``A put-on is not necessarily a put-down. I liken what I do sometimes to a life game, as an adventure in absurdity, an adult fairytale in which I engage people emotionally and intellectually. The audience gets involved and has to decide for itself what's going on and what's to be learned from the experience. Everybody is a participant.''

- Alan Abel

Don't ask me to define it, but some of the items in my collection seem to belong to the category of ``performance art'' - renegotiations of the social contract out of æsthetic desire or some less-easily-defined motive.

There are artists who have specialized in the prank. Some who stand out in this regard are Joey Skaggs, Alan Abel, the team of Coyle & Sharpe, Luther Blissett, Michael Moore, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, Pedro Carvajal, and Paul Krassner. I notice a certain gender bias here, but nothing the Guerrilla Girls can't fix.

Social psychologists have adopted this form of performance art as a professional technique, renaming the performances breaching experiments.

In one example, Jim Moran went to a cocktail party, dressed for the occasion except for one anomalous accessory: a small length of string looped around his ear and extending into one corner of his mouth. Moran didn't explain the string to anyone. He didn't even mention it... and nobody else did either! And thusly the Somebody Else's Problem Field was discovered.

The Surveillance Camera Players arrange dramatic performances intended for viewing on surveillance cameras, then find examples of these cameras in their surroundings and put on interpretations of Ubu Roi and Waiting for Godot for the lucky security guards or video cassette recorders monitoring the scene.

Another group that toys with the ubiquity of surveillance cameras is ShootingBack:

In ShootingBack, I confront representatives of the ``Surveillance Superhighway'' (establishments such as department stores where video surveillance is used extensively, yet photography by customers is strictly prohibited). I begin with my camcorder held down at my side, pointing away from a representative of the SS. Then, I ask the representative ``What are those mysterious ceiling domes - those dark hemispheres...'' or ``Is that a video camera? Why are you taking pictures of me without my permission?'' After the representative tells me that I am paranoid and that only criminals are concerned about cameras, I raise the camcorder up to my eye... At this point, the representative of the SS often shows great concern about my camcorder, and thus, in a 180 degree reversal, is self-incriminating.

Check out their PleaseWait wearable surveillance / mediated interaction technology (or perahps something more subtle).

You may also be interested to know that Michael Naimark has done some useful research into how to temporarily disable surveillance cameras using cheap, off-the-shelf laser pointers.

Andrew Epstein of Amhurst College in Massachusetts created a commentary on the U.S. War on Drugs by taking it to its logical conclusion. He posted signs that read ``In order to curb the use of caffeine at Amherst College, the sale and distribution of coffee are no longer permitted on campus. Effective Immediately.'' Then he shut down and cloaked the old coffee machines and sent out confederates to peddle coffee beans out on the sidewalk black market.

The best part of this is that it was all done above-board with the approval of the campus administration under the guise of an art project. ``I suspect if he had come to the administration as an activist, there would have been much stronger resistance,'' said Epstein's faculty advisor. ``It shows us how art has this kind of peculiar permission.''

Won't go any further without a tip of the hat to Orson Welles' radio show The War of the Worlds which gripped the U.S. in media-hypnotized panic in 1938.

Jeffrey Vallance bought a Foster Farms chicken at the supermarket, then took it to a pet cemetery and - maintaining a straight face - asked for the whole shebang memorial service and burial for his beloved pet Blinky.

A woman going by the name Terrifica puts on mask and cape and patrols New York City, looking for drunk women in bars who are in danger of being picked up on by dastardly men, and coming to their rescue.

One of the techniques used by the Nazi invaders of Poland to stamp out resistance was to demolish statues and monuments dedicated to Polish patriotism or heroes. Many Poles adopted the practice of pretending that the monuments still existed, for instance walking around the empty spaces where they had been.

Three men were arrested for throwing paper airplanes through the airspace of the U.S. embassy in Norway, while the U.S. was bombing Afghanistan.

Lorin Partridge shows up at anti-war protests with pro-war picket signs that read ``War is Groovy'' and ``Killing People is No Big Deal.''

``Olympia,'' dressed in business attire and carrying a briefcase, abruptly went into an hour-long pole dance on the sidewalk of San Francisco's financial district during the Christmas shopping rush.

Seattle municipal bus driver Reggie Wilson drives a route all his own:

He entertains his passengers with jokes, stories and spontaneous poems in the bus, which he's decorated with smiley faces. He hides candies and snacks under the bus seats on special occasions, and he has a cache of stuffed animals for crying kids. He leads sing-a-longs featuring bus and work-themed songs: ``If You're Happy That It's Friday, Say Uh-huh'' and ``Ride, Ride, Ride the Bus Gently Down the Street.''

Buffo reports: ``June, 1973: As a sign of the 'truce' prevailing for the Camden Neighborhood Festival a tug-of-war was organized between a team of squatters and a team of policemen. The squatters were disqualified and victory was awarded to the police bcause when squatters started losing ground, spectators broke through the sidelines and pulled with the squatters...''

``When a street procession reënacting the crucifixion was halted by traffic in west London, a group of local youths surrounded the actor playing Jesus, cut loose his ropes, told him to run for it and said they would cover his getaway.''

Gilbert Highet writes: ``It is in the realm of art, the only realm which combines the sublime and the ridculous, that the hoax belongs. When Horace de Vere Cole strewed horse droppings (procured with considerable difficulty and expense from mainland Italy) about the center of that horseless city, Venice, and then watched the Venetians gazing with a wild surmise first at the pavement of the Piazza di San Marco and then at the sky above, where nothing has yet been seen to fly but pigeons and airplanes, he was enjoying the purest pleasure of art...''

Four young Texans spent most of 2002 impersonating federal law enforcement officers - pulling over drivers and then brazenly calling for backup using their real names. Their motive was hard to discern. Despite the fact that the posse did not assault or threaten anyone, but merely engaged in the sort of low-level power-mad harassment that bona fide members of law enforcement participate in when they're in a good mood, FBI Special Agent Noel Johns wasted no time in saying that ``their actions were characteristic of domestic terrorism.''

In San Francisco, California, a man by the name of Brian Anthony Young impersonated a state fish and game warden for three months, checking licenses, issuing citations and confiscating fish. He said that ``boredom and drugs'' led him to perform the inspections on more than 200 anglers, boats, restaurants and stores.

Speaking of fish and game in San Francisco, the S.F. Cacophony Society recently organized a pigeon roast downtown.

Brian G. Hughes struck it rich in the paper box and banking biz and decided to spend his cash and leisure time messing with people and their attitudes toward conspicuous displays of wealth: entering alley cats in cat shows (and winning!), dropping packages of glass jewels in front of Tiffany's, that sort of thing.

William ``Reverend Billy'' Talen uses the model of a streetcorner preacher, the stage of a Disney store or a Starbucks, and a gospel of anticonsumerism to confront money drones and fight for their souls. We could use a hundred more like him.

Here's a good story: A student at MIT spent her summer days at the Harvard football field, wearing a black-and-white striped shirt and tossing bird seed around while blowing a whistle. A few months later, football season began, and when the referee blew the whistle for the first home game, the field was suddenly covered with birds.

In 1987, a teenager from West Germany flew a small, single-engine Cessna 450 miles through Soviet airspace and landed in Red Square in Moscow. The reds threw Mathias Rust in prison, but Gorbachev let him out soon after - and Gorby took advantage of the incident to can his defense minister and purge the military command, hastening the fall of the U.S.S.R.

Five stars to a Mr. Lozier, who conceived of a brilliant hack in the early 1800s. He managed to convince a sizable crowd of New Yorkers that Manhattan was in imminent danger of sinking under the weight of sprawling construction. After a few days, Lozier came up with the plan of cutting the island loose, towing it out into the Atlantic, turning it around and reättaching it to the mainland. He enlisted (I'm not kidding, folks) hundreds of people in this wacky scheme.

Jane White was sick of more than a decade of monthly visits from pamphleteering Jehovah's Witnesses. Finally, she snapped. At ten in the morning on Sunday, she banged on the door of the Kingdom Hall where the sect was having its services, then invited herself in and started offering magazines to the congregation.

The Pieman (in various guises) has thrown pies at such targets as Bill Gates, Jeffrey Skilling, Willie Brown, Oscar de la Renta, Jean Chrétien, Charles Hurwitz, Milton Friedman, William Shatner, Maharaji, Howard Jarvis, William F. Buckley, Jean-Pierre Chevenement, Prince Charles, Anita Bryant, Daniel Moynihan, Quentin Kopp, G. Gordon Liddy, Phyllis Schlafly, Andy Warhol, E. Howard Hunt, Eldridge Cleaver, Michael Wines, Randall Terry, William Colby, Helmut Kohl, Filip Dewinte, Helen Chenowith, Michael Noonan, Bertie Ahern, Pim Fortuyn, Sylvester Stallone and Jerry Brown. ``We want to give people who are so overwhelmed by the terror of modern life the opportunity to laugh in the face of people who are destroying us,'' said a Biotic Baking Brigade member known as ``Agent Apple.''

A crew calling themselves Los Cybrids stormed the ``Internet 2010'' panel to advocate the outright abolition of the internet in a splendidly flamboyant manner.

A man in Berkeley, California has been circulating petitions to try to get the city to put on the ballot a proposition to make Aristotle's first law of logic (``A=A'') an official city ordinance.

Special categories of hoax performance art have been etched out by practitioners of The Great God Hoax and by magicians and miracle mongers.

P.T. Barnum was ever-creative in his use of ritual performance to manipulate behavior and belief. And points for tummult go to The Rensselaer Drop Squad for relentless dropping of big heavy things down tall staircases.

The Solid Gold Chart Busters have taken on guerrilla cell phone destruction as a hobby. View movie clips of their work on-line - they promise that ``[a]ll the people concerned are real members of the public and no one was refunded for the loss of their mobile telephone.''

Talk radio call-in shows are targeted by the performance artist-pranksters Goy Division, and football star-turned-actor O.J. Simpson targeted both the legal system and U.S. racial politics in his brilliant yet deadly satire, The O.J. Simpson Trial.

A couple of radio DJs pulled a stunt that involved dressing up in prison orange jumpsuits and going door-to-door in neighborhoods in Milbrae, California asking people to help them get out of their handcuffs. In doing so they uncovered an infrequently-used offense in the penal code: falsely causing an emergency to be reported.

Sometimes it's very hard indeed to distinguish performance art from what is commonly labeled delusionary schizophrenic antics. What do you make of Rosie Ruiz and her non-victory at the 1980 Boston Marathon? Or the amazing claims of IdEAL ORDER Psychic TV?

William Topaz McGonagall made a name for himself as an undiscouragable author of awful poetry. Ronald M. Chroniak robbed a bank and then went outside and started handing out money to people, saying ``I just robbed the bank; have a nice day,'' until his arrest.

Larry Walters, with the help of some helium-filled weather balloons, flew to 16,000 feet in a lawn chair.

Gabriele Paolini has made a name for himself by jumping out behind TV reporters as they are delivering live, on-the-scene broadcasts - usually waving condoms or a photo of the pope. There's some sort of implicit activist message in here somewhere, but I've chosen to put this report here rather than in our Guerrilla Hacks section. This because he's managed to get himself on TV more than 18,000 times. Good grief!

A hunter in Uganda was being sought by authorities upset over his habit of shooting gorillas with tranquilizer darts and then dressing them in clown suits.

Pete Wagner (inspired by Brother Jed) likes political demonstrations so much that he decided it was no use waiting for an appropriate issue to come around. He started holding Generic Demonstrations at which any ol' issue would be fair game and people would hold up placards reading merely ``For'' and ``Against.''

Wagner also joined in with some friends to liven up a feminist ``Take Back the Night'' anti-rape march - by forming a all-male cheerleading squad to line the parade route and cheer on the marchers.

Choi Chung-ching staged regular funerals to drive away potential buyers of housing near his home, successfully exploiting a superstitious custom (but eventually getting sued).

They're calling it Munchausen by Internet Syndrome. Some people are manufacturing on-line personæ that are complete with realistic pathos, tragedy, disease, and trauma, and then they go on to suck up the virtual sympathy of other folks on-line.

People who transform their whole lives into performance art get special treatment in our Fake Folks and Impostors pages, but I'll highlight a handful here as well:

First and foremost was a fellow who called himself George Psalmanazar (his real name is lost to history). In the late 17^th Century, George wandered around Europe pretending to be a cannibal prince from the exotic orient. He made up an alphabet and lectured widely about the pagan practices and exotic wildlife of his home nation, even teaching at Oxford on the subject. In 1704 he compiled these observations into the book ``An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa.''

When Psalmanazar died in 1763, his memoirs, in which he confessed to the decades-old hoax, were published. His life was revealed to have been one long work of amazing improvisational dramatic fiction.

One of my favorite performance artists was a San Franciscan named Joshua A. Norton who, in 1859, declared himself to be Emperor of the United States (and Protector of Mexico). The Emperor's visionary proclamations were printed up in the papers, his self-issued currency was often honored, he corresponded with other heads of state, and his renown was such that tens of thousands of people turned out at his funeral.

Lord Buckley, poet, performance artist, and hep cat, gets big points for spirit and inspiration, as does his fellow blue-blood Lady Hester Stanhope, the ``Queen of the East.''