Tactics for Media Artists to Enact The Build

Written by Randall Packer on
Activism • Bunker Fridays • Life in America • Media Deconstruction • Nation's Capital • NetArtizens

A call to media and performance artists to join Bunker Fridays — disrupting, distorting, and rebuilding media reality.

1. Live Media Remixing & Manipulation

  • Capture and remix live political broadcasts, corporate media feeds, and propaganda streams in real time, layering them with distortions, subtitles, and sound manipulations.
  • Use glitch aesthetics to fragment, repeat, and warp news narratives, making their constructed nature explicit.
  • Create real-time mashups that blend historical propaganda with present-day political rhetoric to expose patterns of control.

2. Audience-Activated Media Disruptions

  • Build interactive tools where audience members can submit words, phrases, or video fragments to be layered into the broadcast.
  • Use chat-triggered media responses—where audience input generates instant visual and sound interventions.
  • Create an AI-driven media distortion engine that reacts to audience input by warping live video/audio feeds.

3. Tactical Deepfake & AI Counter-Propaganda

  • Train AI models on political speech patterns, media clichés, and propaganda techniques, then remix them into absurdist or revealing narratives.
  • Generate AI hallucinations—false news reports and manipulated imagery—that expose how easily media perception is shaped.
  • Use deepfake performance art where political figures “speak the truth” by subverting their own rhetoric.

4. Real-Time Media Autopsy & Disinformation Mapping

  • Deconstruct live media broadcasts by overlaying annotated breakdowns of manipulative tactics, misinformation, and historical parallels.
  • Use data visualization to show how a piece of disinformation spreads in real time across networks.
  • Conduct live fact-checking with artistic subversion, displaying alternative histories, suppressed narratives, and media omissions.

5. Noise Interventions & Algorithmic Sabotage

  • Flood search engine results, social media feeds, and algorithmic rankings with counter-narrative artistic content.
  • Use soundscapes of overlapping news clips and algorithmic voice generators to create overwhelming sonic environments that mimic digital information overload.
  • Create glitch poetry and text-to-image AI distortions that expose how media is shaped by its technological frameworks.

6. Networked Performance & Telematic Interventions

  • Bring in remote performers across the world, staging live telematic acts that merge different physical and digital locations into a single broadcasted event.
  • Create split-screen realities, where different performances occupy parallel frames, forcing audiences to choose which version of reality they engage with.
  • Use multi-layered green screen compositions where performers interact with distorted media landscapes in real time.

7. Interactive Fiction & Immersive Narratives

  • Construct alternate reality news stories, blending fact, speculation, and artistic intervention to challenge linear storytelling.
  • Use choose-your-own-adventure mechanics in the broadcast, where audiences make decisions that shape how the episode unfolds.
  • Experiment with hypertext narratives that fracture meaning across multiple feeds, forcing audiences to navigate competing realities.

8. Subversive Use of Corporate & Government Aesthetics

  • Hijack corporate media templates—turning familiar news graphics, talking head segments, and press conferences into subversive, surrealist, or dystopian distortions.
  • Stage fake government PSAs, military briefings, or corporate advertisements that expose hidden agendas through subtle and overt manipulations.
  • Infiltrate real-world media spaces by mimicking official aesthetics, then introducing subversive content that disrupts perception.

9. Experimental Sound & Voice Disruptions

  • Overlay AI-generated political speeches, transforming them into musical compositions, drones, or fragmented vocal textures.
  • Create call-and-response loops, where past political speeches are manipulated into self-contradictory dialogues.
  • Use ambient disinformation soundscapes that build tension, forcing audiences to experience the psychological weight of media saturation.

10. Media Rituals & Performative Resistance

  • Establish recurring rituals in Bunker Fridays—symbolic gestures, phrases, or sonic triggers that act as thresholds into the counter-media space.
  • Use repetitive mantras, spoken word loops, or visual motifs to create an immersive, almost hypnotic alternative broadcast reality.
  • Invite live audience participation in symbolic destruction of media artifacts—erasing, burning, glitching, distorting the old narratives.

How Artists Can Get Involved in Bunker Fridays

Artists interested in implementing these tactics should prepare to:

  • Submit media artifacts (video, audio, graphics, text) for live remixing during broadcasts.
  • Develop and propose interactive media tools that allow audience-driven disruptions.
  • Collaborate in real-time performances that merge digital and physical space.
  • Work with AI, deepfake, and generative systems to create subversive counter-propaganda.
  • Join as a live experimental artist, actively creating within the broadcast environment.

This is The Build.

This is not about reacting to media — it’s about hijacking, reconstructing, and transforming the media ecosystem into something that serves radical artistic and social consciousness.