Luther Blissett is a multiple-use name, an "open pop star" informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and activists all over Europe and the Americas since 1994. The pseudonym first appeared in Bologna, Italy, in mid-1994, when a number of cultural activists began using it for staging a series of urban and media pranks and to experiment with new forms of authorship and identity. From Bologna the multiple-use name spread to other European cities, such as Rome and London, as well as countries such as Germany, Spain, and Slovenia.[1] Sporadic appearances of Luther Blissett have been also noted in Canada, the United States, and Brazil.
Luther Blisset
2015
The novel Q was written by four Bologna-based members of the LBP, as a final contribution to the project, and published in Italy in 1999. So far, it has been translated into English (British and American), Spanish, German, Dutch, French, Portuguese (Brazilian), Danish, Polish, Greek, Czech, Russian, Turkish, Basque and Korean. In August 2003 the book was nominated for the Guardian First Book Prize.
While the folk heroes of the early-modern period and the nineteenth century served a variety of social and political purposes, the Luther Blissett Project (LBP) were able to utilize the media and communication strategies unavailable to their predecessors. According to Marco Deseriis, the main purpose of the LBP was to create a folk hero of the information society whereby knowledge workers and immaterial workers could organize and recognize themselves.[5] Thus, rather than being understood only as a media prankster and culture jammer, Luther Blissett became a positive mythic figure that was supposed to embody the very process of community and cross-media storytelling. Roberto Buiâone of the co-founders of the LBP and Wu Mingâexplains the function of Luther Blissett and other radical folk heroes as mythmaking or mythopoesis
