Frog Design has a great post and video about a term coined by Dave Hoffer, Disruptive Realism.

Disruptive Realism is an expression presented in an everyday context that disrupts peoples perceptions about different things. Expression can mean many things and it a way it’s art but it’s also much more expansive a term than just art.

Some examples from include Banksy’s graffiti, Improv Everywhere, Reverse Graffiti and, of course, last week’s fake NY Times.

It’s a powerful messaging tool, especially where social campaigns are concerned, using juxtaposition to great effect by actually leveraging the very thing we’re trying to change– the status quo. Some of our favorite campaigns use this method like the Swiss Amnesty International campaign “It’s not happening here, but it’s happening now”

And of course, the amazing work by the Iraqi veterans of IVAW (Iraqi Veterans Against the War), like the piece below.

But Frog throws it back to  example to Orson Welles’s ‘War of the Worlds’ radio broadcast

which was meant as entertainment and likely a commentary on how evolution had been twisted into Social Darwinism (which is an interpretation of the HG Wells book on which the broadcast was based.) Regardless of its intention, the broadcast caused mass hysteria. An excellent example of Disruptive Realism.

I think it’s safe to say that The Yes Men would have made Orson proud. Here’s to “reality”.