DADA BLOCK

Dada works and manifestations still have a radicality and freshness that attracts today’s culture jammers and disrupters of life as usual. In their attempt to deconstruct their social order and its values, Dadas intervened in mass media. Dada photo monteurs in Berlin rearranged the cultural and political myths propagated by the press with scissors and glue. In their collages and photomontages, the socially fixed reality is dissolved into a playful, anarchic circus. Constructions of the “new woman” in illustrated magazines were cut up and exposed as yet another commodification. In addition to “cut and paste” their culture, Berlin Dadas also strategically appropriated and parodied commercial language. They operated as an advertising agency and distributed leaflets that offered their top services to lie without scruples. Attacking capitalism and the accumulation of wealth, the Dadas published the text “Invest in Dada!” [“Legen Sie Ihr Geld in dada an!”], since Dada is the only savings bank that pays interest in eternity. And they advertised a series of institutions that mocked the prevailing bourgeois establishment: the Dada Sex Center, and the Dada Institute for the Dissolution of countries.

Parodying commercialism Marcel Duchamp entertained the idea of selling bracelets with the word Dada inscribed. He wanted to advertise them as protection against any kind of illness. And Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven wrote a series of poems, “Subjoyrides,” which she called “ready-mades.” They consist of a collage of advertisement slogans, since she considered the language of commodity culture the true form of American language. These collages transform the superficial sense of advertising into hilarious nonsense. 

It all started with this: “DADA is a virgin microbe.”
It all started with Tzara.

Our DADA-Block is a microbe, a computer virus, a digital grain of salt in an eco-system that’s got us in such a tight hold we can’t breathe. An echo-system – an interception-system – in which every digital banner spies on our habits and combs through our soft lives and hard drives. A system that looks free, but has you foot the bill. If there’s no cost, you’re the product – as always!

Thus was born our hacktion. Our DADA-Block is an AD-tack. Let’s boot ads off of our browsers! Let’s surf from linked to unlinked, from temporary autonomous zones to bootleg utopias, from DADA works to DADA slogans – the Dadas, supreme masters at using advertising to their own ends. Let’s hijack advertising the way it hijacks our lives! Tzara, again: “Dada put the reality of the advertisement itself in the service of its own promotional objectives.” Cabaret Voltaire everywhere! Absinthe on every floor! Our DADA-Block is a prank born out of nothing. D-AD-A! D-AD-A! D-AD-A!

It all continued with the idea of destroying, the better to rebuild – that tabula rasa so dear to the little group in Zurich in 1916. The American essayist Greil Marcus (see our anti-museum, the Dada Depot), wrote: “Wiping the slate clean brought them to life but they expected nothing of the future”. With Snowden, our utopia of a free and total web, a totally free web, took a fatal hit. Today, the NSA is on the other end of the DADAPHONE. Hello NSA! And the NSA is every ad’s objective ally: every ad traces us, tracks us down, harasses us. Every ad gets us accustomed to the idea of voluntary espionage. But with the DADA-Block, other codes apply: our browser extension is 100 percent surveillance-free.

Our DADA-Block is a virgin microbe.
En avant Dada!