Negativland, Culture Jamming, and the Art of Making Something New

Negativland is a long-running multimedia collective known for experimental sound collages, DIY releases, and a practice they named "culture jamming" - layering found and original material to critique media, power, and capitalism. Formed in 1980 by Mark Hosler with David Wills and Richard Lyons, the group’s first handmade record unexpectedly sold 500 copies in three months and ultimately reached about 15,000. Over 46 years they have produced 30+ albums, books, art, radio and live shows; an upcoming live performance at the Internet Archive will combine sound, music, radio and humor with members collaborating remotely (Hosler in North Carolina, Jon Leidecker in San Francisco, Wills by phone in Seattle).

Negativland became a flashpoint in debates over sampling and copyright after a 1991 legal battle with U2 over a record that sampled the band; the group settled and used the controversy to argue for fair use, publishing Fair Use: The Story Of The Letter U And The Numeral Two (1995) and delivering hundreds of lectures on appropriation. In 2015 the Internet Archive partnered to preserve more than 4,000 hours of the weekly Over The Edge radio program (first 34 years archived publicly), and the group has since appeared in NPR's Tiny Desk and a 2022 documentary by Ryan Worsley. With fluid membership, an aversion to personal publicity, and ongoing technical adaptation, Negativland remains influential in remix culture and deliberately hard to categorize.