The Influencers is a three day think-tank that tackles the potential of non conventional communication in contemporary society. We are interested in exploring the hybrid zones wherein autonomous experiments and mainstream culture blend and collapse into one another. Projects that stem out of a deeply rooted do-it-yourself attitude, even when they develop into complex, large scale projects.
Since 2004, The Influencers has been gathering a limited but carefully selected number of diverse projects. This 6th installment makes no exception: celebrity pranksters (with a cause), tactical media artists, computer games modders, hi-tech donkeys, extreme bicycling gangs, atomic sculptors, ads' kidnappers, and media transformers will come together for three long evenings to present, discuss, and perform their work. Whether they are art works or life long projects, or just weird ideas one came up with, these practices are fed by a visionary taste for weirdness and desire for social change.
Unlike other festivals, The Influencers has no theme, but if you are looking for threads to string stories together, this time you will encounter at least a couple. First, examples of mind ecologies, life after dumb consumerism, DIY survival strategies after the (brands) feast is over. Second, risky and dangerous narratives. Those risks that you take on when you force physical, aesthetical, legal, and political boundaries of our society, and challenge collective imagination to desire the unthinkable. We want to show that taking risks is possible, never easy, frequently fun, and always very instructive.
Since its creation in 1992, this informal network organizes unclassifiable events whose protagonists are "mutant" bicycles and their visionary riders that challenge each other in tournaments that are sometimes violent, but always politically incorrect.
In this contemporary, antiauthoritarian version of medieval jousts or the Hell's Angels choppers of the 60s and 70s, we can see an autonomous subcultural form within the contaminated modern metropolis.
The chapters that make up the club across North America, from Minneapolis to New York, Texas to New Orleans, with their customized bike-battles where there is no simple "audience", only participants, have become unmissable events for the members of this big family
In collaboration with: Felipe McWallace
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