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Chi l'ha visto? is a weekly prime-time TV show broadcasted on RAI, the Italian public television. Their nasty mission is hunting missing persons, e.g. teenagers who left home, wives who deserted husband and children, patients escaped from the madhouse and even draft dodgers. The editorial staff may be compared to an Antivice Squad and the presenter Giovanna Milella is a malignant personification of all the middle-class hearth'n'home values despised by anyone who loves freedom.
The name of the show is Italian for "Has Anybody Seen Them?"; as a matter of fact fact the leading part in the manhunting is played by the audience, which Milella exhorts to call the show and co-operate. The studio is filled up with crying parents, angry wives or husbands, psychiatrists, kindred and friends of the missing person etc.
In January 1995 Luther Blissett, a well-known cultural terrorist, managed to make Chi l'ha visto? cut a poor figure and put the TV cops in the pillory of media gossip.
To tell the truth, Luther Blissett is not simply ONE cultural terrorist, rather it is a multiple name which anybody can use to claim actions of cultural terrorism. Luther Blissett is MANY cultural terrorists.
There is no evidence of the use of this multiple name in Italy before the Autumn 1994.
Anyone who makes use of the name may invent a different origin of the project. In Italy there is a rumour that a British body-artist called Harry Kipper borrowed the name from a Jamaican soccer player of the early Eighties. At first Kipper used the name as a personal tag to sign his own performances, then he decided to turn Blissett into an 'open character' whose reputation would be endlessly re-created by anyone interested. Anyone could be Luther Blissett and increase Blissett's reputation simply by adopting the name and spreading new rumours.
Two Harry Kippers really existed, they were a body-art duo going by the name of Kipper Kids, but they supposedly had nothing to do with the origin of the multiple name. However, some of their performances became tesserae of the Kipper's legend, actually an Italian offspring of the Luther Blissett Project. It was a collective work of faction.

In December 1994, we got the bright idea of staging the disappearance of Harry Kipper during a trip to Italy, spreading rumours and gradually approaching Chi l'ha visto?. We also had to insinuate the suspicion that the disappearance itself could be one of Kipper's performances, i.e. an allegory of the death of the Artist as defined by the bourgeois ideology of "genius" and acknowledged by copyright laws. Kipper was supposed to demonstrate that the whole world is a manifold global performance in which EVERYBODY (consciously or not) TAKES PART IN CREATING EVERYTHING, thus no creation is entirely individual.
On the first level of simulation, Kipper had to free the Luther Blissett Project from any founder and origin, to let it jettison ballast and take off.
On the second level of simulation, the prank was an assault on "Chi l'ha visto?" and an opportunity to test the network of the people using the multiple name.
We fabricated a likely story and put some probable truth in it, then we gave it out to the ANSA, a national press-agency, which propagated the news from its offices in Udine, Friuli, North-eastern Italy. This occurred on January 3rd, at night.
The following day, all the regional newspapers flared headlines on "A British Artist Disappeared in Friuli" and textually quoted the ANSA release, which in its turn had textually quoted our fax.
Here is one of the articles, from Il messaggero veneto, 4 January 1995:

AN ARTIST DISAPPEARS: S.O.S. FROM LONDON TO FRIULI

Last sighting in Bertiolo - He was touring Europe on a bike - Did he turn off to Bosnya?
Artists from Bologna and London are asking about the last shiftings of an English artist called Harry Kipper, disappeared in Friuli. He is 33 years old, has dark-red hair and magnetic blue eyes. Kipper a.k.a. Luther Blissett was a busker and a conjuror. The latest news about him date back to 10 weeks ago.
The Bolognese artist Federico Guglielmi asserts that Kipper was sighted last time in Bertiolo, soon before he allegedly headed for Trieste. By the middle of October, Kipper telephoned his friend the London novelist Stewart Home and said he was in Bosnya. This was the last call.
According to some Italian artists acquainted with him, Kipper was touring Europe on a mountain bike to put into practice an idea of the Friulan Piermario Ciani, i.e. to link several cities by an imaginary line which would eventually spell the word "ART".
In the summertime Kipper had lodged in Ciani's house. In the early days of September Kipper moved to Trieste, but apparently never arrived there. From 1991 Kipper had been doing this action of "psychogeographical tourism" tracing the "A" from Madrid to London and Tolone; It had taken the two following summers to complete the "R" through Bruxelles, Bonn, Zurich, Geneva and Ancona. At last, in 1994 he had begun the "T" : after reaching Trieste, he would move to Salzburgh, Berlin, Warsaw and back again to Amsterdam. Instead, he apparently did an inexplicable detour to Bosnya, and disappeared.

Further details were contained in an article from Il Piccolo:

[...] Once arrived in our region, Kipper decided to ideally trace the word "ART" in Friuli too, starting from Pordenone. He reached Maniago, Sauris and Codroipo to trace the "A", then Tolmezzo, Gemona, San Daniele and Mortegliano to trace the "R" and finally Udine, Pontebba, Tarvisio and Treppo Carnico for the "T". Then he came back to Bertiolo[...]

The tale we had sent to the ANSA was complete with Kipper's portrait, psychotopographical maps of the "ART IN EUROPE" and "ART IN FRIUL" projects and some phone numbers of the Bolognese and Friulan "artists" who had put Kipper up (in reality, most of them were anarchists, transmaniacs, psychogeographers and so on). The projects by Piermario Ciani were real and true, so it was another case of fact + fiction.
On January 6th the "Chi l'ha visto?" editorial staff called my phone number in Bologna: they said they were fascinated by Kipper's undertaking and wanted to report his journey and disappearance following his tracks from London to Bologna and Udine. I conferred with the London, Bologna and Friuli comrades, and answered in the affermative.
Four days later, a TV crew came to Bologna in order to reconstruct his shiftings and acquaintances and to grasp what the fuck was "psychogeography"!
This is approximately how we answered to their questions:

Kipper was in Bologna from June 29th to July 8th. In those ten days he attended the founding of the Associazione Psicogeografica di Bologna, and suggested all the members to adopt the multiple name. Then he headed for Ancona and the Adriatic Riviera. In August 10th he arrived in Udine, where he met Ciani (who had been the conceiver of the performance) in the studios of Radio Onde Furlane. Ciani suggested him to stay and trace a word "ART" in Friuli too. Three days after this suggestion, Kipper moved from Bertiolo to Pordenone to start tracing the "A". Two weeks later he came back to Bertiolo and said he had completed the word, but he inexplicably seemed to be sad. During the first week of September he headed for Trieste. None of us heard from him anymore till his phone call to Stewart Home. After yet another month of silence, Stewart informed by telephone both Ciani and us, so we started searching.

In January both the APB and Luther Blissett were not yet known as subversives, so we managed to disguise ourselves as "artists". We were told by a member of the crew called Fiore di Rienzo that the editorial staff assumed the disappearance to be a sort of performance by Kipper. Poor idiots!
The following day the TV cops arrived in Udine, where the local comrades confirmed our account on Kipper's shiftings.
This is the short article by which a local newspaper (Il gazzettino del Friuli, 1/12/1995) informed that Chi l'ha visto? was in town:

"CHI L'HA VISTO?" ON KIPPER'S TRACKS

Even "Chi l'ha visto?" is on the trail of Harry Kipper, the English performance artist who disappeared in Friuli several weeks ago. Yesterday a troupe from the RAI3 show came to town in order to find more details on the person who had arranged with Friulan Piermario Ciani a conceptual performance, that is a cycle ride by which he wanted to link up various Friulan towns and spell the word "ART" on the map. The troupe visited Radio Onde Furlane, which before Christmas had broadcasted a series of spots to find Harry Kipper, and interviewed Paolo Cantarutti from Usmis magazine (on which Ciani had published the map of the performance) and the mail-artist Alberto Rizzi of Rovigo, acquainted with Kipper. According to the director of the show, this disappearance may be just a conceptual artwork put into effect by the British artist.

Two days later the troupe flew to London and interviewed Stewart Home and Richard Essex of the London Psychogeographical Association. Stewart and Richard even showed them the former Kipper's house (a half-demolished building somewhere in the East End).
The reportage was ready for being broadcasted when a tip-off made the TV cops stop the whole thing.
Unfortunately a free-lance "Chi l'ha visto? correspondent living in Udine overheard a drunken conversation and suspected that not only the disappearance was a performance, but even Kipper's very existence was a practical joke. So the editorial staff decided not to risk their reputation and replaced the preannounced reportage just in time. However their move was useless because we had already sent the story to the national papers, so the case bursted out, with such headlines as "Cyber-prank on 'Chi l'ha visto?'", "They made a fool of Milella", "Searching for Kipper who does not exist!" etc.
The papers published excerpts of our explanatory statement:

[...] We did not want only to throw discredit on the show, but also put their inquiring eyes off the track and make them waste their time following an unexisting person, so that the real runaways might stay free [...]
(Il Resto del Carlino 1/20/95)

[...] Chi l'ha visto? is a nazi-pop expression of the need of control [..]
(L'Unità, 1/21/95)

This is the ending of an article appeared on Il Gazzettino (1/20/95):

This name, Luther Blissett, is used as a multiple pseudonym to sign and vindicate counter-cultural actions, demonstrations, boycotts and press releases in order to create a myth based on improbability and shadiness. It is impossible to find a single author of the prank [...] Thus we are all victims of Luther Blissett, but we are accomplices too, and no one in particular is responsible. It is a thing that makes you think, Blissett nearly reached TV..."
And this is the ending of our statement (Come fu che Luther Blissett quasi arrivò a 'Chi l'ha visto?', Bologna, 1/16/1995):

"This was the most relevant proof of the effectiveness of such strategies as multiple names, strategies which allow many different revolutionary subjects to collaborate without identitary mistrusts or paranoic suspicions, so that they can effortlessly influence the collective imagination. It's much better than the useless complaints on the omnipotence of the spectacle. Become Luther Blissett!".

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