Neoism is a parodistic -ism. It refers both to a specific subcultural network of artistic performance and media experimentalists, and, more generally, to a practical underground philosophy. It operates with collectively shared pseudonyms and identities, pranks, paradoxes, plagiarism and fakes, and has created multiple contradicting definitions of itself in order to defy categorization and historization.

Definitions of Neoism were always disputed. The main source of this is the undefinable concept of Neoism which created vastly different, tactically distorted accounts of Neoism and its history. Undisputed, however, are the origin of the movement in the late 1970s Canada. It was initiated by Hungarian-born Canadian performance and media-artist Istvan Kantor (aka Monty Cantsin) in 1979, in Montreal. At around the same time the open-pop-star identity of Monty Cantsin was spread through the Mail Artist David Zack (born New Orleans, June 12, 1938, died presumably in Texas ca. 1995) with the collaboration of artists Maris Kudzins and performance artist Istvan Kantor.

Schisms followed in the mid-1980s. Questions and concerns arose about whether the "open pop star" Monty Cantsin moniker was being overly associated with certain individuals. Later, writer Stewart Home sought to separate himself from the rest of the Neoist network, manifesting itself in Home's books on Neoism as opposed to the various Neoist resources in the Internet. In non-Neoist terms, Neoism could be called an international subculture which in the beginning put itself into simultaneous continuity and discontinuity with, among others, experimental arts (such as Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus and Concept Art), punk, industrial music and electropop, political and religious free-spirit movements, science fiction literature, 'pataphysics and speculative science. Neoism also gathered players with backgrounds in graffiti and street performance, language writing (later known as language poetry), experimental film and video, Mail Art, the early Church of the Subgenius and gay and lesbian culture. Neoism then gradually transformed from an active subculture into a self-written urban legend. As a side effect, many other subcultures, artistic and political groups since the late 1980s have—often vaguely—referred to or even opposed Neoism and thereby perpetuated its myth.

Since the gradual disappearance of Neoism in the 1990s, brief offshoots have appeared including The Seven By Nine Squares, Stewart Home's frequent use of Karen Eliot (as well as Sandy Larson, Luther Blissett (nom de plume) and others) to replace Monty Cantsin as the embodiment of the open pop star concept. "This project... confuses the restrictions that both define and delimit individual identity.... Changing details, such as biographical particulars... are usually considered indispensable [sic] in securing the signature of an individual."

Neoism, as a name for a different context, was coined in 1914 by the American satirist Franklin P. Adams as a parody of modern arts. Sydney J. Bounds used the word as the name of a planet in his 1977 science fiction story No Way Back. In 1980 Monty spent two weeks at mail artist Ginny Lloyd's San Francisco Storefront, a one year living art project holding art events and installations in a storefront window. He lived in the space, compiled writings and launched his Blood Campaign.

Neoism quickly spread to other places in America, Europe and Australia and involved up to two dozens of Neoists. Until the late 1980s and before the mass availability of the Internet, the mail art network continued to be used as the main communication and propaganda channel for Neoism.

Neoists refer to their strategies as "the great confusion" and "radical play". They were acted out in semi-private Apartment Festivals which took place in North America, Europe and Australia between 1980 and 1998 and in publications which sought to embody confusion and radical play rather than just describing it. Consequently, both Neoist festivals and Neoist writing experimented with radical undermining of identity, bodies, media, and notions of ownership and truth. Unlike typical postmodern currents, the experiment was practical and therefore existential. Monty Cantsin, for example, was not simply a collective pseudonym or mythical person, but an identity lived by Neoists in their everyday life.

For these purposes, Neoists employed performance, video, small press publications (such as Smile, the international magazine of multiple origins) and computer viruses, but also food (Chapati), flaming steam irons and metal coat hangers (used as telepathic antennas). Borrowing from Thomas Pynchon, Neoism could be more suitably called an "anarchist miracle" of an international network of highly eccentric persons collaborating, often with extremist intensity, under the one shared identity of Monty Cantsin and Neoism.