I originally stumbled upon Michael Durham’s Business Reply Pamphlet at WFMU’s Beware of the Blog. The link from there led to Centennial Society, Durham’s biting, and perhaps intentionally navigationally crap site. It required the work necessary to get the goods. Much like the infodesign-articulated situations in his work, where skyscraper molotovs and a 15 story xerox drops end in break room orgies, board room campfires and sprouting sunflowers in urinals.

Durham’s work charts the path of idyllic creation through joyous destruction. Ontological-anarchic propaganda that would make anyone in their right mind want to smash the state and bow-hunt squirrels in the bowels of corporate towers.

Once I actually found the work at his site, I was further amazed to find that he actually disseminated Business Reply Pamphlet just as that: his own reply to corporate culture, stuffed into random pre-paid business reply envelopes.

This wasn’t the only type of guerilla warfare Durham was engaged in. Documented onslaughts of Walgreen’s coupons, bible disclaimers, terror alert, billboard and on-shelf product alteration hacking, his Fallen Rappers Pez dispenser project (submitted to Pez with resulting communiqué). Every project surges with the same urgency that kept a Fight Club quote resounding in my head:

“Imagine, stalking elk past department store windows and stinking racks of beautiful rotting dresses and tuxedos on hangers; you’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life, and you’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. Jack and the beanstalk, you’ll climb up through the dripping forest canopy and the air will be so clean you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison to dry in the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching eight-lanes-wide and August-hot for a thousand miles.” —Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, Chapter 16

Michael Durham is a change agent, monkey-wrenching controls on the elusive rails of Freedom.

view: Business Reply Pamphlet / Welcome to Geneva! / A Day At The Mall / Fallen Rappers
via: Centennial Society / Michael Durham / WFMU

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