The Annual Air Guitar World Championship Contest was first held in 1996 as part of the Oulu Music Video Festival. Participants from all over the world competed in skills of playing air guitar. The ideology behind the event was that "wars would end and all the bad things would go away if everyone just played air guitar". The once so absurd idea has bloomed into an international media event that attracts a wide international league of contestants, audience and media representatives to Oulu, Finland.
In 2002 a couple of Americans heard about the contest. David “C-Diddy" Jung (whose costume includes a Hello Kitty backpack used as a breastplate) and Dan “Bjorn Turoque" Crane discovered that there had never been an entry from the U.S. to compete in this prestigious event. They set out to change this shameful fact and made a documentary film of their efforts.
The film, Air Guitar Nation was released a couple of months ago and is making the rounds, but not in a theatre near me. I'll have to keep my eyes open for the film, here's the trailer. C-Diddy, who competed in the contest, is a master of this performance art, check him out here.
