From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

An Internet performance artist is a person who pulls strange stunts on the web, for their own sheer fancy. While companies have hired marketers to come up with unusual Internet promotion for their products, they are rarely as unique and news-worthy as those pulled by amateurs. Many don't consider themselves to be "performance artists",

• A man claimed he had travelled back from the future, giving detailed accounts of his post-present day on a now defunct web forum. It gained much attention on Internet. The IP address of the poster was completely untraceable, despite the best attempts of many hackers to identify the location of this presumed prankster. If it were indeed true, this future unfortunately had too many similarities to Back to the Future and other science-fiction movies, including a time machine quite reminiscent of a Delorean.

• Paint the Moon - On two dates, James Downey encouraged all the people of Earth with laser pens to aim them at the moon. Though many responded back with e-mails notifying Downey of their participation, the project was a failure. Eric Van Stryland, director of Orlando's Center for Research in Electro-Optics and Lasers at the University of Central Florida noted to USA Today that although it's "still a fun idea", such a project would need "at least a few million billion red laser pointers to see a big red spot on the moon."

• Nobel Prize For Jo - James Downey sets up a site to encourage Harry Potter fans to send letters to the organisers of the Nobel Prize for Literature, in attempt to get JK Rowling's book nominated. Thousands of emails were received as well as many letters,however the society does not accept nominations from the public.

• Self-Casting - Peter Coffin added himself to a Nicolas Cage movie called Time Share on IMDB. It was done simply by clicking the "update" link on the bottom of the movie's entry and filling in the appropriate information. The deed itself was executed sometime in August 2005 and was actually added to IMDB in October 2005. Coffin has never admitted on record that this was a prank, but aknowledges trickery on several blog entries. He also claimed to have talked to Nicolas Cage on the phone about the movie. As of 2006-04-01, the entry still contains Coffin's name. Other people have since added him to the description of the movie as well.