicles forty years of manipulating the media to address such issues as cultural intolerance and racism; scientific cure-alls that exploit people's weaknesses and vanities; inequities in the American judicial system; and the misuse of power and authority by government, big business, people with an agenda and the media itself.

As a committed and passionate advocate of media literacy, independent thinking, and creative activism, he always reveals the truth behind his hoaxes and explains his intent.

Skaggs teaches how to analyze and extract the underlying messages in the news; question authority in all its forms; not give up critical analysis for wishful thinking; look to more than one source for information; and not trust everything you read, see and hear.

The experience will profoundly change your own relationship to mass media.

Workshop/Seminar:
Social Activism Through Media Manipulation
Length: one to two hours
For: Journalists, Artists, Activists, Educators, Students

Based on a course Joey Skaggs developed and taught for the Media Communications Department of New York's School of Visual Arts, "Culture Jamming and Media Activism," this workshop or seminar can range in length from half a day to a full week.

With the advent of online social networks and Twitter, new opportunities abound for social activism. Skaggs explores the field of new technologies to communicate ideas and grab attention, and also shows how performance art, video, theater, graphic design, advertising and public relations can be used to manipulate media to advance a cause.

Participants in the workshop will identify social issues that concern them, analyze their target audience, and conceive and/or initiate a plan for social action by manipulating the media.