Luther Blissett (Roberto Bui/Giovanni Cattabriga/Federico Guglielmi/Luca Di Meo)
° 1994
Luther Blissett is a multi-use name, an "open reputation" informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and social activists all over Europe since Summer 1994. The name was borrowed from a 1980's British soccer player of Afro-Caribbean origins.
In Italy, between 1994 and 1999, the so-called Luther Blissett Project (an organized network within the open community sharing the "Luther Blissett" identity) became an extremely popular phenomenon, managing to create a legend, the reputation of a folk hero. This Robin Hood of the information age waged a guerrilla warfare on the cultural industry, ran unorthodox solidarity campaigns for victims of censorship and repression and - above all - played elaborate media pranks as a form of art, always claiming responsibility and explaining what bugs they had exploited to plant a fake story.
Blissett was active also in other countries, especially in Spain and Germany. December 1999 marked the end of the Luther Blissett Project's Five Year Plan. The end of the Luther Blissett Project did not entail the end of the name, which keeps re-emerging in the cultural debate and is still a popular byline on the web. Luther Blissett's face was created by Andrea Alberti and Edi Bianco in 1994, by morphing old 1930's and 1940's portraits of WM1's great-uncles. Author of Q novel now write under the name Wu Ming (they published: 54 (2001), Manituana (2007), Altai (2009) and also a couple of “solo novels”).
