The Oberlin Review
<< Front page Arts October 13, 2007

Using Technology to Protest: Yes Men Give Current Obie Generation a Voice
 
Action Figures: Media group the Yes Men visited campus Wednesday in conjunction with Creative Resistance, a class taught by former Yes Man and Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Julia Christensen
 

It is tempting to believe that we are living in an age of apathy, where the concept of taking it to the streets seems obsolete. But, perhaps that is no longer where the activists, revolutionaries and conceptual artists are marching. We are living in an ever-expanding Internet culture in which identity, reality and even authenticity are suppressed in the name of shining light on the often blatant absence of government and corporate responsibility.

In conjunction with the studio art course, Problems in New Media: Creative Resistance, taught by Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Julia Christensen, the Yes Men spoke to a full audience on Wednesday evening. A movement of global insubordination utilizing the newfangled power of the Internet, the Yes Men are a fine example of how our generation has creatively found ways to lay the whoopee cushion down under the ass of The Man.

Christensen, who was a Yes Man herself, most notably on tour posing as the “Yes, Bush Can!” campaign group during the 2004 election, explained how “electronic civil disobedience” is really the new frontier of arts activism.

Her course aims to explore the use of the Internet and technology as an artistic tool, particularly with a slant on how they are used in the realm of protest. A clear advantage of media art is that it is digital. It is reproducible, distributable and accessible in mass quantities, at high speed and at low cost.

Dubbed as a professor of “emerging media,” Christensen sees that we are in the midst of “restructuring art and aesthetics to include the electronic and shifting our perception of the fine arts to incorporate technology.”

As this type of art evolves into a less tangible realm of visualization, the importance of it becomes “less and less about the fetishization of the object and more and more about the idea. A lot of it is about riffing on what’s already there and using the media networks that are in place as a creative force,” Christensen said.

The key is the aftermath — the reaction that it produces. As Yes Men Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno put it during their talk, “When people react to us, it generally ends up in our favor.”

For the Yes Men, it starts with a website, a multidimensional universe that is no less imaginative metaphorically, if not literally, than the classic paint on canvas. In many ways, they are able to create a vision of utopia of which so many appreciate simply being able to get a brief, albeit false glimpse.

Upon being invited to BBC World to speak on behalf of Dow Chemicals — the company they were mistakenly understood to represent on their website — the duo saw it as a “historic occasion to do something right.”

That Dow Chemicals would accept full responsibility for the Bhopal catastrophe twenty years earlier is a fictive, yet magical alternative reality. The Yes Men are also developing fabrications that are, ironically, perhaps, not so far from reality as we all would like them to be. In an era where we find the national petroleum council advising the president on energy matters, we can imagine that a decrease in oil production would mean that “starving would become the new black.”

But, as Yes Man “Sheppard Wolf, NPC representative” sees it, current policies wouldn’t even need to change if “ordinary people” die to make a profit, and give their lives, quite literally, to a revolutionary new future in fossil fuel production.

So what issues are actually high on the governmental policy’s list of current pressing matters? What did Noah know that the big names just don’t seem to get? Performing as the same sort of asinine — and still poignant — visionaries that would use dead bodies to keep making oil, the Yes Men also spoke as Halliburton representatives at a “Catastrophic Loss” conference.

They unveiled a prototype of their latest invention, the Survivaball, a one-size-fits-all inflatable bubble suit that will keep corporate executives safe in the event of climate catastrophe. He emphasized that “industry must be ready to seize that good” of “tomorrow’s catastrophes&hellip;.Consider the Black Plague. Without it, the old business models of Europe would never be overturned by the entrepreneurs of the Renaissance.”

One of the attentive and interested executives in the audience suggested that this invention would prove beneficial in the event of a terrorist attack; it seems easier to fear a phantom menace than an encroaching global calamity.

When all is said and done, I can’t help but wonder where all the residual good of their hoaxes have ended up. When they posed as the spokesmen for Dow Chemicals, the company lost several million dollars in stocks, only to be redeemed shortly thereafter. They garnish the media and milk it for all its worth, but consider the incredibly short lifespan of the top headline.

And once they have been exposed as a hoax, are they left preaching to the choir? Still, shock waves do have the power to make us nostalgic and eager for days of revolution, and in our time, it seems that energy in watts is the energy that will fuel social change.

In their final remarks at the end of the evening, the Yes Men implored the audience to “use whatever talent they had to tell the real story.” The Yes Men are performers, they are culture jammers, and they are riding the Internet wave aiming to get out a crucial and alarming message.


 
 
   

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